Interest Groups in U.S. Local Politics 3031376250, 9783031376252

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Interest Groups in U.S. Local Politics Edited by Sarah Anzia

Interest Groups in U.S. Local Politics

Sarah Anzia Editor

Interest Groups in U.S. Local Politics

Previously published in Interest Groups & Advocacy “Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism,” Volume 11, Issue 2, June 2022

Editor Sarah Anzia Public Policy & Political Science University of California Berkeley Berkeley, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-37625-2 ISBN 978-3-031-37626-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37626-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

Interest Groups in US Local Politics: Introduction to the Special Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah F. Anzia Developing a Pro-housing Movement? Public Distrust of Developers, Fractured Coalitions, and the Challenges of Measuring Political Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer Politics, Power, and Precarity: How Tenant Organizations Transform Local Political life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jamila Michener and Mallory SoRelle

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Teachers’ Unions and School Board Elections: A Reassessment . . . . . . . . Michael T. Hartney

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Interest Groups, Local Politics, and Police Unions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Daniel DiSalvo

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PACs Rule Everything Around Me: How Political Action Committees Shape Elections and Policy in the Local Context . . . . . . . . . . 100 Andrea Benjamin The Age of Urban Advocacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Jefrey M. Berry

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Interest Groups & Advocacy (2022) 11:179–188 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-022-00162-3 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Interest groups in US local politics: Introduction to the special issue Sarah F. Anzia1  Accepted: 18 February 2022 / Published online: 12 March 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022

Abstract Interest group scholarship has so far focused mainly on national politics and has had very little to say about interest groups in American cities, counties, school districts, and special districts. This special issue is a step toward remedying that: it is a collection of articles and essays that examine some of the interest groups that are commonly active in US local politics. The contributions herein discuss real estate developers, tenant organizations, teachers’ unions, police unions, and local PACs— covering topics such as how they are organized, how they engage in local politics, some of the constraints on their influence, and the nuanced ways in which ideology and identities can sometimes shape what coalitions are possible in the local context. By bringing this work together in one place, in a journal devoted to research on interest groups, the hope is that this special issue will help to cement “interest groups in local politics” as the recognizable research focus it deserves to be. Keywords  Interest group · Local politics · Local government · Partisanship · Ideology · Union

Introduction Some of the most salient policy issues in the United States today are responsibilities of local governments. Policing is mainly a charge of municipal police departments and county sheriffs. Housing development is shaped by municipal zoning ordinances and local political institutions. Local school boards regularly make important policies governing public education. And county public health agencies played a crucial role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. All of these issues are nationally salient, affecting the daily lives of people throughout the country, but the policymakers responsible for them are primarily local. * Sarah F. Anzia [email protected] 1



Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, 2607 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

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Until recently, however, the overwhelming emphasis of mainstream American politics scholarship was national politics and the federal government. Even as American politics scholars increased their attention to US state politics—which has a lot in common with national politics—the same did not occur for the nation’s cities, counties, school districts, and special districts. That has started to change in the last few years as there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in local politics (Warshaw 2019). But as welcome as this resurgence has been, it has so far ignored or downplayed the role of interest groups—and has instead framed local politics mainly in terms of interactions between voters, elected officials, and political institutions. Meanwhile, interest group scholarship has largely followed the trend of the broader American politics literature: it has been almost exclusively about the role of interest groups in national politics—and to a lesser extent state politics—and has had very little to say about interest groups in local politics.1 The reason for this is not that interest groups are not active in local governments. In my new book, Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments (Anzia 2022), I show that interest groups are actually highly active in many cities, and also that patterns of interest group activity in local politics look very different from those we are accustomed to seeing in national politics. Moreover, for many of the local policy issues we would like to understand—including housing, policing, public education, and local fiscal issues—the reality is that interest groups are oftentimes quite involved in trying to influence them. By analyzing interest group activity in local politics and evaluating how it shapes a number of different local policies, Local Interests takes an important first step toward building a foundation for research on local interest groups. This special issue of Interest Groups & Advocacy takes another important step. It was conceived from a recognition that there are a number of political scientists working on research projects that eventually lead them to questions about local interest groups, but that because local interest groups research is so severely underdeveloped—and is so far from being an established research focus—the work usually does not get identified as such. Moreover, the lack of a clear, identifiable network of scholars working in this area probably deters some researchers from pursuing projects of interest on these topics. This special issue is an attempt to remedy that—to bring together the work of political scientists who are all doing important research on local interest groups, and to label it as such. Through the articles in this issue, we learn more about some of the interest groups that are commonly involved in local politics. And by bringing them together in one place, in a journal devoted to research on interest groups, the hope is that this will help to cement local interest groups as a recognizable research focus.

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  See Hojnacki et al. (2012) for a review of the interest group literature. Gray and Lowery (1996) focus on the US states in developing their population ecology theory of interest group systems. There have been some studies of interest groups in cities; see Berry (2010), Hajnal and Clark (1998), and Cooper, Nownes, and Roberts (2005). See also Moe (2006, 2011, 2019) for research on teachers’ unions in school districts.

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The articles and essays in this issue span a number of different interest groups and policy areas. Katherine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer explore the role of real estate developers in local housing politics, explaining how antipathy to developers might deter some pro-housing groups and individuals from joining coalitions with them—possibly limiting developers’ political influence. Jamila Michener and Mallory SoRelle offer a rich descriptive account of tenant organizations: how and why they organize and what they do (and do not do) to counter the efforts of landlords in local politics. Michael Hartney presents a quantitative analysis of how teachers’ unions’ endorsements affect the outcomes of local school board elections in the modern era, and Daniel DiSalvo puts the focus on police unions in an essay that explains how they are organized, what they do in local politics, and how and why they are well positioned to influence local policies on policing and public spending. Andrea Benjamin provides an in-depth look at the specifics of interest group politics in Durham, North Carolina, showing how local PACs can provide structure to local elections in a nonpartisan context.

The engagement and influence of local interest groups—and the constraints they face Viewed all together, these articles show clearly that local politics is not only about the interactions between voters, elected officials, and political institutions— that organized groups of different kinds are quite involved and can make a difference. The articles by Benjamin and Hartney in particular show how interest group endorsements can be important to local elections. In an analysis of exit poll data from the 2017 city election in Durham, Benjamin finds that many voters knew which candidates had been endorsed by some of the major local groups, and that that knowledge was associated with their vote choices in the local election. Focusing on local school board elections, Hartney assembles data on thousands of candidates in California and Florida and finds that candidates who receive endorsements from teachers’ unions are much more likely to win than candidates not endorsed by teachers’ unions. And as DiSalvo writes, similar efforts should be made to understand the frequency and effectiveness of police union endorsements in local politics. They are well organized in most parts of the country and have a great deal at stake in local policymaking, and so going forward, researchers might fruitfully borrow the approaches of Benjamin and Hartney and apply them to police unions. That said, endorsements are only one way interest groups might try to influence the dynamics and outcomes of local politics. In their article, Einstein, Glick, and Palmer note how developers and a variety of groups make campaign contributions in local elections, and they underscore how important it is that groups and residents show up in force to public hearings.2 DiSalvo emphasizes collective bargaining as an important route through which police unions can influence local policy.3 And 2

  See also Einstein, Glick, and Palmer (2019).   See also DiSalvo (2015).

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Michener and SoRelle detail the varied tactics of tenant groups, including coordinating members to attend public meetings, running for rent board positions, engaging in protest, publicly confronting elected officials, and coordinating rent strikes. One of the challenges and opportunities for future research on local interest groups will be considering all of the different ways groups try to have an impact—some of which are more difficult to track than others. Concerns about the second face of power have rightfully loomed large in research on interest groups and power in American politics, but these articles and other recent studies begin to tackle that challenge, developing new, innovative ways of studying how groups might exercise influence (see, e.g., Hacker and Pierson 2014; Hertel-Fernandez 2019; Moe 2019; Anzia 2022). These articles also illustrate how some of these local interest groups are dealing with considerable constraints on their influence—including groups that are commonly thought of as being powerful in local politics. Landlords are one example: Michener and SoRelle provide examples of tenant organizations that have successfully pushed back against landlords, changing the course of local policy. Developers are another. Some of the classic studies of urban politics depict developers as major influencers (e.g., Logan and Molotch 1987), but Einstein, Glick, and Palmer present striking new evidence of how unpopular and poorly trusted developers are in many local communities. They show that neighborhood groups and local residents wanting to block housing developments can use this unpopularity to their advantage by casting developers as profit-motivated outsiders that do not have community interests at heart. As a result, pro-housing groups and individuals that might otherwise form alliances with developers on the basis of their shared policy goals are wary of being viewed as cozying up to them, and pro-housing efforts in cities can remain fragmented. Thus, while there are groups and organizations active in local politics, these two housing-related articles demonstrate that they may often face considerable pushback from residents and other groups.

Ideology and the structure of politics: How local politics is different A second theme that begins to emerge from these articles is that if there is a structure to local politics, it is a different structure than that of national politics, and any role of nationally-based ideology and partisanship is complex and conditional.4 For example, Benjamin portrays politics in Durham as a setting in which interest groups—not political parties—provide structure to city elections. Like many cities across the United States, Durham has nonpartisan elections that are held off-cycle. The city is also heavily Democratic; party affiliation (even if not shown on the ballot) is not something that distinguishes the candidates from one another. But as Benjamin shows, PAC endorsements do. In the 2017 city election she examines, a large PAC called the People’s Alliance backed one slate of candidates for city council and mayor, while two smaller PACs—the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black

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  For more on this line of thinking and evidence in support, see Anzia (2021, 2022), Bucchianeri (2020), Bucchianeri et al. (2021), Jensen et al. (2021), and Marble and Nall (2021).

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People and Friends of Durham—supported a different slate. This suggests that there may be some regularity or structure to local politics in Durham, but it is not defined by partisanship. Public-sector unions are also very involved in local politics in many places, and it is often hard to characterize their organization, behavior, and influence in partisan or ideological terms. DiSalvo’s essay implies that police unions defy the familiar Democrat-versus-Republican structure of national politics. As unions, particularly unions with a strong presence in large cities (which tend to be Democratic), police unions have a natural alliance with the Democratic Party, but as law enforcement, they have a natural alliance with the Republican Party. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their political behavior in state politics is bipartisan, as DiSalvo notes. Teachers’ unions, in contrast, affiliate more strongly with the Democratic Party in national and state politics (Moe 2011), but their activity and influence in local politics are not limited to school districts where most residents are Democrats. Hartney’s article shows that teachers’ unions endorse school board candidates in Republican and Democratic districts alike—and are just as successful in getting their endorsed candidates elected in the former as in the latter. These important local interest groups and what they do in local politics do not fit cleanly into a national partisan or ideological structure. But that is not to say that ideology plays no role at all in local politics. Two of the articles in this special issue describe ideological commitments (in some form) as a motivator of group behavior. In their research on why individuals form and join tenant organizations, Michener and SoRelle discover an array of motives, some related to personal experiences with landlords, but others rooted in economic ideas and a desire to counter capitalist structures. They also find that many tenant organizations conceive of their missions not in terms of housing policy but rather as bringing power to tenants and ordinary people. Einstein, Glick, and Palmer’s account of developers also seems to highlight a role for ideology—one where ideology can inhibit certain coalitions from forming. If pro-housing groups and individuals are reluctant to align with developers for fear that the public would accuse them of having a corporate, outsider agenda, then that fear of being ideologically pigeonholed is affecting the dynamics of local politics. This last point is important because it may suggest a nuanced role for national ideology in local politics—one that is disassociated from people’s positions on core local policy issues. American politics scholars have typically conceived of and measured ideology in terms of positions on policy: national partisanship and ideology, for example, are rooted in citizens’ and elites’ positions on national policy matters.5 In Local Interests, I argue that because the core issues at stake in local government are mostly different from those that define national partisanship and ideology, we should not expect national partisanship and ideology to be strong drivers of local politics and policy. And I find considerable evidence in support of that expectation (Anzia 2022). But Einstein, Glick, and Palmer’s argument points to a different way

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 For instance, DW-NOMINATE scores are generated from congressional roll-call votes, thus positions on national policy matters (e.g., Poole and Rosenthal 2007). Similarly, Tausanovitch and Warshaw (2014) pool public opinion data—positions on policy—to generate their local-level ideology scores.

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that national partisanship and ideology might matter in local politics. It is not that national partisanship and ideology map onto people’s issue positions at the local level. It is that people’s partisan or ideological identities—their affective attachments from national politics—constrain and shape what can and cannot happen in local politics, including what coalitions are possible, and how forcefully and vocally groups and coalitions can push for local policies they favor.6 Note that this is not the same thing as arguing that local governments might generate their own distinctive ideologies, meaning local ideologies based on local government issues. There is some debate on that question, with some finding evidence of distinctive local ideology in a few large cities (Abrajano et  al. 2005; Boudreau et al. 2015; Sances 2018), and others finding that local politics is often less structured than that and not reducible to a single dimension (Anzia 2022; Bucchianeri 2020; Bucchianeri et  al. 2021). More research on that question is needed, but the proposal at hand here is something different. On the basis of what they want to see happen in local policy, a pro-housing group should be on the same side as developers, because they both want to build housing. But the pro-housing group might not join forces with the developers—especially in a left-leaning community—because if they did, residents wanting to block housing could credibly cast them as friendly to corporations. That might reduce support for the pro-housing group within the leftleaning community. Meanwhile, as Einstein, Glick, and Palmer suggest, residents and groups opposed to housing developments can benefit from a pro-environment image—one that will be viewed favorably by the community—even if their agenda really is rooted in raw economic self-interest. What this implies, more broadly, is that there can be a very local conflict over policy, with groups and residents lining up on the issue in ways orthogonal to their alignments in national politics, but that what is possible in local politics—and the balance of power on the issue—is also shaped by the community’s left–right identities from national politics. Consider that gun-owners who like to hunt might sometimes have shared policy interests with environmentalists in that both might want to preserve natural habitats, but their ability to work together locally might be inhibited by their tendency to align with opposite sides in national politics.7 Likewise, a local Sierra Club chapter and a local chamber of commerce might be in agreement that shutting down a polluting factory in the area would be desirable, but in a conservative town, residents might look askance at the local business community developing an alliance with Sierra Club. It would seem that similar dynamics were at play in local school district debates about reopening to in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Hartney explains in his article, many teachers’ unions resisted returning to in-person instruction, which resulted in many K-12 schools being fully remote for more than a year. This put many liberal parents who strongly supported a return to in-person instruction in a politically uncomfortable position: their views on this salient local

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  On partisanship as a social identity, and on affective polarization, see Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe (2015) and Iyengar et al. (2019). 7   I am grateful to Rob Schwartz for suggesting this example.

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policy issue were at odds with those of teachers’ unions—one of the strongest allies of the Democratic Party in national and state policies. For those parents, being vocal in favor of reopening schools could mean being labeled anti-union, anti-teacher, or Republican (since President Trump and Republicans in many states called for schools to reopen).8 In liberal communities, this may have worked to weaken efforts to reopen schools to in-person instruction, just as Einstein, Glick, and Palmer suggest that this dynamic might weaken pro-housing efforts. Some might quibble with the claim that distrust in developers and pro-union, pro-teacher sentiment should be counted as national party ideology, but the general logic here holds just the same. Ideology has always been hard to define. As Lewis (2019, xv) writes in his book about the endogeneity of national party ideology, “ideologies are vast and expansive mental frameworks and language structures that hold together many different ideas.” Einstein, Glick, and Palmer’s account of developers suggests that even when groups have clear positions on local issues, their pursuit of favorable policies could be hindered—or helped—by ideological commitments that are formed in other arenas, most notably the arena of national politics. All of this makes it hard to know what groups’ and residents’ “true” motives are in local politics. As Einstein, Glick, and Palmer point out, it can be difficult to determine whether some local homeowners oppose housing growth because they really care about the local community and the environment or because they really care about the value of their homes. Police unions often advocate for policies on the grounds that they would enhance community safety, even though those policies are also in the interests of police officers. But Hartney’s article in this special issue offers a clever test on this question of motives: he asks whether the rate at which teachers’ unions endorse incumbents running for reelection in school board races can be explained by two different variables: 1) the rate of student achievement growth in the district in the year prior and 2) the percentage increase in teacher salaries in the district in the year prior. The results he presents provide a fairly clear indication of which criterion is more relied upon by teachers’ unions when they are deciding how to allocate their support in local school board elections.

Conclusion The articles and essays in this special issue are rich with new ideas, data, and insights about the role of interest groups in US local politics. They combine a variety of analytical approaches, including quantitative analysis of data on group endorsements in local elections, qualitative analysis of data from interviews and public meetings, comparative analysis of hundreds of local elections, in-depth analysis of a single city, and a far-ranging review of the scattered existing research on a particular type of local interest group. From the research presented in this issue, we see that ostensibly powerful groups like developers may confront limitations to their

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  For an account of these dynamics, see Bodenheimer (2022).

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influence. We see examples of how marginalized groups can successfully organize in race-class subjugated cities.9 We see that unions of local government employees are active players in local politics. And in municipal governments and school districts, most of which are formally nonpartisan, we see hints that interest groups fill in the gaps where political parties have less presence. There are, of course, many other types of interest groups that deserve attention from political scientists beyond those discussed in this issue. Business groups have long been recognized as important to local governance (e.g., Stone 1989; Mossberger and Stoker 2001), and new work is beginning to further explore how they engage in local politics and to what effect (Anzia 2022; Kirkland 2021). Neighborhood associations are hard to characterize but are often quite active in local politics (Anzia 2022; Logan and Rabrenovic 1990). Local governments themselves can act as interest groups by lobbying other governments (Payson 2020, 2021). And this special issue closes with an essay by Jeffrey Berry, a prolific scholar of interest groups in American politics who has written about their activity in local politics (Berry 2010), especially the role of environmental groups in advocating for local sustainability policies (e.g., Portney and Berry 2016; Feiock et al. 2014). Even for the interest groups that are discussed in the pages to follow, there are many more questions to ask and explore, most importantly how the organization and activity of these groups affect local policy. But the articles in this special issue help to establish a foundation for moving forward on those questions—and are an important step toward making “interest groups in local politics” the recognizable research focus it deserves to be. Declarations  Conflict of interest  The author states that there is no conflict of interest.

References Abrajano, Marisa A., Jonathan Nagler, and R. Michael Alvarez. 2005. A Natural Experiment of RaceBased and Issue Voting: The 2001 City of Los Angeles Elections. Political Research Quarterly 58 (2): 203–218. Anzia, Sarah F. 2021. Party and Ideology in American Local Government: An Appraisal. Annual Review of Political Science 24: 133–150. Anzia, Sarah F. 2022. Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berry, Jeffrey M. 2010. Urban Interest Groups, in The Oxford Handbook of American Political Parties and Interest Groups, eds. Jeffrey M. Berry, L. Sandy Maisel, and George C. Edwards III. New York: Oxford University Press, 502–518. Bodenheimer, Rebecca. 2022. How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics. Politico. January 11. https://​www.​polit​ico.​com/​news/​magaz​ine/​2022/​01/​11/​oakla​nd-​lefty-​my-​ whole-​life-​school-​closu​res-​trigg​ered-​an-​ident​ity-​crisis-​526860

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  See the Michener and SoRelle article in this issue as well as Soss and Weaver (2017).

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Interest groups in US local politics: Introduction to the special… Boudreau, Cheryl, Christopher S. Elmendorf, and Scott A. MacKenzie. 2015. Lost in Space? Information Shortcuts, Spatial Voting, and Local Government Representation. Political Research Quarterly 68 (4): 843–855. Bucchianeri, Peter. 2020. Party Competition and Coalitional Stability: Evidence from American Local Government. American Political Science Review 114 (4): 1055–1070. Bucchianeri, Peter, Riley Carney, Ryan Enos, Amy Lakeman, and Gabrielle Malina. 2021. What Explains Local Policy Cleavages? Examining the Policy Preferences of Public Officials at the Municipal Level. Social Science Quarterly 102 (6): 2752–2760. Cooper, Christopher A., Anthony J. Nownes, and Steven Roberts. 2005. Perceptions of Power: Interest Groups in Local Politics. State and Local Government Review 37 (3): 206–216. DiSalvo, Daniel. 2015. Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press. Einstein, Katherine Levine, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer. 2019. Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Feiock, Richard C., Kent E. Portney, Jungah Bae, and Jeffrey M. Berry. 2014. Governing Local Sustainability: Agency Venues and Business Group Access. Urban Affairs Review 50 (2): 157–179. Gray, Virginia, and David Lowery. 1996. The Population Ecology of Interest Representation: Lobbying Communities in the American States. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. 2014. After the ‘Master Theory’: Downs, Schattschneider, and the Rebirth of Policy-Focused Analysis. Perspectives on Politics 12 (3): 643–662. Hajnal, Zoltan L., and Terry Nichols Clark. 1998. The Local Interest-Group System: Who Governs and Why? Social Science Quarterly 79 (1): 227–241. Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander. 2019. State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States — And the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press. Hojnacki, Marie, David C. Kimball, Frank R. Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, and Beth L. Leech. 2012. Studying Organizational Advocacy and Influence: Reexamining Interest Group Research. Annual Review of Political Science 15: 379–399. Huddy, Leonie, Lilliana Mason, and Lene Aarøe. 2015. Expressive Partisanship: Campaign Involvement, Political Emotion, and Partisan Identity. American Political Science Review 109 (1): 1–17. Iyengar, Shanto, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood. 2019. The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science 22: 129–146. Jensen, Amalie, William Marble, Kenneth Scheve, and Matthew J. Slaughter. 2021. City Limits to Partisan Polarization in the American Public. Political Science Research and Methods 9 (2): 223–241. Kirkland, Patricia. 2021. Business Owners and Executives as Politicians: The Effect on Public Policy. Journal of Politics 83 (4): 1652–1668. Lewis, Verlan. 2019. Ideas of Power: The Politics of American Party Ideology Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Logan, John R., and Harvey Luskin Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Logan, John R., and Gordana Rabrenovic. 1990. Neighborhood Associations: Their Issues, Their Allies, and Their Opponents. Urban Affairs Quarterly 26 (1): 68–94. Marble, William, and Clayton Nall. 2021. Where Self-Interest Trumps Ideology: Liberal Homeowners and Local Opposition to Housing Development. Journal of Politics 83 (4): 1747–1763. Moe, Terry M. 2006. Political Control and the Power of the Agent. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 22 (1): 1–29. Moe, Terry M. 2011. Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Moe, Terry M. 2019. The Politics of Institutional Reform: Katrina, Education, and the Second Face of Power. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mossberger, Karen, and Gerry Stoker. 2001. The Evolution of Urban Regime Theory: The Challenge of Conceptualization. Urban Affairs Review 36 (6): 810–835. Payson, Julia A. 2020. Cities in the Statehouse: How Local Governments Use Lobbyists to Secure State Funding. Journal of Politics 82 (2): 403–417. Payson, Julia. 2021. When Cities Lobby: How Local Governments Compete for Power in State Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

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S. F. Anzia Poole, Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal. 2007. Ideology and Congress. Transaction Publishing. Portney, Kent E., and Jeffrey M. Berry. 2016. The Impact of Local Environmental Advocacy Groups on City Sustainability Policies and Programs. Policy Studies Journal 44 (2): 196–214. Sances, Michael W. 2018. Ideology and Vote Choice in US Mayoral Elections: Evidence from Facebook Surveys. Political Behavior 40 (3): 737–762. Soss, Joe, and Vesla Weaver. 2017. Police are our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race-Class Subjugated Communities. Annual Review of Political Science 20: 565–591. Stone, Clarence N. 1989. Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Tausanovitch, Chris, and Christopher Warshaw. 2014. Representation in Municipal Government. American Political Science Review 108 (3): 605–641. Warshaw, Christopher. 2019. Local Elections and Representation in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science 22: 461–479.

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Interest Groups & Advocacy (2022) 11:189–208 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-022-00159-y ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Developing a pro‑housing movement? Public distrust of developers, fractured coalitions, and the challenges of measuring political power Katherine Levine Einstein1   · David M. Glick1 · Maxwell Palmer1 Accepted: 4 February 2022 / Published online: 14 March 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022

Abstract Developers have a longstanding history of exercising disproportionate influence over federal, state, and local policy decisions, often at the expense of communities of color and lower-income neighborhoods. Recent research suggests, however, that homeowners and the interest groups that represent them may have gained the upper hand politically, making it harder to build housing—especially in high-demand cities. This article explores how the link between developers and perceived profit-seeking may limit the construction of new housing and the formation of effective housing reform coalitions. It concludes by evaluating why measuring developer power—and disproving negative views of developers—is methodologically quite challenging.

Introduction Housing is extraordinarily difficult to build in many communities in the United States, fomenting a crisis that makes housing unaffordable for large numbers of lowand middle-income residents (Glaeser 2011; Gyourko and Molloy 2014; Been et al. 2014; White 2016; Bernstein et al. 2021). The housing shortage persists despite the long-recognized political power of housing developers (Logan and Molotch 1987). As an interest group, developers have influenced federal, state, and local policy decisions to their own financial advantage. Often, this political power is wielded at We are grateful to Sarah Anzia and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. We thank Will Marble and Clayton Nall for sharing survey data. * Katherine Levine Einstein [email protected] David M. Glick [email protected] Maxwell Palmer [email protected] 1



Department of Political Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

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the expense of communities of color and lower-income neighborhoods (Logan and Molotch 1987; Rae 2004; Hackworth 2007; Sattler 2009; Levine 2017; Michener and Wong 2018). Some recent studies suggest that the pendulum may have swung back in favor of anti-growth homeowners, and the interest groups that represent them, especially in high-demand metropolitan areas (Schleicher 2013; Been et al. 2014; Einstein et al. 2019; Pasotti 2020). State and local land-use policies make housing development more expensive and unpredictable (Glaeser 2011; Gyourko and Molloy 2014; Been et al. 2014)—often by creating opportunities for small groups of vocal community members to stop or delay new projects (Pendall 1999; Tighe 2010; Schleicher 2013; Einstein et  al. 2019). Engaged in a zero-sum game with developers, homeowners and neighborhood associations have seemingly gained the upper hand politically in many communities. Indeed, the perceived political and economic power of developers may, in fact, fuel some opposition to new housing units (Monkkonen and Manville 2019). These dynamics may extend to broader political debates about housing reform. This article explores how, in progressive, high-housing-cost cities and states, negative views of housing developers, and their inextricable links to profit-seeking, may limit the construction of new housing and create fissures among potential housing reform allies. We show that the public has deep antipathy towards developers; combined with the structure of housing policy conversations, this distrust creates a narrative in which homeowners, as self-proclaimed defenders of “community interests,” face off against untrustworthy developers who are motivated only by narrow profit-seeking. Using new data from a survey of mayors, we find that, in contrast, local leaders see developers more positively. These dynamics may help to explain why developers are not only vilified by opponents of new housing, but also denigrated and scorned by potential coalition partners who support the construction of more housing. We conclude by discussing the methodological barriers inherent in measuring the political power of developers and homeowners and making normative claims about their relative influence. In short, the political and economic power of developers may be difficult to observe (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). Indeed, it is virtually impossible to measure the backroom dealing where many researchers, and the public, believe developers exert their greatest power. These interactions are by their very nature shadowy and hidden. Even with public data on, for example, campaign donations, this reality makes it difficult to adjudicate between differing (and often quite heated) debates over their political power. As a final caveat, we note that the evidence in this paper draws from the experience of high-housing-cost cities. In these places, a failure to build enough marketrate and subsidized housing has fueled skyrocketing costs (Gyourko and Molloy 2014; Schuetz 2019). The social costs of the failure to build are particularly acute in these locations (Rothwell and Massey 2013; White 2016; Bernstein et al. 2021). But, developer power may operate quite differently in communities that are not experiencing strong growth pressures. Privileged white homeowners fight new housing in high growth and declining cities (Einstein et al. 2019). But, the ability of developers to combat homeowner opposition may differ dramatically depending upon the Reprinted from the journal

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economic context of a community. Economically declining cities may be considerably more willing to offer concessions to developers in order to foster growth (Stone 1989; Morel et al. 2021). In other words, in both high housing cost and economically declining  cities, residents may believe that developers run local politics; the reality of developer power, though, may in fact operate differently.

Anti‑growth politics and the power of developers Recent scholarship on the local politics and economics of housing has focused on community opposition to new development as a powerful obstacle to the construction of new housing (Pendall 1999; Fischel 2001; Tighe 2010; Hankinson 2018; Marble and Nall 2020; Einstein et  al. 2019). Conversations about new housing developments are dominated by a privileged group of older, white, homeowners who oppose new housing development (Einstein et al. 2019). In at least some highcost cities, renters share this distaste for new housing (Hankinson 2018). Homeowners and neighborhood associations frequently play an important role in building and organizing this opposition (Trounstine 2018; Einstein et al. 2019). These groups present varied arguments against development and frequently invoke neighborhood concerns and portray themselves as defenders of the community (Einstein et al. 2019). The language they use to justify their opposition rarely highlights their own financial interests, such as property values and investment concerns. Instead, residents and interest groups seeking to stop or delay new housing describe the ways in which a proposed project might degrade their community, ruining the local environment, wildlife, traffic, or public services. Their stated reasons are rooted not in self-interest, but in those of the community (Einstein et al. 2019). For-profit, private developers, in contrast, are often viewed as shadowy, powerful interests who exert enormous and disproportionate influence in urban politics and policy (Logan and Molotch 1987; Hackworth 2007; Monkkonen and Manville 2019).1 Residents see developer interests—particularly when constructing marketrate development—as motivated primarily by financial gain. Indeed, evidence from survey experiments suggest that this antipathy toward developers undergirds much of the opposition to new market-rate housing (Monkkonen and Manville 2019). In many ways, community members’ views about developers are well founded. Market-rate developers’ interests are rooted in improving their firm’s finances. They have no intrinsic desire to improve conditions in the communities in which they build—other than, perhaps, as a means of securing future business. By definition, developers, for the most part, are not neighbors. They typically purchase a property, tear it down or renovate it, and then resell it to the eventual long-term property owner. This short-term investment may lead residents to perceive developers as

1   In keeping with much of the literature on developer politics, this article focuses on private, for-profit developers. Other entities—notably the federal, state, and local government and nonprofits—can also act as housing developers. The discussion of these developers likely differs markedly in those contexts— though, we note, the public opposition to this type of housing remains fierce (Tighe 2010).

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having a more speculative and predatory, rather than neighborly, relationship with the community. Moreover, developers have wielded enormous power in cities’ planning and policymaking—especially in larger cities (Logan and Molotch 1987; Rae 2004; Sattler 2009; Levine 2017; Michener and Wong 2018). They have used this disproportionate influence to advance their financial interests at the expense of communities of color and lower-income neighborhoods. Many cities bear the scars of urban renewal processes driven by developer—rather than community—interests (Caro 1974). These processes continue today, as developers scoop up investment properties in gentrifying communities, and resell them at enormous profits to outsiders. In short, the profit-motivated and at-time unscrupulous behavior of developers has profoundly reshaped communities—and the political and civic lives of those who have experienced these powerful neighborhood changes (Sattler 2009; Levine 2017; Michener and Wong 2018). In many cities, distrust of developers has been built by the ravaging of vulnerable communities over multiple generations. At times, developer power plays have even devolved into outright bribery and public corruption. In one 2018 example, a real estate company in Los Angeles bribed a city councilor in order to, among other things, reduce the amount of affordable housing required in the development.2 Beyond these more overt abuses, limited enforcement capacity means that, in many communities, developers may flout local building codes. Inappropriately sealed dumpsters, loud work sites, unsafe construction sites, and lengthy construction disruptions all likely (and understandably) contribute to resident antipathy toward developers. Finally, the byzantine building process in many American cities may favor big developers over smaller, community-based ones. Larger developers have the resources to hire the necessary specialist staff and weather lengthy construction delays. Smaller developers, in contrast, often lack the same financial cushion, leaving them less able to compete. In practice, this may increase the likelihood that a developer is from outside the community—and thus less sympathetic to local residents. Widespread perceptions of developer greed and corruption thus have some basis in truth, both in contemporary and in historic politics.

Perceptions of developers We begin by focusing on the public and its perceptions of developers and homeowners. While many previous studies have investigated aspects of this question, they have typically focused on one city or movement. Does the contemporary public in cities facing acute housing shortages have a widespread mistrust of developers? Are homeowners in these cities seen as defenders of community interests? While nationally representative public opinion data about developers are not available, Marble and Nall (2020) included questions about trust in developers (and other groups) in their 2017 survey of residents of the 20 largest metropolitan areas of 2   https://​www.​latim​es.​com/​calif​ornia/​story/​2021-​01-​07/​downt​own-​devel​oper-​will-​pay-1-​2-​milli​on-​in-l-​ a-​city-​hall-​corru​ption-​case.

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the United States.3 The survey reveals that the vast majority of respondents have very low levels of trust in real estate developers, comparable to the level of trust in Donald Trump (in highly Democratic metropolitan areas) and corporate executives. While only 36% of respondents trust real estate developers, over 90% of respondents express trust in homeowners, and more than half of all respondents report trusting the police, apartment renters, and their state and local governments. Welfare recipients and the federal government both were more popular than developers. Figure 1 displays the levels of trust for each category. This distrust of real estate developers spans all demographics. Figure 2 reports the levels of trust by age, gender, homeownership status, race, and political party. With the exception of people aged 18–24, substantial majorities of every demographic group have little trust in developers. The age gap is intriguing; older residents who lived through periods of stronger developer power may have more distrust of developer interests. This general lack of trust correlates strongly with opposition to building new housing. As part of their survey experiment, Marble and Nall (2020) asked respondents (with varying contextual information as treatments) about their level of support for building different types of new housing. Pooling across all conditions (including the control), we find that respondents with greater distrust of developers are less likely to support new development of all housing types. Figure 3 shows this relationship.4 This relationship between distrust in developers and support for new housing is negative and statistically significant for all housing types, controlling for race, age, gender, party, and homeownership status.5 Community vs. profit meeting dynamics This widespread antipathy toward developers is important. As we briefly noted earlier, the institutions through which much of America’s housing actually gets built provide pathways for public views, including those about developers, to profoundly affect the production of housing. Because housing construction in many communities is tightly controlled by zoning and land-use regulations, proposals involving the construction of more than one unit of housing often find themselves requiring a special permit or variance for approval. This means that these projects are subject to a public hearing process where community members have an opportunity to raise objections to a proposed development (Schleicher 2013; Einstein et al. 2019). It is through these forums that public distaste for developers becomes a true liability. Such views may motivate some to participate. Moreover, they shape the general 3   While Marble and Nall (2020) asked respondents about their trust in developers, they do not report the results of this question in their article. We rely on their full survey data, helpfully shared with their article replication data, for this analysis. The survey included 4100 respondents across the 20 largest MSAs and was conducted online in 2017.

4   While Fig.  3 reports the results for the full data, the results are similar when limited to the control group.

5   We make no claims here about causality from these survey data. Experimental results from Monkkonen and Manville (2019) suggest that this distrust does, in fact, lead to opposition to new housing. But, this does not rule about the possibility that opposition to new housing could also lead to antipathy towards developers.

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dynamics of these meetings to the detriment of developers and constitute an important tool for opponents to wield. Participants at these meetings—and the neighborhood and homeowners’ associations who represent them—invoke community concerns, highlighting neighborhood public services, environmental concerns, wildlife, traffic, and greenspace, among other issues. Rather than narrowly present parochial concerns, members of the public frequently portray themselves as defenders of community interests (Einstein et al. 2019). They also juxtapose their ostensibly broad and community-oriented perspective with developers’ self-serving economic interests. In previous work, we collected thousands of pages of planning and zoning board meeting minutes across 97 eastern and central Massachusetts cities and towns between 2015 and 2017 (Einstein et al. 2019). These data encompass all meetings about the construction of more than one housing unit—from small infill projects to large apartment complexes. These cities and towns represent a wide demographic range, including large dense cities, small, homogenous suburbs, and deindustrialized old mill towns. Here, we qualitatively analyze the self-presentation and bargaining strategies of neighborhood associations and interest groups. The neighborhood residents and interest groups that attend these meetings invoke their status as community-minded representatives when arguing against development. At one 2016 Zoning Board hearing about a market-rate affordable housing development in Brookline, MA, the president of a local neighborhood association expressed strong concerns about the proposal, invoking her status as a defender of the community: “I’m the president of the Sheafe/Holly/Heath Neighborhood Association...and therefore I represent the neighbors and their concerns [emph. added]...40B [a MA state program for encouraging affordable housing development] is important, but the neighborhood and residents are also.” At a Lawrence, MA Zoning Board meeting in 2017, the meeting minutes noted that ”Ms. [X]...stated that she, being the President of the Mt. Vernon Neighborhood Association, was representing many that could not be at the meeting. She said that many of her Mt. Vernon neighbors were opposed.”6 Sometimes, these neighborhood interest groups negotiate with the developer on behalf of their constituents. The minutes of a 2015 Planning Board meeting in Weymouth, MA describe how the president of the local neighborhood association: met with [the developer] several times and his proposal is a good faith result of their negotiations. The association would still like to see 10 units. [The developer] also changed the building shape, color scheme, and added green space. There are light blocking shields. The Association would like to see these conditions in the approval. They would like the parking in the rear not to be built yet and there is an issue with the wall. They do not support or oppose this proposal, they were just trying to mitigate for the neighbors. More broadly, these types of negotiations are sometimes formalized into Community Benefit Agreements (CBAs) (Wolf-Powers 2010). In this framework, 6

  While meeting commenters are identified by name in the public meeting minutes, we have redacted their names to preserve their privacy.

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Homeowners Police Apartment renters Local Gov. State Gov. Welfare recipients Federal Gov. Real estate developers President Trump Corporate executives 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70% 80% 90% 100% Trust somewhat + Trust a lot

Fig. 1  Levels of trust

neighborhood interest groups seek to extract ostensibly community-oriented concessions from developers—who are presumed to not be acting in the broader interests of the community—in exchange for permitting a proposed project to happen.7 Local leaders and developers In all of these contexts—broader public opinion, public meetings, and CBAs— neighbors and their interest groups position themselves as community-minded. They juxtapose this self-presentation with the selfishness and greed of developers. We now turn to local elites and how they see developers and the politics between developers and homeowners. Local elites recognize that this public disdain for developers poses a significant challenge to the construction of new housing. In the 2021 Menino Survey of Mayors,8 we asked a nationally representative set of mayors9 of cities over 75,000 their perceptions of developers ( n = 126 ). Specifically, we asked mayors how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “In general, real estate developers are a negative influence on my city.”

7

  We have relatively little empirical evidence on whether CBAs succeed in this stated aim (Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris 2021). 8

  The Menino Survey of Mayors is conducted annually by Boston University’s Initiative on Cities.   Details about the demographics of participating mayors, compared with the national population, can be found here: https://​www.​surve​yofma​yors.​com/​files/​2021/​11/​2021-​Menino-​Survey-​BBB-​Report.​pdf. 9

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Age 18-24 years 25-44 years 45-64 years 65+ years Gender Men Women Homeowner Homeowner Renter Party Democrat Independent Republican Race Asian Black Hispanic other White 0% 10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Real Estate Developers

60%

70% 80% 90% 100% Trust somewhat + Trust a lot Homeowners

Fig. 2  Levels of trust in real estate developers and homeowners by demographic groups

The results are striking. Only seven percent of mayors agreed with the statement. 79% disagreed, with the remainder adopting a neutral stance. These results hold across party lines (though Republican mayors are more likely to strongly disagree), city size, and some city demographics. Mayors of higher housing cost cities are 19 percentage points more likely to adopt a neutral stance—which in this case is the anti-developer position—relative to their counterparts governing cheaper cities. However, even in more expensive communities, 69% of mayors disagree that developers are a negative influence. Obviously, the wording differs somewhat from the question underlying the general public data we discussed. Nevertheless, mayors’ views about developers appear considerably more positive than those of the general public. Mayors recognize this public antipathy. One southern mayor, when asked whether he agreed or disagreed with the statement said, “I somewhat disagree, but now my citizens would disagree with me—but someone needs to build the apartments and houses.” While he did not view developers as intrinsically altruistic, he saw their aims—building new housing—as aligned with his community’s. Others similarly saw developers as making positive contributions to their communities, while understanding that

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Trust in Real Estate Developers

Apartment-Only Buildings Trust a lot Trust somewhat Distrust somewhat Distrust a lot High-Density Single-Family Homes Trust a lot Trust somewhat Distrust somewhat Distrust a lot Low-Density Single-Family Homes Trust a lot Trust somewhat Distrust somewhat Distrust a lot Mixed-Use Trust a lot Trust somewhat Distrust somewhat Distrust a lot Townhouses Trust a lot Trust somewhat Distrust somewhat Distrust a lot

1

2

3

4

5 Support for Building

Fig. 3  Relationship between trust in real estate developers and supporting new housing development

the behavior of developers contributed towards negative perceptions: “Disagree [that developers are a negative influence], but some of them are total [jerks].”

Barriers to coalition‑building Thus far we have discussed widespread antipathy to developers and the ways it interacts with the structure of public housing proceedings. This is not the only way in which developers’ unpopularity affects housing supply. It can also create a wedge in potential pro-housing coalitions. Rather than serving as well-resourced and motivated allies for reformers, developers’ unpopularity makes them a liability that hinders otherwise advantageous alliances. At a basic level, many housing reformers—like general members of the public—dislike and distrust developers, and are unwilling to see their interests as aligned. They may automatically be less inclined to support a policy if they know developers endorse it. Moreover, strategic housing advocates—even those who may be more sympathetic to developers’ 19

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interests—likely know that developers’ unpopularity may make them toxic coalition partners in the eyes of the policymakers who are ultimately accountable to their constituents. These fissures have been most evident in recent debates over reforming local zoning rules. A growing number of cities and states have proposed or enacted land-use reforms to facilitate the construction of multifamily housing—and to remove exclusionary impediments to the construction of new housing.10 These types of policy reforms potentially appeal to disparate groups. Affordable housing advocates may appreciate that land-use reform facilitates the construction of more and cheaper housing. Proponents of racial and economic equity may endorse policies that make it easier to build in exclusionary and segregated communities. Environmentalists might favor policies that allow for the construction of dense, transit-oriented developments, thereby reducing vehicle emissions. Developers and others in the homebuilding/construction industry are perhaps the most immediate beneficiaries of such changes. Land-use reform often makes it cheaper to build. It increases the number of units that a developer can place on a particular plot of land, and simplifies the oftentimes onerous permitting process. As a consequence, developer and homebuilding interest groups have strongly supported efforts to relax zoning and land-use regulations at the state and local levels. They have chafed when advocates and policymakers push for additional affordability requirements and restrictions. The fact that developers are the most transparent supporters, however, provides a political opportunity for opponents to fight land-use reforms on ostensibly progressive grounds. Some opponents highlight developers’ purported disproportionate influence on housing policy. In response to a Virginia effort to permit duplexes in areas zoned for single-family housing, one Democratic-leaning civic group,11 Arlingtonians for Our Sustainable Future, suggested that community planning was “hostage to developers’ pressure.”12 Others underscore developers’ profit motives, often bolstered by developer groups’ opposition to policies targeted towards affordability, such as inclusionary zoning. In Cambridge, MA, The Black Response Cambridge, a coalition of Black members of Black-led, Cambridge organizations, strongly opposed increasing the allowable density in the city’s zoning code on affordability grounds. In doing so, they invoked developers and their interests: “Asking for-profit developers to fix the affordable housing problem is like asking an arsonist to put out their own fire. What is their incentive?...The recent ‘missing middle’ upzoning petition led by for-profit developers does not result in the housing that we, The Black Response Cambridge,

10

  A wide body of scholarship links land-use regulations and exclusionary zoning practices with higher housing costs and greater economic and racial segregation (Gyourko and Molloy 2014; Rothstein 2017; Trounstine 2018). 11

  https://​www.​bloom​berg.​com/​news/​artic​les/​2019-​12-​20/​inside-​the-​virgi​nia-​bill-​to-​allow-​denser-​housi​ ng.

12

  https://​3d81d​522-​ce99-​431c-​a359-​61f1c​e06c5​57.​files​usr.​com/​ugd/​a48bae_​0e6e1​c52b0​2549c​6a824​ 10946​fecee​1b.​pdf.

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want to see.”13 Livable California, a nonprofit, anti-development advocacy organization, exemplifies this point. In describing their organization’s mission, they distinguish between the preferences of “developers” and those who crave “affordability” and “livability”: The developer/“trickle-down” camp [emph. added] wants free reign to build what they want, where they want, without oversight from local communities and their elected representatives. They believe that building more of anything, no matter how expensive, will eventually bring housing prices down by a factor of two or three to where housing becomes affordable again. The affordability/livability camp [emph. added] wants housing that is affordable to a majority of the people and is built with community input and local oversight to maintain and enhance the livability of communities. They believe that affordable housing requires doing something different and smarter than just building more high-end housing and hoping the benefits trickle down.14 Livable California rates state bills by describing the extent to which they benefit developers, with developer benefits generating an automatic classification as a “bad bill.” One proposed piece of legislation, for example, was “bad” because it “empowers developers to override cities, buying and destroying stores and businesses to build dense market-rate housing.” Another so-called “truly bizarre bill is [State Senator Scott Wiener’s] latest gift to speculators.” In Arlington, MA, an anti-development group employs a similar strategy, highlighting developers’ desire to skirt local inclusionary zoning requirements as a reason to oppose state and local housing reform efforts: Some have suggested that to create more affordable housing we should abolish single-family zoning and allow for two units per lot. Rezoning our R1 districts to R2 is a developer’s dream: Our inclusionary affordable housing bylaw only kicks in at six units or more, and would not apply to this type of development. Opening up the R1 districts means that developers will target the thousands of smaller, older homes in Arlington that are semi-affordable today. They will be torn down and replaced with boxy duplexes, with each unit costing two or three times as much as the home it replaced. Gentrification and the economic gap in Arlington will only increase.15 Opponents take advantage of community sentiment towards developers by positioning any piece of legislation that benefits developers as anti-affordability. Finally, opponents of zoning reform portray it as anti-environmental, often citing developers’ history of ravaging local environments. This line of criticism has strong roots in developers’ longstanding fight against environmental protections and regulations (Mullin 2009). The Sierra Club opposed a state land-use reform in 13   https://​www.​cambr​idged​ay.​com/​2021/​02/​15/​black-​respo​nse-​cambr ​idge-​on-​upzon​ing-​petit​ion-​missi​ng-​ middle-​fails-​for-​housi​ng-​affor​dabil​ity/. 14

  https://​www.​livab​lecal​iforn​ia.​org/​livab​le-​calif​ornia-​housi​ng-​backg​round/.   https://​sites.​google.​com/​view/​arfrr/​facts-​faqs?​authu​ser=0.

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California on the grounds that it would allow developers to bypass environmental review, thereby contributing to environmental degradation: This means that certain projects up to 85 feet in height (about 8 stories) would be eligible for ministerial permitting, and thus avoid environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), in areas where all design, review, and public comment focus on single-family homes. This would increase the amount of unmitigated pollution in these communities while stifling public input. We continue to believe that developers should prevent or mitigate their pollution, and this potential avoidance of CEQA is unacceptable.16 Livable California argued against a bill that would have allowed municipal governments to override citizen-initiated ballot measures in some instances on the grounds that it would amplify developer power and harm the environment: “SB 902 fuels unhealthy power plays by developers who the bill incentivizes to attempt to elect a majority on city councils and boards of supervisors in order to swing the vote to roll back voter approvals that permanently protected lands....We at Livable California have discovered 40, and believe there may be hundreds, of citizen initiatives, approved by voters, that protect shorelines, hillsides, urban growth boundaries, open space, and other lands. This bill is a direct attack on the environment and voter rights in California.”17 In Cambridge, MA, The Cambridge Citizens’ Coalition contended that an effort to eliminate single-family zoning would harm the local environment, in part because of developers’ profit motivation: Let’s not overlook the effect on open space and the tree canopy. Slashing the space required between buildings means less open space and fewer mature trees. Under ”Missing Middle” zoning, all setbacks (front, back and sides) are cut basically in half. Owners can also go up to 40 feet - the equivalent of a four-story building. Proponents promise that since ”The Missing Middle” gets rid of the requirement of off-street parking, driveways would turn into gardens. That’s a lovely dream, but developers look to their return on investment [emph. added], and roughly two-thirds of households in Cambridge have at least one car. We can wish that the cars all go away, but “Missing Middle” zoning means only that will be far more of them competing for the same number of on-street parking places.18 Opponents thus have a wide array of ways in which to use community dislike of developers as a tool to stymie housing reform.

16

  http://​www.​ethan​elkind.​com/​wp-​conte​nt/​uploa​ds/​2018/​01/​SB-​827-​Wiener-​Oppose-​Final.​pdf.   https://​www.​livab​lecal​iforn​ia.​org/​lette​rs-​submi​tted-​for-​again​st-​calif​ornia-​housi​ng-​bills/. 18   https://​www.​cambr ​idged​ay.​com/​2021/​03/​29/​missi​ng-​middle-​zoning-​is-​bait-​and-​switch-​cambr ​idge-​ style-​and-​wont-​aid-​affor​dabil​ity/. 17

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The challenge of evaluating developer power Thus far, we have discussed ways in which the public’s disdain for developers, however, merited, can hinder the construction of new housing that proceeds through public forums and make it harder to pass pro-housing policies. We have not considered the validity of some of the key beliefs that opponents of developers and their interests hold. Perhaps developers do control the levers of urban policy behind the scenes—to the detriment of the broader community. Perhaps developers’ real influence comes from their unfettered access to senior leadership rather than the public’s ability to speak against developers’ proposals for a few minutes at a board meeting. The long shadow of urban renewal and contemporary emphasis on higher-end, luxury development in many communities certainly lend credence to this account, especially in communities of color that have been historically marginalized in urban planning (Levine 2017). Opponents of new housing projects may, in this telling, serve community interests in combating hidden developer power. In this section, we use several examples to show that this account is difficult to falsify. Indeed, in their seminal work on political power, Bachrach and Baratz (1962) note, “The question is, however, how can one be certain in any given situation that the ’unmeasurable elements’ are inconsequential, are not of decisive importance? Cast in slightly different terms, can a sound concept of power be predicated on the assumption that power is totally embodied and fully reflected in ”concrete decisions” or in activity bearing directly upon their making? We think not” (p. 948). In articulating a second face of power, Bachrach and Baratz (1962) argue that power cannot simply be evaluated by exploring whether “A participates in the making of decisions that affect B.” Rather, “power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A” (p. 948). It is this second face of power that most believe developers wield. And it is this second face that is difficult to prove or disprove. Indeed, our analysis of the survey of mayors earlier in the article helps to illuminate this point. One way to interpret mayors’ fairly rosy perceptions of developer influence would be to argue that they see the value developers provide to their communities by building new housing. This is the logic we used earlier in this article. Another plausible interpretation, though, is that mayors are forced to make concessions to developers in order to govern (Stone 1989)—or, perhaps that mayors’ and developers’ political and financial interests are linked, at least in part, because the former take money from the latter. It is impossible for us to prove one way or another whether mayors’ perceptions are shaped by hidden developer power, and if they are, exactly which source of power is doing the work. We further explore these methodological and inferential challenges by returning to public meetings and exploring campaign donations.

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Developers at public meetings We could attempt to measure observable manifestations of developer power. We could trace, for example, their participation in the same public meetings at which members of the public so effectively oppose the construction of new housing. Developers present project plans before local planning or zoning boards or city councils. Public officials on these reviewing bodies then have the opportunity to ask clarifying questions before proceedings turn over to members of the general public. After public comment is closed, public officials then debate whether to approve a proposal, deny the application, or continue the hearing. This procedural order means that public hearings present developers with an agenda-setting opportunity. They are the first to speak and therefore can frame their project in terms of community goals—just as residents frame their opposition as representative of broader community interests. To evaluate how developers use this opportunity, we analyze public meeting minutes—some that include exact transcripts—to illuminate whether developers contextualize their projects in these public-spirited terms. Specifically, we select several cases from a broader set of public meetings across Massachusetts (Einstein et al. 2019). We explore public meetings from the following five Massachusetts cities and towns, representing a range of socioeconomic and racial demographics: Arlington, Cambridge, Lawrence, Sudbury, and Worcester. For each, we analyze the project that received the most public comments—in some cases, across multiple meetings. This procedure allows us juxtapose the arguments made by developers with those made by community members in projects that generate a lot of attention and activity. All of these projects were unusually large relative to others in their respective communities. They attracted substantial public participation. These big projects pose a conservative test for our analysis: we should expect bigger projects to be proposed by more professionalized and sophisticated developers who would anticipate significant opposition. This should, all else equal, lead to better developer presentations that take into account potential community opposition and highlight the broader benefits for their proposed projects. Across these diverse contexts, the bulk of developers and their team members primarily focused their comments on: (1) describing project plans, and (2) explaining how these plans aligned with city/town land-use codes.19 They outlined traffic studies, building heights and layouts, landscaping and wastewater plans. Very few (three out of 44 comments) linked the construction of more housing with affordability— despite the well-documented connection in Massachusetts and elsewhere between insufficient housing and rising costs (Einstein et al. 2019). Indeed, developer profits were cited in public comments as often as were affordability concerns. In one case, project proponents even defended a proposal by drawing a contrast between the project and those of so-called greedy developers. The developer’s architect explained that “We, we’re asking for the relief because it’s needed not because – [the developer is] not a greedy developer. This is her first time developing...[W] e’ve actually internally pushed back and trying to hone it down to the minimum 19

  We coded 44 developer/team member statements across these five cities and towns.

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that is, you know, kind of a doable thing. So we really are not trying to hide anything about this development.” Developers and housing supporters recognize the stereotype. These relatively narrow presentations contrast with neighbors’ comments on these same projects, which highlighted broader community concerns. Rather than focusing on zoning and land-use regulations, neighbors emphasized how traffic harmed their quality of life, what density would do to their neighborhood’s character, and how the proposed development might degrade the local environment. The one exception to this rule was in Cambridge, where the project developer and their team were far more likely to comment on broader city and town goals. Indeed, 10 out of 44 developer team comments in our full data set linked their plans to broader city/town goals; six of those comments came from the team developing a large housing complex—including affordable housing—in Cambridge, MA. These developer team members highlighted their conversations with the broader community and meetings with city and town officials, and noted the influence these conversations had on their proposed project. One said that a proposed development met the city’s goals as outlined in a Red Ribbon Commission and Central Square Advisory Board study. Relative to the other communities we analyzed, Cambridge faces stronger development pressures due to its universities, biotech industry, community amenities, and proximity to Boston. It may be that developers in this more competitive environment have responded with more professionalized presentations—or that the Cambridge Planning Board has solicited these types of developer presentations in prior meetings. Indeed, developers’ goal is ultimately to persuade local permitgranting boards to allow them to build; strategically, they should try to hew their presentations as closely as possible to board members’ preferences. Compared with the presentations of other developer teams in surrounding communities, the community-oriented emphasis of the Cambridge developer was notable. This case also suggests that developer project presentations need not inevitably hue to minutiae of land-use regulations to the exclusion of broader considerations and interests. Future research might further explore variations in developer behavior to better identify how community context, board behavior, and developer characteristics shape variations in how development teams present their proposals, and ideally, whether such differences affect outcomes. One interpretation of these results is that developers are not, for the most part, effective agenda-setters at public meetings. Rather than linking their proposals with broader community aims, developers tend to quickly cede that ground to neighborhood residents. A more cynical view would hold that developers do not need to be particularly effective presenters at these meetings because they have back channel access to public decision-makers. We cannot, of course, measure these secret meetings (or, in the most cynical possible view, bribes), making it impossible to disprove that shadowy economic interests, in fact, dominate political decision-making.

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Developers in political campaigns Donations to political campaigns present a similar analytic challenge. Developers might also further confirm and exacerbate their reputations as shadowy influencers by making large campaign donations. Indeed, while developers have anecdotally “bought” politicians using explicit and illegal bribery, they could also legally seek influence by contributing to campaign coffers. Doing so could also be a way in which they exert influence and pursue their goals outside of the institutions that we have shown to be disadvantageous for them. To examine this possibility, we analyzed campaign contributions to elected officials in Massachusetts. The state’s campaign finance regulations require that candidates in cities with populations greater than 65,000 people file with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance, and that donors report their occupation and employer when contributing more than $100 to a candidate.20 We focus on the 2017 mayoral elections for the ten cities with the most expensive elections (Boston, Newton, Fall River, Lawrence, Somerville, Framingham, Salem, Lynn, Revere, and Holyoke).21 For comparison, we also include candidates for statewide office, state legislature, and district attorney in 2018. For each contest, we restricted our sample to the two candidates with the largest contributions over the previous two years (2016 and 2017 for mayors, and 2017 and 2018 for the other candidates), and dropped any candidate who raised less than $10,000. This produced a sample of 311 candidates running for 219 offices.22 We coded the individual contributions based on occupation and employer. We used the employer and occupation fields for the individual donors to determine if the contributor was likely to be a developer or in a related field. We also coded for contributors working for the city, in law, and in medicine, for comparison. This coding will necessarily be approximate, as small donors are missing this information, and the occupation and employer will not match perfectly to industry. Furthermore, this coding may combine donors with opposing views on development. For example, while we expect developers, contractors, and builders to be mostly pro-development, real estate agents may be less supportive (McCabe 2016). As a result, we code real estate as a separate category from development. We validated the coding by verifying that the largest developers, builders, and other companies in the industry were properly coded when they donated. Figure  4 reports the average percentage of contributions to a candidate from donors working in each industry. In mayoral elections, the average candidate receives about 5% of their total contributions from the real estate industry, comparable to receipts from real estate agents and lawyers, and less than they receive from municipal workers (including police, fire fighters, public school teachers, and others 20

  Candidates in smaller cities and towns file locally, and contributions are not reported to a centralized database. 21

  Other large cities, such as Worcester and Cambridge, are excluded because they elect their mayors as part of the city council election. 22

  We restricted the sample due to the large number of candidates who raised minimal funds and did not run viable campaigns.

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listed their employer as the city). The share of contributions from developers is slightly lower in the other categories, where the largest share of contributions come from lawyers. This is especially notable in elections for district attorney, where 24% of contributions to the average candidate come from the legal sector. Indeed, the disproportionate political activity of lawyers in district attorney races suggests that interest groups—when motivated—can dominate local contests (Anzia 2014). These same dynamics do not appear to be at play for developers in local elections. Figure 5 presents the same data for each of the ten cities in our sample. Contributions from developers are highest in Boston. In several cities, municipal workers, who are employed by the city and whose compensation is determined through negotiations with the city government, have the largest share of donations. We find little evidence that developers represent a major source of campaign contributions to any statewide or local office. Once again, while this empirical analysis shows that developers are relatively uninvolved in campaigns, it is possible that developers shape campaigns in other ways. If politicians view them as essential governing partners (Stone 1989), then they may allow developers to shape their policy agenda without dollars exchanging hands. And, as always, money may flow from developers to politicians in other hidden ways.

Conclusion As in any study that attempts to measure political power, developers may exert their influence in ways that we cannot observe. While journalistic accounts in many large cities have identified isolated instances of developer bribery and corruption, there are likely many other times where such behavior has gone undetected. Moreover, developers may engage in racist or sexist gatekeeping—as in many other professions—which prevents community members from profiting in real estate transactions. While this article suggests that developers may not be as omnipotent as some advocates and scholarly accounts suggest, it by no means rules out the possibility that developers engage in shadowy power plays at the expense of marginalized community members. What’s more, the dynamics look considerably different depending upon the focus of study. Our evidence in this articles comes from states and cities with extraordinarily high housing costs. Understanding the housing politics of these so-called super-star cities is critical; many of these cities have experienced enormous economic growth, and would potentially be sites of economic opportunity were it not for their exorbitant housing costs. But, the exercise of developer power may operate quite differently in less economically advantaged places. Public officials in communities desperate for any form of development may cede considerably more power to developers. Moreover, not all community resident voices are treated equally. Jeremy Levine’s (2017) research on housing development in Boston powerfully illuminates how community residents’ voices can be marginalized in public meetings. Nonetheless, the available evidence suggests that developers do not dominate public meetings about housing development and that their regulated political activities are in line with other local interest groups. Especially in smaller, suburban 27

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K. L. Einstein et al. Mayor

Statewide Office

Development

4.3%

Real Estate

4.9%

Law

5.4%

Medicine

2.6%

2.6%

4.2%

2.9% 12.6%

2.6%

Municipal

State House

6.4%

3.4%

5.7%

3.0%

0.7%

1.7%

0%

State Senate 1.9%

1.7%

Real Estate

2.3%

1.8%

6.0%

Medicine

2.4%

1.2%

0%

30%

24.1%

4.1%

Municipal

20%

District Attorney

Development Law

10%

3.0%

10%

20%

30%

0%

10%

20%

30%

Percent of Contributions to Average Candidate

Fig. 4  Average campaign contributions by industry and elected office category Boston

Fall River

Development

7.5%

Real Estate

7.5%

Law

Development

4.7%

2.3%

5.1%

4.7%

4.8%

1.1%

Lynn

Newton

Revere

1.1%

2.1%

4.4%

Law Medicine 0%

10%

20%

10%

6.1%

0.6%

7.9%

0%

5.7%

1.0% 9.3%

20%

0%

10%

Lawrence 3.3% 2.5% 5.2% 4.2% 4.7%

Somerville 5.5%

5.6%

3.7%

2.5% 11.8%

Salem

5.9%

6.3%

2.1%

Municipal

3.6%

3.9%

3.8%

9.6%

3.9%

1.3%

2.8%

Real Estate

Holyoke 3.4%

3.0%

3.7%

3.5%

Municipal

5.2%

4.4%

6.5%

Medicine

Framingham

5.6%

1.1%

20%

11.3% 3.0% 2.0% 4.7%

0% 10% 20% 0% 10% 20% Percent of Contributions to Average Candidate

Fig. 5  Average campaign contributions by industry and elected office category by city

communities, there is little evidence of developer dominance. Yet, their unpopularity is wielded as a cudgel, stymieing housing developments and reform coalitions alike. Public distaste for private-sector housing developers, however warranted, presents a formidable obstacle to policymakers and reformers who hope to resolve America’s ever-mounting housing crisis.

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Declarations  Conflict of interest  On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

References Anzia, Sarah F. 2014. Timing and turnout: How off-cycle elections favor organized groups. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bachrach, Peter, and Morton S. Baratz. 1962. The two faces of power. American Political Science Review 56 (4): 947–952. Been, Vicki, Josiah Madar, and Simon McDonnell. 2014. Urban land-use regulation: Are homevoters overtaking the growth machine? Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11 (2): 227–265. Bernstein, Jared, Jeffery Zhang, Ryan Cummings, and Matthew Maury. 2021. Alleviating supply constraints in the housing market. The White House. https://​www.​white​house.​gov/​cea/​writt​en-​mater​ ials/​2021/​09/​01/​allev​iating-​supply-​const​raints-​in-​the-​housi​ng-​market/. Accessed 6 Jan 2022. Caro, Robert. 1974. The power broker. New York: Knopf. Chapple, Karen, and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. 2021. White Paper on anti-displacement strategy effectiveness. Prepared for the California Air Resources Board. https://​www.​urban​displ​aceme​nt.​org/​ sites/​defau​lt/​files/​images/​carb_​anti-​displ​aceme​nt_​policy_​white_​paper_3.​4.​21_​final_​acces​sible.​pdf. Accessed 22 Apr 2021. Einstein, Katherine Levine, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer. 2019. Neighborhood defenders: Participatory politics and America’s housing crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Einstein, Katherine Levine, Maxwell Palmer, and David M. Glick. 2019. Who participates in local politics? Evidence from meeting minutes. Perspectives on Politics 17 (1): 28–46. Fischel, William A. 2001. The homevoter hypothesis: How home values influence local government taxation, school finance, and land-use policies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glaeser, Edward L. 2011. Triumph of the city: How our greater invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier. New York: Penguin Press. Gyourko, Joseph, and Raven Molloy. 2014. Regulation and housing supply. NBER Working Paper 20536. Hackworth, Jacob, ed. 2007. The neoliberal city: Governance, ideology, and development in American urbanism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hankinson, Michael. 2018. When do renters behave like homeowners? High rent, price anxiety, and NIMBYism. American Political Science Review 112 (3): 473–493. Levine, Jeremy. 2017. The paradox of community power: Cultural processes and elite authority in participatory governance. Social Forces 95 (3): 1155–1179. Logan, John R., and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban fortunes: The political economy of place. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. Marble, William, and Clayton Nall. 2020. Where interest trumps ideology: Homeownership and liberal opposition to local housing development. Journal of Politics. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1086/​711717. McCabe, Brian. 2016. No place like home: Wealth, community, and the politics of homeownership. New York: Oxford University Press. Michener, Jamila, and Diane Wong. 2018. Gentrification, demobilization, and participatory possibilities, 123–146. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Monkkonen, Paavo, and Michael Manville. 2019. Opposition to development or opposition to developers? Experimental evidence on opposition toward new housing. Journal of Urban Affairs. https://​ doi.​org/​10.​1080/​07352​166.​2019.​16236​84. Morel, Domingo, Akira Drake Rodriguez, Mara Sidney, Nakeefa Garay, and Adam Straub. 2021. Measuring and explaining stalled gentrification in Newark, New Jersey: The role of racial politics. Urban Affairs Review. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​10780​87421​10463​40. Mullin, Megan. 2009. Governing the tap: Special district governance and the new local politics of water. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pasotti, Eleonora. 2020. Resisting development: Protest in aspiring global cities. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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Pendall, Rolf. 1999. Opposition to housing: NIMBY and Bbyond. Urban Affairs Review 34 (1): 112–36. Rae, Douglas W. 2004. City: Urbanism and its end. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The color of law. New York: W.W. Norton. Rothwell, Jonathan T., and Douglas S. Massey. 2013. Density zoning and class segregation in U.S. metropolitan America. Social Science Quarterly 91 (5): 1123–1143. Sattler, Beryl, ed. 2009. Family properties: How the struggle over race and real estate transformed Chicago and Urban America. New York: Picador. Schleicher, David. 2013. City unplanning. Yale Law Journal 122: 1672–1736. Schuetz, Jenny. 2019. Cost, crowding, or commuting? Housing stress on the middle class. Brookings Institution. https://​www.​brook​ings.​edu/​resea​rch/​cost-​crowd​ing-​or-​commu​ting-​housi​ng-​stress-​on-​ the-​middle-​class/. Accessed 19 Aug 2019. Stone, Clarence Nathan. 1989. Regime politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Tighe, J. Rosie. 2010. Public opinion and affordable housing: A review of the literature. Journal of Planning Literature 25 (1): 3–17. Trounstine, Jessica. 2018. Segregation by design. New York: Cambridge University Press. White House. 2016. Housing development toolkit. https://​www.​white​house.​gov/​sites/​white​house.​gov/​ files/​images/​Housi​ng_​Devel​opment_​Toolk​it%​20f.2.​pdf. Accessed 2 Mar 2017. Wolf-Powers, Laura. 2010. Community benefits agreements and local government: A review of recent evidence. Journal of the American Planning Association 76 (2): 141–159.

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Interest Groups & Advocacy (2022) 11:209–236 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-021-00148-7 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Politics, power, and precarity: how tenant organizations transform local political life Jamila Michener1   · Mallory SoRelle2 Accepted: 13 December 2021 / Published online: 14 February 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022

Abstract As the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated housing precarity, tenant organizations grew in numbers and salience. But membership-based tenant organizations predated the pandemic and will persist beyond it. There are (at least)  hundreds of them in localities across the country. Many aim to advance sweeping change. In doing so, they face formidable tasks: politically organizing in race-class subjugated communities, working in opposition to powerful actors (corporate landlords, property managers, etc.), and navigating complex and sometimes hostile local political institutions (city councils, mayors, rent boards, etc.). How do these organizations build power and effect change in the face of such obstacles? Drawing on a rich body of original qualitative evidence (participant observation and in-depth interviews), this paper explores the politics of local tenant organizations. We assess the origins of such organizations, how they are structured, and how they pursue political change. In doing so, we offer a rich descriptive account of phenomena that have largely escaped the attention of political scientists. We find that tenant organizations can cultivate radically different ways of conceptualizing political economy, carve out a distinctive political focus on race-class subjugated communities, and create critical opportunities for otherwise marginalized actors to develop and exercise political power. Keywords  Tenant organizations · Housing · Power · Organizing · Politics

* Jamila Michener [email protected] 1

Department of Government and Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell University, 123 Central Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA

2

Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, 210 Sanford Building, Durham, NC 27708, USA



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Introduction Laura,1 a middle-aged Black woman living in Western New York, was saved from houselessness when her neighbors physically surrounded her home—stopping the local police from executing an eviction. Laura’s neighbors deployed a tactic known as an eviction blockade. When sheriffs showed up to evict Laura, a throng of neighbors and supporters encircled her home. Police saw the scale of the gathering and decided to delay the eviction. This happened numerous times over several years. Each time Laura was scheduled for an eviction, her neighbors rallied and the eviction was postponed. Eventually, Laura’s bank ceased eviction proceedings altogether, opting instead to negotiate more favorable terms that allowed her to remain in her home. The eviction blockades that kept Laura housed were coordinated by a grassroots membership-based tenant led organization called Housing NOW.2 Housing NOW found Laura’s name on a housing court roster, contacted her, and asked her if she wanted help combatting her eviction. Laura accepted their offer. Being part of Housing NOW transformed Laura’s political life. After securing her own housing, she continued working with Housing NOW to organize her neighbors against predatory landlords and banks. Even more striking is how these efforts changed local political dynamics in Laura’s community. The threat of eviction blockades and other forms of direct action altered landlord-tenant dynamics, strengthening the position of tenants. Landlords who were fearful of being targeted by Housing NOW halted eviction proceedings and instead negotiated terms with tenants that kept them in their homes. Local elected officials made housing a more central aspect of their campaign platforms, showed up at direct action events organized by Housing NOW, and talked with the group about changing local policies. As media coverage of eviction blockades spotlighted the role of law enforcement, there was increasing pressure to reevaluate the involvement of police in eviction processes. The efforts of groups like Housing NOW point to a larger reality: collective organizing among people fighting precarious and insecure housing is occurring in localities across the country. Not only does this organizing produce political opportunities for individuals, it also structures the realities of local politics. Ample research on American politics suggests that people like Laura and her neighbors have woefully constrained political power (Franko 2013; Gilens 2012; Hajnal and Trounstine 2016; Nuamah 2020; Piven et  al. 2009; Schlozman et  al. 2012; Soss and Weaver 2017: 583). Indeed, race-class subjugated (RCS)3 populations are positioned in the crosshairs of social and political exclusion: living in or near poverty, working low-wage jobs, residing in “bad” neighborhoods, and having politically debilitating encounters with carceral and welfare state institutions. Each of these experiences—from economic deprivation to bereft neighborhood conditions 1

  This qualitative narrative is based on participant observation. All names of research participants are anonymized in order to protect confidentiality. 2   Organization names and other (non-essential) details are altered to ensure anonymity. 3   We follow Soss and Weaver (2017, p. 567) in using the phrase “race-class subjugated.” Such language recognizes that “race and class are intersecting social structures…that defy efforts to classify people neatly…”.

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Politics, power, and precarity: how tenant organizations…

to negative interactions with the state—is typically expected to demobilize people (e.g., Verba et al. 1995; Michener 2013, 2018; Weaver and Lerman 2010). Nevertheless, narratives like Laura’s highlight the prospects for marginal denizens to engage in critical forms of politics and to build political power in their communities. This is consistent with what we have learned from scholars who have marked the contours of resistance and political agency among subaltern groups (Cohen 2004; Kelley 1990, 1996; Piven and Cloward 1977; Scott 1985). Local, membership-based organizations are a vital locus of such power building (Burghardt 1972; Rodriguez 2021; Han et  al. 2021; Michener 2020). In this paper, we attend to a particularly important and growing subset of those groups: tenant organizations. As the pandemic exacerbated housing instability, renters faced eviction in staggering numbers—about one in five (more than 10 million people) fell behind on their rent payments, even after multiple rounds of Covid stimulus checks. In this context, tenant organizations have grown more salient. There are hundreds of these organizations in localities across the country. Many aim to advance sweeping change. In doing so, they face formidable tasks: politically organizing in race-class subjugated communities, working in opposition to powerful actors (landlords, property managers, etc.), and navigating complex and sometimes hostile local political institutions (city councils, rent boards, etc.). How do tenant organizations build power and affect change in the face of such obstacles? While there is a well-established interdisciplinary literature that attends to the democracy-enhancing functions of various kinds of organizations, tenant organizations have not been incorporated into such studies (Goss 2013; Han 2009, 2014; McAlevey 2016; Skocpol 2003; Skocpol et al. 2000). Drawing on a rich body of qualitative evidence, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper explores the politics of local tenant organizations. We describe how such organizations develop, how they are structured, and their tactics in pursuing political change. Along the way, we offer a rich account of an organizational type that political scientists have overlooked, thereby missing a crucial form of political engagement within RCS communities. We find that tenant organizations can cultivate radically different ways of conceptualizing the political economy, carve out a distinctive space in local politics by centering economically and racially marginalized communities, and create critical opportunities for marginalized denizens to develop and exercise political power. Tenant groups generate a range of alternatives for imagining and enacting local politics in the context of a capitalist economy marked by striking and enduring racial inequalities.

Housing, power, and local politics Housing is a policy arena marked by an enduring history of political struggle. While many “consumer” issues fall short of consistently and sufficiently motivating robust political action (e.g., food prices, consumer protections), housing stands out as an issue that often catalyzes political engagement and energizes political life, even in race-class subjugated communities (Dreier 1984; Thurston 2018; Michener  2020; Rodriguez 2021; SoRelle 2020). 33

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Housing holds a unique status as an important political issue. It is the largest single expense for most families (PEW 2016). Housing cost burdens for renters have been on the rise as rental markets have seen a proliferation of high-cost units alongside a decline in low-cost units (Joint Center for Housing Studies 2020). Rental prices are at record highs, while vacancy rates (especially in moderate-tolow quality rentals) have reached a relative nadir (Joint Center for Housing Studies 2020). Among other things, this means that tenants cannot “vote with their feet” by simply exiting predatory, substandard, or otherwise adverse housing situations (Tiebout 1956). Such conditions produce painfully limited options for all but the wealthiest classes, while empowering landlords, banks, and elite economic interests. Under these circumstances, durable antagonisms flare between those who are profiting from the housing status quo and those who are hard pressed under its weight. This lays the groundwork for political contestation. Beyond such structural economic conditions, the relational configuration of housing produces distinct political conditions. Namely, “housing preeminently creates and reinforces connections between people, communities, and institutions, and thus it ultimately creates relationships of power” (Marcuse and Madden 2016: 89). Tenants4 are an identifiable group of people who often come into regular contact with one another. This creates opportunities to develop social bonds, commiserate, communicate their struggles, and engage one another in a wide variety of ways. Landlords, banks, property management companies, and those with capital interests in the housing market lie on the other end of the relational spectrum. These actors exercise salient and traceable control over the lives of tenants. The conspicuous clarity of such power arrangements inscribes the residential as political and positions housing as a site for “organizing citizenship, work, identities, solidarities and politics” (Madden and Marcuse 2016: 12). Importantly, the venue of political contestation over housing is primarily local. Housing is experienced on a local level and understood as a local issue. In the larger scheme of U.S. federalism, housing policy is historically the prerogative of local actors (Kincaid 1992). States sometimes use their power to place constraints on localities (e.g., preemption of local rent control laws) and the federal government offers “people-based” housing resources to support low-income denizens (e.g., the Housing Choice Voucher Program), but many of the most consequential decisions about housing remain squarely in the domain of local politics (Dantzler 2016; Hatch 2017; Trounstine 2018). A significant body of research on housing-related interest groups has focused on economic elites and non-profit advocacy organizations (Al-Turk 2016; Einstein et al. 2020; Erickson 2006; Lilley 1980; Mollenkopf and Pynoos 1980; Yerena 2015,

4

  Tenants are defined differently by different groups, depending upon their purpose. Since our purpose in this article is to enhance and expand understanding, we define tenants capaciously, reflecting the range of definitions we encountered while doing research. Per this approach, a tenant is anyone without the ability to comfortably control their access to and/or quality of housing. This includes renters who pay landlords for their housing, but also includes those who are unhoused, as well as home “owners” whose ability to stay housed is precarious and contingent on (sometimes predatory) terms set by banks and other financial institutions or access to land for mobile/manufactured housing.

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2019). Another subset of research has attended specifically to organized residents within public housing (Feldman and Stall 2004; Feldman et al. 1998; Howard 2014; Keene 2016; Rodriguez 2021; Williams 2004). However, comprehensive research on tenant organizations writ-large reached its height in the 1970s and 80 s and has since languished (Atlas and Drier 1980; Burghardt 1972; Capek and Gilderbloom 1992; Dreier 1982, 1984; Lawson 1986;  Heskin 1981;  Marcuse 1980; Maslow‐ Armand 1986; Shlay and Faulkner 1984). There are 44 million renter households the United States (2019 American Community Survey) and over 2.1 million families that are at least 3 months behind on mortgage payments (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau 2021). Yet, political scientists have largely neglected tenants as political actors. Correspondingly, they have overlooked the role of tenant organizations in building and channeling the power of tenants. Even before a global health pandemic threw the perennial crises of housing into sharp relief,5 popular accounts suggested that tenants across the country were “rising” and that their activism was “expanding” (Burns 2018; Kasakove 2019; Lang 2019; Tobias 2019). In the wake of Covid-19, tenant engagement was further catalyzed. Calls to “cancel rent” and organized rent strikes multiplied (Bougslaw 2020; Busch 2021; Haag and Dougherty 2020; Lowrey 2020; Salter 2020). The absence of research on the politics of tenant organizations makes it difficult to discern the significance of these formations. This paper offers a contemporary descriptive account of tenant organizations in the United States, with an eye towards advancing knowledge of what these organizations do, the varied ways they do it, and the implications for local politics and democracy in the places they operate.

Tenant organizations: a hybrid political formation What type of organization are tenant groups? As a rule of thumb, organizational typology is a difficult and contested enterprise. Even (or perhaps especially) among scholars of interest groups, there is no widely accepted consensus and no clearly delineated process for defining and distinguishing between an “interest group,” an “advocacy group,” and a “social movement organization” (Andrews and Edwards 2004;  Baroni et  al. 2014; Burnstein 2019). There are certainly definitions and distinctions circulating in the literatures(s); however, there is a notable “lack of shared vocabulary” around key terms. Researchers sometimes use the same words while still “talking past each other” (Baumgartner and Leech 1998: 22; Burnstein 2019: 3; Burnstein and Linton 2002). We will not attempt to resolve this definitional ambiguity. However, to ensure that the descriptive picture we offer is not distorted by concerns over how to properly classify tenant organizations, we note

5   One potential explanation for the scholarly blind spot vis-à-vis organizing around housing insecurity in RCS communities may stem from what Strolovitch (2013) argues is the political construction of economic crises. That is to say, “conditions of vulnerability, often simply taken for granted as part of the normal social landscape when they affect marginalized populations, become regarded as crises when they affect dominant groups” (167).

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that—notwithstanding a wide range of definitional options available in academic literatures—tenant organizations do not neatly fit into the existing landscape of research on interest groups or advocacy groups. This is not surprising. Categorization is an exercise that often exposes a lack of fit between the categories of analysis that scholars develop to gain analytical traction on research topics and the categories of practice that are legible to social and political actors in the real world (Brubaker 2013). If we take organizations’ self-understanding into consideration (i.e., their own constructed categories of practice), then tenant organizations emerge as a hybrid form primarily oriented around building power in local communities. Many members of these organizations we interviewed openly eschewed labels such as “advocacy group,” “activist group,” and most stridently “non-profit organization.” Moreover, not once did anyone we interviewed use the words “interest group,” and only occasionally did organizational participants categorize their groups as “grassroots.” While we do not argue that tenant groups represent an entirely novel organizational form, we do stress that their lack of obvious fit with the primary categories that predominate literatures on organizations is instructive. A constellation of characteristics and orientations makes tenant organization different: they emphasize power building over advocacy, autonomy over financial security, and deep organizing over superficial activism. Such choices are reflected in organizational discourse and action. All of this has implications for how tenant organizations operate within local politics. In the sections below, we provide concrete qualitative evidence of these and other aspects of tenant organizations. We furnish an in-depth examination that highlights how tenant organizations carve out a distinctive space in local politics by building power around the concerns of economically and racially marginalized communities. A close look at tenant organizations usefully expands our understanding of local political life, particularly in marginalized communities.

Research process and method The qualitative findings presented here are derived from participant-observation and in-depth interviews. Participant observation is a type of ethnographic approach that involves embedding oneself in a group or community for an extended period to observe, learn, and chart important phenomena (Burawoy et  al. 1991; Gillespie and Michelson 2011). It embraces a bottom-up methodological approach that centers the voices of its subjects (Michener et  al. 2020). For this study, we observed and participated in the meetings, workshops, and trainings of tenant organizations across the country over an 8-month period between September 2020 and May 2021. Because we were in a pandemic, all our observation was virtual. After several months of observing—once we had garnered significant knowledge in terms of

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language, structure, and process—we began in-depth interviews with members of tenant organizations across the country. We interviewed 46 people from 38 organizations. Those organizations were spread across 21 states and 33 localities. The states where organizations in this study operated spanned a wide geographic gamut including the Northeast, Southeast, Northwest, Southwest, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic.6 Similarly, the localities the organizations were embedded within were heterogenous, ranging from big cities like New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago to mid-sized cities like Oakland, California, to smaller cities, counties, and localities. Most of the organizations were in urban areas, but a handful (~ 6) were in areas with significant rural populations. We followed a multi-step process for recruiting research participants. First, we identified a wide range of tenant organizations throughout the country via systematic searches across several platforms (Facebook, Twitter, GuideStar, Google). We primarily searched for the words “tenant” and “renter.”7 Once we identified a baseline set of organizations (~ 50), we then used a virtual snowball approach to find additional organizations. This involved reviewing organizations’ websites and social media for any mention of additional organizations. Ultimately, we identified 134 tenant organizations across the country. While this list is certainly not complete in its coverage, it is likely comprehensive. Since tenant organizations are oriented towards building power, most of them want to be found. This gives them an incentive to be visible on the internet, in databases like GuideStar, and on social media. Though we missed organizations, it is also likely that many tenant organizations doing discernable work in local communities were sufficiently visible to be identified via our systematic sweep of a wide variety of platforms. We reached out to all the organizations whom we could contact via email, Facebook, or Twitter messages. We received “return to sender” messages for only a handful. In the final calculus, we communicated with 127 of the 134 organizations identified. E-mail and social media are imperfect communication channels, so it is entirely possible that some of our messages went to “junk mail” or were otherwise undetected. Moreover, several organizations replied to our outreach but were not in the final pool of interviewees either because they were unable to coordinate an interview time, did not show up for a scheduled interview, or needed approval from a quorum of organizational members before speaking to us. Altogether, we received responses from 42 organizations and completed interviews with members of 38 organizations. In straightforward terms, this means that roughly 33% of the organizations that we originally contacted responded to us and about 30% were part of the final pool of participants. While these numbers may sound low from a sampling-based statistical perspective, they are robust for an in-depth qualitative project. This research is based on the case-study logic as opposed to sampling logic (Small 2009; Yin 2003). Our goal 6  Interviews included people from organizations in the following states: California, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Florida, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Washington, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Virginia and Kansas. 7   To refine and focus our searches, we systematically combined these terms with the names of states and all major cities (top 100 largest) to ensure that we would identify place-specific organizations. This statebased approach very much widened our ambit and helped us to locate organizations in less populous states like South Dakota and Idaho.

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was not to get a “representative sample” of tenant organizations. Instead, we aimed to get a range of organizational cases that varied along two key axes: geographic context and organizational type. As we will describe below, we achieved this goal. A key indicator that we interviewed enough people/organizations is that we reached saturation—the point where we consistently heard redundant information such that additional cases did not reveal new information (Small 2009). The interviews occurred via zoom or over the phone, whichever method the participants preferred (the vast majority opted for zoom). Many of the people we interviewed logged on to zoom with their cameras turned on, so we were often able to see them. A relatively small number of interviewees left their cameras off and were not visible. The interviews lasted an average of 56 min. The longest interview was 82 min and the shortest was 36  min. Most interviews were with one participant, but sometimes multiple organization members would join the zoom call (up to 4 at one time). Moreover, some people would refer other members of their organization to speak to us, so on numerous occasions we separately interviewed different people from the same organization. The interviews were semi-structured and based on a short interview guide. We left significant leeway so that conversations could unfold organically. We asked all interviewees about how the organization got started, what its main activities were, how it was structured, what challenges it faced, and how it engaged with legal and political systems. We left time at the end of interviews to ask participants if there was anything important that we did not ask (most interviewees supplied us with responses to this prompt). The semi-structured nature of the interviews allowed participants to tell us things we did not inquire about, alert us to connections we had not considered, and describe processes in ways we could not have anticipated. The interviews thus produced precisely the depth of information that we intended. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were then uploaded into Dedoose, a web-based qualitative software program. We used Dedoose to complete several rounds of coding. Dedoose allows for comprehensive and systematic coding to identify main themes and catalogue interview excerpts. The first round of coding was based on an original list of very broad codes drawn from the main questions asked in the interviews. These codes included things like: “origins” (how organizations began), “activities” (what organizations did), “challenges” (what difficulties organizations faced), “political context” (how organizations understood and responded to the political system), and “organizational structure” (how organizations described their own structures). During the first round of coding, we read through the transcripts and created interview excerpts (i.e., relevant quote blocks from interviews) that aligned with these very broad codes. During this round we also conducted “open” coding to generate additional codes and subcodes based on emergent themes (Williams and Moser 2019). The codes developed through the open coding process were both wider ranging and more specific (e.g., this included codes like “power”, “elections” “racism” “landlords” “law enforcement” and more). We then completed a second round of coding based on the additional codes and subcodes generated through open coding. This second round of coding further refined our categorization. Finally, subsequent analyses included selective coding, where we integrated codes and reviewed patterns to identify core narratives for a bigger picture Reprinted from the journal

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understanding (Williams and Moser 2019). All the coding for this article was done by a single researcher, so intercoder reliability was not a concern.

The origins of tenant organizations We begin our analysis with the origins of tenant organizations. This is an appropriate starting point both because baseline knowledge about such organizations is low and because the beginnings of tenant groups speak to the ways they conceptualize local political economy. To better understand the roots of tenant organizing, we began our interviews with questions related to (1) how the interview participant came to be a part of a tenant organization and (2) how the group they are a part of got started. These questions address the topic of “origins” from two distinct (but occasionally overlapping) vantage points: individual and organizational. Sometimes the person we were interviewing started the organization, so the two origin stories bled together. Other times they remained separate. We relay both kinds of narratives here. The primary themes that emerged about origins suggested that people were driven to tenant organizing because of their economic ideas, personal experiences, or both. Some people had harrowing experiences of displacement or predation at the hands of landlords or property managers. They had been evicted or otherwise experienced traumatizing life events related to housing. This either motivated them to start a tenant organization or spurred them to join one. Another group of people we interviewed did not necessarily have adverse experiences with housing. Instead, they came to tenant organizing because of a commitment to a set of ideas about politics and the economy. Some participants openly described those ideas as “socialist” or “democratic socialist,” but even those who did not use such labels echoed related notions. At the heart of the economic ideas expressed by nearly all the people we interviewed were beliefs that housing should not be a commodity, that the economy was rigged against the working class, that capitalism was deeply flawed, and that tenants needed power to contest oppressive political and economic structures built for the interests of powerful elites and indifferent to the material needs of workingclass people. Personal experience as a catalyst for tenant organizing Personal experiences of harm or displacement were the main issue raised when we asked about the origins of tenant organizing efforts. Marcy, an organizer for a prominent tenant union in a midsized Midwestern city said that she got involved: because I personally experienced an eviction and it was from one of...the most notorious landlords in the city...it caused me hardship in securing housing for about a year or so, and...in order to really fight what I saw was going on in [the city] as far as the high eviction rates and that type of stuff, I thought that we needed a group, and then I heard about the [tenants union]. 39

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It was very common for interviewees to mention experiences specific to a particular building, landlord, or management company. Two Black women who started a tenant association at a large residential apartment complex in a low-income Northern New Jersey neighborhood explained that they acted because of conditions in their building. Phoebe, the primary initiator of the tenant association said, “I started back in October of 2018 because there were a lot of deficiencies here [in the building] that I noticed.” Phoebe first approached Savannah, a neighbor she often had small talk with while waiting for the (frequently malfunctioning) elevator. Savannah decided to work with Phoebe to start a tenants’ association because, “a lot of tenants had issues within their homes…you know whether there was a leak or paint or sewer issue or backup of the bathrooms…many things…so we started reaching out to tenants to have meetings on a monthly basis.” Notably, nearly everyone we spoke to from a tenant organization that started in the aftermath of the pandemic mentioned Covid-related experiences as an impetus. Yanlin, an Asian-American woman who helped to start a tenant organization in New York City, explained her trajectory. I got furloughed and I was just like, I don’t know what to do...I don’t know how I’m gonna pay rent now because there’s this coronavirus going around killing people. So, my friend was just kind of like, ‘hey why don’t you organize your building?’ I was like, ‘you know what, okay sure.’ I really didn’t even think about it that hard, I was just like ‘okay, but like how,’ and then [my friend was] like, ‘here are some resources,’ and I was like ‘okay,’ and then from there, I met my next door neighbors who are also tenants under [the same management company] and then they added me to a signal group, and then we were all in a signal chat with other people who have the same landlord, and then from there...we were like, ‘why don’t we just form a larger tenant Union?’ Renters were not the only ones motivated to organize in response to housing crises. Indeed, while many of the organizations in this study focused exclusively on renters, a handful (~ 6) included homeowners facing foreclosure among their “tenant” members. This is how Riley, an organizer at a large city-wide tenant group in Massachusetts, found her way to housing work: I joined [the organization] in 2011 when the bank foreclosed on my home. And God, I fought for five years, five months, and two days and won my house back in 2017. So, [before that] I was not an organizer. I was a stay-at-home mom, I was a deli professional, I was a customer service rep, I was a store manager. Beyond lived experiences of economic precarity, some people were motivated when they witnessed the experiences of others or saw firsthand how the housing system operated. Tanvee, a young  woman doing tenant organizing in a mid-sized midwestern city, relayed that: ...there was a neighbor of my parents...who was a slumlord locally, who offered to kind of show me around. And he took me around to a bunch of his properties and I discovered him to be not just a landlord but a slumlord, he showed me the gun that he uses to threaten his tenants, to get them out when Reprinted from the journal

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they’re behind on rent...I started realizing that the people that I’d grown up around some of them literally made their money off the backs of other people on the other side of town 10 minutes away from where I lived and that was very politicizing because I started to recognize that, I was not necessarily of the community where I grew up but...I had benefited from all of the privileges of living in a lush manicured area going to a great public school going to a great college. So, I had the risk of becoming one of those like oppressive class people, so that kind of motivated me to like to change the course of my life...I became an organizer. Political ideas as a catalyst for organizing While many of the people we spoke to (roughly two-thirds) talked about their connection to tenant organizations through the prism of personal experience, several had only minimal personal experience with housing precarity. Though these folks were renters, they were financially comfortable and adjacent to what many would consider the “middle class.”8 For them, the pull of tenant organizing was rooted in ideas rather than experiences. Those ideas related to larger perspectives towards the economic system that were often cultivated in and by other organizational spaces (e.g., Democratic Socialists of America). Westin, a young Asian-American college graduate in his 20 s, explains his trajectory towards starting a tenants’ union in Florida: I was part of a Socialist Party, and I was talking to a friend, a comrade you know, we were talking, he was part of DSA... he said to me... I’m kind of like sick of doing electoral work, I kind of want to do something, direct and something that directly challenges power, something that’s very direct and for the people...And at that time we had [another tenants union] one county up...and they had been doing their own thing and we’d actually been part of that and I had been active and helping them as well, so my friend said you know I want to do something direct like a tenant union, so I said, well then let’s do a tenant union. For Westin, the drive to do “something that directly challenges power” was motivated by viewpoints about power relations and social class. Westin regarded tenant organizing as “another way to…show working class people what they can do.” He described his own passion for the work in terms of his desire to alter the dynamics of class relations in his city. Though he did not relay personal experiences of housing insecurity, Westin understood organizing as a process of contextualizing personal experiences within a larger political-economic framework. He noted that, The struggle, even something as traumatic and frankly, violent as eviction can actually motivate people to be more involved and more engaged through organizing...it’s such a direct challenge of material conditions...like [organizing] is a 8

  See Michener (2017a, b) for a critical perspective on conceptualizing class.

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direct relationship between material conditions, especially in [this city] where the divide is so extremely stark...if you could picture it [this one] landlord has property in this Pacific Island... and she had two yachts...and I talked to [her tenants], and you know they’re like “Oh, you know, sometimes she comes by and she just like harasses me for like $50” and I’m thinking to myself you got two yachts and you trying to push people for $50, what’s going on here...like just cartoon levels of like evil, or cartoon levels of violence on the people... there’s no respect for tenants...and tenants recognize that and that’s why organizing is both crucial and such a good pathway to getting people organized and radicalized because you don’t really have to tell people they’re being exploited, they know it and you just have to put the pieces together for them and they’re, like “oh God!” Westin was one of numerous people who described tenant organizing in terms of ideas about the political economy. Interviewees with well-developed perspectives on class relations were almost always college educated, and many of them had spent time in graduate school. Accordingly, they were less likely to have taken an experiential route to tenant organizations and more likely to have been spurred by political learning. Matt, a white tenant organizer in Northern California, exemplifies this: ...my path to it was that I went to graduate school, which I call neoliberalism school, where they tell you all about the public-private partnerships and how privatization was going to save the world...It was the most bizarre disorienting experience, knowing that there’s a serious problem and the solutions that are being offered are not solutions or they’re totally inadequate...So, I got out [of school] and then my rent went up, and that pissed me off even more because, of course, they haven’t done anything to the property, it’s just sitting here and all of a sudden I’m paying more and more...And so, I got together with a couple friends...and we said “what the hell’s going on and what can we do about it?” And so, we did a power mapping exercise of the city...we wanted to know if we’re going to dedicate hours of our time of our very limited time, we want it to be towards something that’s going to have a real positive impact and everything just lead back to housing...you know class and race inequality... how is our wealth extracted from our communities, the number one way is the landlord, and so again and again and again when you drilled it down, it was like this fucking housing, this housing. It was just clear that tenants were second class to everyone else, and that the relationship between politicians, real estate capital, and working-class people was what was destroying everything so when we got together, the tenants union was kind of born at that point...and here we are now almost three years later. Some of the tenants we interviewed had dual catalysts of both experience and ideas (even Matt, quoted above, talks about his rent being raised). Altogether, these forces worked in tandem to attract tenants and teach them about organizing. Tenant organizations brought people with very few negative experiences but well-honed ideas about capitalism, racism, and other facets of structural inequality into the same spaces as folks who were on the very edge of economic marginality, even if they Reprinted from the journal

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didn’t have well developed theories about why and how they got there. These (often) divergent catalysts for involvement engendered organizations that spanned racial and class boundaries. Moreover, the merging of political experience and political ideas proved instructive for the people involved. Those with experience but without larger economic frameworks for making sense of that experience learned a lot through exposure to the ideas that are circulated in tenant organizations. Before too long, people with otherwise little exposure to politics (formal or informal) were calling each other comrades, talking about the failures of capitalism, and power mapping their local political structures. On the other hand, self-avowed socialists—many of whom were White and/or had elite educational backgrounds—came to tenant organizations in search of political outlets more satisfying than elections but found much more than that. They found an opportunity to engage directly and robustly with people from RCS communities and to learn concretely about the forms of predation and abuse that marginalized people faced.

The structure of tenant organizations We asserted earlier that tenant organizations do not neatly fit into existing categories of non-governmental organizations (e.g., non-profit, advocacy group, social movement, etc.). We also suggested that this lack of fit underscores what we might learn from the approaches of tenant organizations to engaging local politics. To build on and contextualize these points, we next describe the structure of the organizations in this study. Two aspects of organizational structure are especially crucial: (1) funding models and (2) decision-making processes. Funding models concern the resource flows of tenant organizations. Decision-making processes have to do with who can influence organizations’ ideas, activities, and direction. Ultimately, these structural features reveal the independent and egalitarian nature of many tenant organizations, highlighting their insistence on being beholden only to tenants, their strategies for remaining “unbought and unbossed,”9 and their institutional commitment to “horizontal” decision-making processes powered by the voices of as many tenant members as possible. Funding mechanisms and organizational autonomy Most of the tenant organizations that were part of the study (26 of 38) were “autonomous” regarding their funding. “Autonomous” is the language that tenant organizations use to refer to the status of having no paid staff and being completely financially independent of any actors besides tenants themselves, especially foundations and government agencies. Many tenant organizations stressed the importance of 9

  This characterization is inspired by Shirley Chisolm, the first Black women elected to Congress and the first Black major party candidate to run for President. Chisolm famously said: “I am the only unbought and unbossed politician, and I mean that literally.”.

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the distance that being “autonomous” gave them from non-profit “advocacy” and “service provision” models. Tenant organizations went to great care to protect their autonomy, prioritizing it even over resources that might afford them greater capacity. They relied on membership dues and public donations for a small resource base. Accordingly, they organized activities that were local (because trips to the capital or other parts of the state/country are expensive) and not financially burdensome. The costs that members of tenant groups paid were primarily in the currency of time, energy, and even bodies on the line, but most groups were not financially complex. The intentional eschewing of a staffed “non-profit” structure often underscored tensions between tenant organizations and what some interviewees called “the nonprofit industrial complex.” For example, Tatum, a white woman from a newly started tenant organization in a midsize midwestern city talked about how non-profits can hinder efforts at achieving more transformational policy gains: [We have] a lot of nonprofits [and] that really affects the landscape...[it’s] good work, obviously, but maybe it would otherwise be more radical...there were some of these nonprofits...pushing for a rental registration ordinance that ended up just getting completely watered down...It didn’t look anything like we wanted it to...But we just couldn’t really reach an agreement, so the coalition kind of broke and they ended up getting a rental registration ordinance that requires random inspections of apartment buildings every 10 years and they only hired like one new inspector to do it. So completely pointless...anytime we’re in a policy kind of struggle it can very easily get derailed into compromise because there’s just not as much [non-profit] people who want to stick to their guns on it. Many members of tenant organizations took a critical stance towards non-profits, social service organizations, and advocacy organizations. They took pains to distinguish themselves from such groups, pointing out how their emphases on volunteering their time to build power in communities differed from the service provision emphasis of the “professional class.” Tenant organizers sometimes characterized the non-profit orientation as a “charity model” that was about distributing resources and juxtaposed that with a “mutual aid” approach, which was about building power through collectively helping one another. For example, at one tenant union meeting, the conversation centered on the “distinction between a focus on tenants and a focus on housing.” At the crux of this delineation was the tenant organizations’ belief that “housing type non-profits…are more band-aid[s] and not so much about building tenant power.” When this same group later deliberated over their “points of unity”— the core principles they all agreed held them together as a group—one member suggested the following point of unity: “We organize for tenant power, not for housing.” Another member offered this: “We are not service organizations; we are movement organizations. As such we practice and build solidarity—not charity—across buildings, neighborhoods, borders, and language barriers.” Much of this echoed a point of unity from an umbrella organization that coordinates a network for tenant unions, the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN). One of ATUN’s key points of unity is that: Reprinted from the journal

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We fight for tenants, not for housing. We recognize that this is a crisis of tenancy, a crisis of our place in the overall system of social reproduction. Calling this a housing crisis benefits those who design, build, and profit from housing, not the people who live in it. Tenants are full political subjects who will not be liberated by secure housing alone. In this way, the lines that tenant organizations drew between their work and the work of non-profit/advocacy/service organizations were not about semantic particularities. Instead, members of tenant organizations mapped these organizational categories onto fundamental political alignments. Many tenant organizations operated on the conviction that to build “liberatory” formations that could push back against the power of economic elites, they had to conceive of and talk about their work in ways that reflected their assessment of a grossly unequal capitalist economy. “Autonomy” was an important part of this liberatory lexicon. Notwithstanding the frequent and important distinctions made between “autonomous” and “staffed” organizations, autonomy was nonetheless important to staffed and funded membership-based, tenant led organizations. Tanvee, the lead organizer at a large and prominent tenant group, was a paid staff member. But she was clear on her organizations’ strategies to maintain their autonomy: We have a couple grants...they’re all from foundations. And then, in the last year we’ve also built a really amazing grassroots individual donor network. We raised like $75,000 from individuals last year... and I think there’s good arguments to do it like that, it’s a way that people feel ownership in a thing, even if it’s like a $1 or $5...I get the fear about an outside person or entity or donors coming in and limiting what organizations are able to do, I think there are ways to design around that so it doesn’t happen...like my [tenant led] board, the people who are in charge of hiring me firing me...they’re going to hold me accountable to doing the work that I do for them right, so that’s a structural way that we reset against some of those kinds of risks...with our fundraising I don’t like taking foundation money because it’s just rich people money that’s redirected...I think as we grow as an organization, we will want to build more and more of this kind of individual donor model of sustaining our work so that we’re not actually at risk of being hemmed in or tied to any foundation kind of structure, but I will say, none of the money that we’ve raised to date has limited the radicalism in our base at all. Like none of it. We chained our fucking bodies to the doors of the courts pissing everyone in town off. There’s no one in this town that we haven’t pissed off in some way in the past year... we’ve gotten our people arrested...we’ve taken people on rent strike, we’ve come up against corporations...and you know I haven’t had a donor call me and be like ‘you can’t do that shit there are some people who might not renew their sustaining donation’ or something like that, it hasn’t really limited our ability to do what we need to do. Riley, a paid organizer on staff at a tenant group in Massachusetts, shared a similar perspective on structuring funding to allow the organization to remain independent. She noted that her group had been, “very intentional not to take any government funding, not even city funding, so that no one can dictate what we can and cannot do 45

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in order to protect our communities.” To enable them to follow through on this commitment, Riley’s organization coordinated grassroots fundraising campaigns, which became especially crucial when they realized that foundations were less and less interested in supporting housing organizations: We noticed in 2016/2017 that housing wasn’t a hot topic. When 45 got elected it really moved to immigrants and the grants just weren’t there. So, we were like well, we don’t really have time to write 25 grants for $3,000 a piece. So, we actually developed a really robust grassroots fundraising thing and we do it on our own, it’s led by the members...we have this one campaign...we ask 100 people to make the commitment to ask 10 of their friends to donate $10 between October 1 and October 10. So, we raised the $10,000 and usually we have matching donations to make it 20,000. And we don’t have a dues structure, what we ask people to do is either A: volunteer your time or B: if you can’t volunteer then we ask that you become a sustaining donor at $5 a month, you know, whatever is affordable for you. Riley, Tanvee, and most of the other people we spoke to from staffed organizations were well versed in concerns about autonomy10 and readily offered sophisticated strategies about how to forefend against being influenced by donors. So, while the “autonomous” versus “staffed” dichotomy was an important way that tenant organizations distinguished themselves from mainstream non-profits and advocacy groups, there were certainly staffed tenant organizations that received outside funding, but nonetheless considered themselves reasonably autonomous as a result of intentional decisions to: (1) tightly control channels of influence that tracked back to economic elites and (2) deeply root themselves in decision-making processes that incorporated tenants.11 Decision making processes Most of the organizations in this study (~ 31) were “horizontal” with respect to their decision-making processes. Indeed, the descriptor “horizontal” is one that we picked up from observing tenant organization meetings. In many of these meetings, speakers would emphasize that though they were facilitating, they were not leading. Moreover, most meetings involved shared facilitation duties, a practice that underscored horizontal involvement. For example, at a tenant union meeting for a group in Michigan, the person speaking first stated this general approach with clarity: “there is no hierarchy of the roles, they are all necessary, they are all equally important.”

10

  Scholars have demonstrated the numerous ways that funders—especially foundations—can reshape the priorities of grantee organizations toward more politically moderate goals (e.g., Francis 2019) and away from explicit efforts at organizing and mobilization (e.g., Shanks and SoRelle 2021). 11   It’s also worth noting that all of the staffed tenant organizations in our study had a very small staff (between 1 and 6 people). Tenant organizations with large numbers of paid staff members were not common, by design. The commitment to being “tenant led” was at the core of these organizations’ identities, and with tenants at the helm, there was less need for lots of staff.

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This point was made again and again, and it seemed especially salient in meetings where groups were making decisions. Several of the tenant meetings we sat in were gatherings explicitly adjudicating decision-making models. For example, we watched as a (different) tenant union in Michigan spent over 4 hours debating their decision-making processes. Stressing that “we don’t have leaders here,” they struggled over how to maximize the participation of all tenant members. Some members wanted to do this through a “consensus based” voting model that required no decision be made unless everyone in attendance at a given meeting agreed on it. One woman explained the logic of this approach saying that, “rather than a top-down decision model where people vote and then the majority rule…the consensus model says that if someone disagrees you take a moment and discuss.” A dissenting group member contended that “consensus doesn’t work if people don’t feel comfortable showing up and disagreeing.” Yet another proposed that consensus was “appropriate for committee and other meetings, but when larger discussions about the union are involved, voting is efficient and can loop in feedback from people who don’t attend meetings [through virtual voting].” Ultimately, the group decided on a 2/3 agreement threshold for moving forward with group decisions. Even after this decision, one person offered a final word of caution saying that, “consensus institutionalizes good conversational norms, so if we are going to have a voting system then fine, we just need to make sure we have good conversational norms and make sure people don’t feel like they are getting steam rolled over.” The most common answer that members of tenant organizations used when asked to describe how they were structured was “horizontal.” But this did not mean that they were unorganized or that it was a chaotic free-for-all. Instead, it meant that there was no single person at the “top” and that every member of the organization was ultimately accountable to other members. We can turn again to Tanvee for an example of what these kinds of arrangements looked like in practice: So, we have a [tenants] base, this is the core organizing unit...we have weekly base meetings and most of our decisions are made by the full base so mostly we do consensus style decision making in those meetings...Within the base, we have a strategy team and our board of directors. The strategy team is just comprised of leaders from the base, it’s not like a separate entity, and the strategy team is empowered by the base to make decisions... the strategy team is like 25 [community] leaders who make decisions on behalf of the base... the Board is also mostly leaders from the base so we don’t look like a lot of traditional nonprofits in that our board is all people who are directly impacted...And it’s a pretty small board at it’s all people from our base and the board actually doesn’t make any strategic decisions or programmatic decisions...it’s kind of like the operation side.” Riley described a slightly different structural process for decision-making, with resonances of similarity and a particular emphasis on racial equity and centering those who are “affected” by processes like displacement or foreclosure: 47

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We’re fully member led...we spent two years being very intentional about what it looks like to be fully member led because... our original organizers were not affected by displacement or foreclosure. So, we wanted to be fully member led at every single aspect our staff, our entire board. And so, we developed, you know, like our board has to be majority women, majority Black and Brown, being very intentional so that white men cannot come in and take over the organization. Altogether, most tenant organizations in this study prioritized horizontal decision-making processes marked by maximal and robust tenant involvement and voice. In this way, the structure of tenant organizations mirrored their goals. To build power in communities, they ensured that power was disbursed as equitably as possible within their own groups. This orientation towards horizontality ensured that people affected by the predation and precarity that tenant groups were fighting against, were not just being passively “advocated” for in a general sense but were being actively positioned to influence the processes that shape their material conditions (Michener 2018; Strolovitch 2008).

How tenant organizations engage local politics Tenant organizations engage in ways that can have profound repercussions for local politics. They pursue a wide variety of strategies for taking action to affect local communities. The nature and extent of those strategies depend upon organizations’ beliefs about the best ways to reach their goals. Many tenant organizations operate from a place of deep distrust in formal political systems, elections, and political officials. This baseline skepticism leads to at least three different organizational approaches: (1) Withdrawal, (2) Integration, and (3) Oppositional Engagement. These sometimes overlap  as organizations sometimes blend approaches. However, most organizations have a primary tack that informs their participatory strategies. Below, we describe the resulting manifestations of political action. Withdrawal: stepping into people power Distrust of political and economic systems can motivate withdrawal from engagement with the formal political system. While this was not the path that most tenant organizations in the study took, there were a few (~ 3) that expressed no desire whatsoever to participate in formal politics. Instead, these organizations aimed to articulate and enact an alternative vision of politics that eschewed existing political institutions and built new ones. One large (e.g., hundreds of members) tenant organization in this study strikingly exemplified the withdrawal approach. At one of the tenant meetings we observed, Joe, a tenant member, explained the group’s history with electoral politics. He talked about a politician who once tried to get the group to endorse her campaign. Group members were enthusiastic about the candidate because she opposed displacement and sweeps of encampments for the unhoused. While the tenant organization decided not to formally support the Reprinted from the journal

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candidate (because the group had a rule against doing so), many members worked for this candidate’s campaign. Election time arrived and she won. Then, one of her first votes was “against” people who are unhoused and living on the street. The official also took money from developers, and often voted in the interest of landlords. Eventually, the candidate came to the tenant group asking for forgiveness and admitting to voting the wrong way. The group was ultimately relieved that they had not formally endorsed her. One member explained: The reason why we don’t support politicians is because we don’t have a system of having them be responsible to us. We give them support and they don’t fulfill their side...the power of the people is not going to be won in the hands of the politicians, it is going to be won in our own hands...Seeing her candidacy, I thought there was hope but no, they go into a system and they are eaten up by it, they turn them into the system of power stepping on us tenants...the campaign was so attractive, she said all the right things... and the first months in 3 or 4 votes she’s already failing us. Continuing the conversation, another group member agreed: I do see more and more that [our organizations’] power is outreach, educating, creating a movement...tenants in crisis that start organizing say that before they found [the organization] they were hopeless but once they found [us] they were able to find courage...that’s why I joined [the group] and that’s why I’m still a member four years later. Echoing these sentiments, a third member offered the following: When we talk about politics we are talking about power, so a conversation that only focuses on councilmembers or the government ignores the fact that there are millions of tenants...when we talk about the ability to have influence in the city it’s not about who we are going to elect or what the mayor is going to do, it is about what the [tenants union] is going to do to grow its power...as a union if we are going to talk about politics we have to talk about our power...how do we construct power in our own locals, and our own neighborhoods. There were 37 people in the zoom breakout room we were in that day, and everyone who spoke (i.e., most people) agreed that engaging formal political officials was not desirable. They talked about “moments of people stepping into their power” in terms of rent strikes, direct action, mutual aid and more. But not in terms of electoral systems or traditional political institutions. One notable element of such withdrawal was that a significant number of members were immigrants excluded from formal political channels because of their documentation status. Merida, a Latina woman, shared this perspective: I am a resident with a green card but that status doesn’t give me the opportunity to vote or to participate in the legal way that all of you can because I can’t vote so for me it’s almost automatic that I’m not participating in the political system... there are so many families that don’t have documents... 49

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it’s important that we can function outside of that system because people are scared and they don’t have access...the question of illegality and that our movement be outside of the system...being in the movement permits me to be active and participate in another way, a more autonomous way, a way that is much more radical. Throughout the meeting, there was almost complete consensus around the conviction that “developing processes and structures that serve us is so important” because “[formal power] structures clearly aren’t there to serve our interests.” Integration: taking over the rent board On the other end of the strategic spectrum, some tenant unions make a concerted effort to become integrated into formal political institutions. They view the people leading those institutions as flawed, but not the institutions themselves. They reason that if they can simply replace the people there now with people from their organization, circumstances for tenants would improve. Not many organizations fell into this category, but some did (~ 5). For example, one group placed several members of their tenant union on the local rent board. Rent board representatives are elected officials who make critical decisions about rent prices and who play a role in adjudicating conflicts between landlords and tenants. When we sat in tenant meetings in cities with rent boards, members were encouraged to attend rent board meetings, run for rent board positions, and more generally to “take over” the entire institution to make it work for the benefit of tenants. Phoebe, a Black woman mentioned earlier, started a tenant association at her apartment complex in Northern New Jersey. Eventually, she decided to run for a position as a member of the local housing council. Phoebe noted that, “being vocal about [the tenant association] afforded me the opportunity to now be [on the council] for the city…which is another level of addressing housing and seeing housing deficiencies outside of just calling [my landlord], I’m able to see it from a city-wide perspective now.” These examples of tenant organizers integrating into formal political institutions were not common, but the people who shared them were less strident in their perspectives towards government and more mainstream in the kinds of change they called for: focusing on rent control more than rent strikes, affordable housing more than decommodification, and “representing tenant interests” more than building power among tenants.

Oppositional engagement: shutting down court Most of the tenant organizations in this study pursued a strategy of intentional opposition and disruption to the formal political system. While this opposition brought them into contact with formal political institutions, that contact was focused on Reprinted from the journal

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fundamental transformation or disruption, often both. For these groups, integrating into the political system was not an option, but neither was fully withdrawing from it. An oppositional engagement strategy allowed tenant organizations to maintain their cynicism towards government and politics, while also taking action to force the hands of government officials they perceived as recalcitrant and hostile. Tanvee’s group was a clear example of oppositional engagement. So, it’s kind of part of our DNA to be engaged in that kind of political conversation we have also started seeing those kind of public dialogues as like free spaces, where we get to do political education. We just engaged in this budget process and ...won a million dollars for [tenant advocacy]...within this most recent budget season we’ve had a basically six week long campaign to get them to commit to that level of funding and, frankly, we didn’t think we would win...we were basically doing it to build muscle around the budget process but in the meantime, the positive externalities, we won a million dollars... the budget hearings themselves were like some of the most amazing political theater and political education...we would have like 50 people at a public hearing downtown...the entire place is filled with [our color] shirts. And it’s people, one after another, after another, with little two minute testimonies speaking truth to power, and in that telling a story about the perils of racial capitalism and how it shows up in people’s lives in [our] city. And not one of those 50 people is saying the words “racial capitalism” because they don’t need to, but they’re telling their story in a way that makes it so evident that these...monopolies and vulture capitalists that are extracting from our neighborhoods are a force of harm, that the police are a force of harm, that these local agencies are a force of harm...I think we’ve seen [that] in a city like this, if we are serious about this shit, we can win pretty easily...all it [takes is] us just having the audacity to be like, politics don’t have to look like this. Politics could work for us, but we have to step up and make that happen. Similarly, Phil, a Black organizer in the South, talked about how his tenant group temporarily shut down eviction court and the entire city government: Some of our more militant members were like “we just got [to]  shut it down...what other strategy do we have, the federal government’s not coming to help us”...that was also when the $600 a week unemployment bonus was going to end so we chose late July in part because we were responding to eviction court reopening and seeing nearly 100 people being evicted every day for the first week...there were two components [to our action] one street theater piece to demonstrate what was going on, we wanted the media seeing us ripping the assholes of our city and state officials and actually laying out why they are responsible for any deaths to come, for anything that comes from these evictions, because they have the power to stop things... so basically folks said let’s do a street theater piece...let’s just pretend like we’re doing some artsy fartsy street theater piece, and then we’ll immediately go and lock up. So after we did a street theater piece people immediately went to all the entrances to chain themselves to the gates to prevent 51

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anyone from going in...we did that before eviction court opened...it was perfect timing and then basically people are chained...the mayor did not want something rowdy because everything that happened with George Floyd...so she was just like don’t mess with them, don’t mess with them, and so, we were able also shut down City Hall...people went and blocked the entrance to City Hall, so we shut down the entire city government that day. When we asked Phil whether he had discerned a change in local political dynamics after the shutdown, he noted several things: We definitely heard less things from tenants about landlords just being A-holes. I think a lot more landlords were willing to negotiate...it also had an impact we believe on illegal evictions...because [landlords] were like wait there’s this group of crazy people who are willing to do that and they got away with it. I think it had an impact on discourse about how people think about housing. Also, the judges became more open...there was an election for an eviction court seat...they were all pandering to us, they were pandering out of their asses...so that was an interesting power switch, where now we know the judges are actively aware of what we’re doing and what we’re putting out into the universe. Tanvee and Phil offer two examples of how tenant organizations shape the contours of local politics by engaging in oppositional political action. Many similar examples emerged in this study. This was the primary approach taken by tenant groups. Instructively, when we asked them whether they had seen any policy successes or discernable local change as a result, every group recounted specific repercussions stemming from their actions. People we interviewed often pointed us to specific resources, legislation, rules changes, and other outcomes—and many offered concrete evidence of their involvement in political processes as a catalyst to these changes. For example, group members would direct us to watch video of direct-action protests, city council meetings they had taken over, public confrontations with local officials, etc. They would point us to media coverage of these events. Then, they would indicate precisely which political officials responded publicly or privately and trace the path of resources or outcomes (fewer evictions) that flowed from the public pressure they put on those in power. Altogether, tenant organizations offered convincing (even if not dispositive) evidence of their impact in local politics.

Conclusion and future directions When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) enacted a nationwide moratorium on evictions as part of their response to the public health crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic, it sparked a flurry of legal challenges from landlords and associated power brokers in the housing market. Estimates suggest that corporate landlords filed more than 56,000 eviction notices after the order went into effect in September 2020, and tens of thousands of families were evicted as landlords ignored the ban or states failed to enforce it consistently. These conditions, when combined Reprinted from the journal

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with the untold number of renters who endure predatory behavior by landlords and financiers, bring into sharp relief the consequences for race-class subjugated (RCS) communities of a tremendously unequal political economy. But they also demonstrate how local organizations can emerge to directly combat these inequalities, empowering people whose political efficacy and the myriad forms it takes are often too overlooked by political scientists. Tenant organizations are an exemplar of this phenomenon, and our study offers a necessary account of how they emerge, operate, and pursue political change. Through the careful identification of these organizations and the collection of rich qualitative data, we offer three critical takeaways about tenant organizations as centers of local political power for RCS communities. First, tenant organizations cultivate distinctive perspectives on local political economy, developing unique ideational spaces in local politics. Second, they center the concerns and priorities of economically and racially marginalized communities, both in their organizational practices and in their political action. And third, tenant organizations raise new possibilities for the role of organizations in local politics, especially politics at the margins. For these reasons, tenant groups warrant deeper attention from social scientists. Our first point, that tenant organizations cultivate distinctive perspectives on local political economy, is especially relevant to building knowledge about the politics of ideas and attitudes. Political attitudes “guide human behavior across domains” in ways that make them potentially powerful determinants of political action and policy outcomes (Hatemi and McDermott 2016). A robust multidisciplinary literature specifically attends to the contours and consequences of political attitudes about the economy and inequality (Blekesaune and Quadagno 2003; Corneo and Grüner 2002; Dawtry et al. 2015; Doherty et al. 2006; Kelly and Enns 2010; Piston 2018; Thal 2017). While important and illuminating, this corpus is dominated by quantitative survey-based approaches focused on individual attitudes (particularly those of middle class or affluent people) measured as separate and disconnected from organizational or community contexts. We offer a very different vantage point on political attitudes by qualitatively examining the ideas about economic and political systems that emerge in local contexts as nurtured by organizational actors.12 In doing so, we underscore vital relationships between political ideas, political organizing, and local political economy. The second takeaway, that tenant organizations center economically and racially marginalized communities in their organizational and political practices, has several implications for how we understand the political power of marginalized people. Notably, these tenant groups are in communities aptly  described as “structurally vulnerable” (Michener 2017a, b). That is to say, they emerge in geographically bounded areas that are burdened by concentrated poverty, and in many cases, they are also RCS communities that suffer from punitive expressions of state power. Numerous studies have demonstrated how the consequences of disadvantage multiply for those who live in structurally vulnerable communities (e.g., Chetty et  al. 2016; Massey and Denton 1993). But our study suggests the possibility for positive 12

  For a similarly distinctive take on political attitudes see: Weaver et al. (2019).

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political engagement to emerge from such communities. And unlike traditional public interest group activity that frequently fails to represent the most marginalized members of groups (Strolovitch 2008), these organizations explicitly center the needs and perspectives of vulnerable members. As such, tenant organizations provide a model for positive political power building for otherwise marginalized constituents. Finally,  our study provides a foundation for future research to address crucial questions about how local organizations emerge and operate to support RCS communities across the United States. One key set of questions concerns the conditions under which tenant (or other similar) organizations are likely to emerge and succeed in achieving their goals. While we have argued that tenant organizations do not conform neatly to a specific organizational type, accounts of their formation, organization, and political activities map onto (and challenge) scholarly expectations about the origins of successful collective action. Interview participants highlight the importance of collective grievance and shared framing for their decisions to form or to join tenant groups, both of which have been demonstrated to boost collective action (Gamson 1992; Klandermans 1997). They also identify how a specific approach to organizational structure and decision making is central to groups’ mission and success. The reliance on autonomous funding and horizontal power structures both illuminate the importance of the “mobilizing structure” for successful collective action (McCarthy and Zald 1973; McAdam 1982), while potentially challenging assumptions about what types of structures are sufficient. Finally, they offer unique assessments of local political opportunity structures (McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1998; Tilly 2004) and how those conditions shape their strategies and success. Another critical question that emerges from our study is how and to what extent the person- rather than issue-centered orientation of these groups shapes the prospects for political spillover effects into other arenas of engagement. While our analysis focuses on tenant organizing, the implications of our findings may travel to other issues of political economy where power and precarity are concentrated at the local level. For example, mobilization to address issues like fringe banking, which most frequently affect structurally vulnerable RCS communities that are geographically bounded, could adopt the logic of tenant organizations to better pursue policy change that benefits and centers those affected by these predatory financial institutions. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that when scholars fail to consider organizing that takes a form distinct from traditional interest group or movement organizations, we fail to identify crucial sources of political power for the most precarious communities. Addressing these and a host of related questions is necessary to more fully understand the contours of local political economy and the possibilities for marginalized actors to successfully exercise political power within profoundly unequal capitalist systems. Conflict of interest  On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

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Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Pres. Schlozman, Kay Lehman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady. 2012. The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shanks, Delphia and Mallory E. SoRelle. 2021. The Paradox of Policy Advocacy: Philanthropic Foundations, Public Interest Groups, and Second-Order Policy Feedback Effects. Interest Groups & Advocacy. Shlay, Anne B., and Robert R. Faulkner. 1984. The Building of a Tenants Protest Organization: An Ethnography of a Tenants Union. Urban Life 12 (4): 445–465. Skocpol, Theda. 2003. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Skocpol, Theda, Marshall Ganz, and Ziad Munson. 2000. A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in the United States. American Political Science Review: 527–546. Small, Mario Luis. 2009. How Many Cases Do I Need?’ On Science and the Logic of Case Selection in Field-based Research. Ethnography 10 (1): 5-38. SoRelle, Mallory. 2020. Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Soss, Joe, and Vesla Weaver. 2017. Police Are Our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race-Class Subjugated Communities. Annual Review of Political Science 20: 565–591. Strolovitch, Dara. 2008. Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tarrow, Sidney G. 1998. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press. Thal, Adam. 2017. Class Isolation and Affluent Americans’ Perception of Social Conditions. Political Behavior 39 (2): 401–424. Thurston, Chloe N. 2018. At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tiebout, Charles M. 1956. A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures. The Journal of Political Economy 64 (5): 416–424. Tilly, Charles. 2004. Social Movements, 1768–2004. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Tobias, Jimmy. 2019. In the Heart of Real-Estate Power, a Housing Movement Nears Victory. The Nation (May 30). https://​www.​thena​tion.​com/​artic​le/​archi​ve/​unive​rsal-​rent-​regul​ation-​new-​york/. Trounstine, Jessica. 2018. Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities. New York: Cambridge University Press. Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weaver, Vesla M., and Amy E. Lerman. 2010. Political Consequences of the Carceral State. American Political Science Review. 104 (4): 817–833. Weaver, Vesla, Gwen Prowse, and Spencer Piston. 2019. Too Much Knowledge, Too Little Power: An Assessment of Political Knowledge in Highly Policed Communities. The Journal of Politics 81 (3): 1153–1166. Williams, Rhonda Y. 2004. The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Michael, and Tami Moser. 2019. The Art of Coding and Thematic Exploration in Qualitative Research. International Management Review 15 (1): 45–55. Yerena, Anaid. 2015. The Impact of Advocacy Organizations on Low-Income Housing Policy in US Cities. Urban Affairs Review 51 (6): 843–870. Yerena, Anaid. 2019. Strategic Action for Affordable Housing: How Advocacy Organizations Accomplish Policy Change. Journal of Planning Education and Research: 0739456X19888000. Yin, Robert K. 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications. Strolovitch, Dara Z. 2013. Of Mancessions and Hecoveries: Race, Gender, and the Political Construction of Economic Crises and Recoveries. Perspectives on Politics 11 (1): 167–176.

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Interest Groups & Advocacy (2022) 11:237–262 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-022-00152-5 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Teachers’ unions and school board elections: a reassessment Michael T. Hartney1  Accepted: 6 January 2022 / Published online: 21 January 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022

Abstract Drawing on an original data set of over 4000 teacher-union endorsements in local school board elections, I make three contributions to the literature on union power in education politics. First, despite some recent evidence that union strength has narrowed at the federal and state levels, I show that teachers’ unions remain an influential player in local school politics today. Second, I provide evidence that teachers’ unions are active and influential in elections that occur outside of traditionally strong union states and prolabor school districts. Finally, I show that union-endorsed candidates do not win simply because they are stronger candidates ex ante, but in part, because union support makes them more formidable candidates on Election Day. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings and suggest some avenues for future research on interest groups in local school politics. Keywords  Teachers unions · School boards · Education policy · Interest groups · Local politics An emerging narrative in American education suggests that teachers’ unions have lost significant political clout in recent years (Brill 2010; Ferman and Palazzolo 2017; Viadero 2009). On the surface, this thesis seems reasonable. The Great Recession put public sector unions squarely on the defensive (DiSalvo 2015). Teachers’ unions, in particular, have faced a variety of new political obstacles. Wealthy education reform advocacy groups emerged to challenge their dominance (Henig et al. 2019; McGuinn 2012; Sawchuk 2012). For a short time, the unions even faced pushback from their traditional allies: In the early aughts, many Democrats joined with Republicans to support union-opposed school reforms (Hartney and Wolbrecht 2014). Then, at the end of the decade, the US Supreme Court announced that public

* Michael T. Hartney [email protected] 1



Department of Political Science, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA

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sector unions could no longer collect fees from dissenting nonmembers, reducing the revenue that unions have to engage in advocacy (DiSalvo and Hartney 2020). Despite these recent setbacks at the state and federal levels, we know much less about how these new dynamics have affected teacher-union influence in local school politics. Although several scholars have examined union power in collective bargaining (see, e.g., Anzia and Moe 2014; Marianno and Strunk 2018; Strunk et  al. 2018; 2021; Hemphill and Marianno 2021), few studies have assessed teacher-union electioneering in contemporary school board elections.1 In fact, since Terry Moe first showed—nearly 20  years ago—that California’s teachers’ unions were active and influential in board elections there, no subsequent large-N analysis has been carried out to evaluate the size and scope of union power in school board elections. Attending to this omission is important because research shows that interest group electioneering is an important and consequential political tool, especially for public sector unions in local politics (Moe 2005; Sieg and Wang 2013; Anzia 2022). My aim in this study is important but circumscribed: to carefully assess the state of teacher-union influence in local school board elections, paying special attention to the trajectory of that influence over time. Drawing on an original data set of over 4,000 union endorsements in two states, I make three new contributions to the literature on local school politics. First, despite some recent evidence that labor retrenchment has narrowed union power at the federal and state levels (Hertel-Fernandez 2018; Feigenbaum, HertelFernandez, and Williamson 2019), I show that teachers’ unions remain quite influential in local school board elections. Specifically, I find that union-endorsed candidates win roughly 70 percent of all competitive school board elections—a rate that matches their previous level of electioneering success prior to the Great Recession. Second, I provide evidence that teachers’ unions are active and influential in board elections that take place in both strong (California) and relatively weaker union states (Florida), and that union-favored candidates do well in districts with pro- and anti-union electorates. Third and finally, I improve on a key limitation in prior studies of union electioneering. Specifically, I address the thorny issue of selection bias—that union-backed candidates are more successful only because unions strategically endorse the strongest candidates: those who would win irrespective of having gained union support. By evaluating the performance of the very same candidates over time—both when they run with and without union support—I find that both incumbents and challengers benefit electorally when they run with union support. This finding suggests that union-endorsed candidates do not simply do better because they are stronger candidates ex ante, but rather, because union endorsements confer advantages that make endorsed candidates more successful on Election Day. Below, I begin by explaining why it is important for scholars to invest more time and effort into studying the backwaters of local school politics, especially if they seek to make progress in understanding the full scope of how organized interests

1

  One exception are a series of recent case studies on school board elections conducted by Henig, Jacobsen, and Reckhow (2019).

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influence US education policy. I then review some relevant prior research on the role of unions in school board elections, before turning to present the results of my own analysis. After presenting several different sets of findings, I conclude by discussing their implications and providing some suggestions for future avenues of research on interest group activity in local school politics.

Why local education politics still matter The shortage of large-N analyses on interest group electioneering in local school board elections is not altogether surprising. It is exceedingly difficult to get data on local election outcomes and candidates’ characteristics—to say nothing of endorsements—over time within even a single state. As Anzia (2022, 3) observes, “research on local politics in the United States tends to ignore interest groups, and research on interest groups tends to ignore local government.” But the absence of good data is, I suspect, just one factor at play. The growing centralization of American education since A Nation at Risk, combined with the “reabsorption” of education politics into general purpose politics (Henig 2013), has led scholars to put tremendous energy into understanding the activity of education interests at the state and federal levels (Finger 2018; Finger and Reckhow 2021; Hartney and Flavin 2011; Howell and Magazinnik 2017; Rhodes 2012; Manna 2006; McGuinn 2016). These are valuable contributions. And they are surely necessary. The focus on states, in particular, makes good theoretical sense. Under the US constitution, state officials are the actors who are legally empowered to make most key education decisions. But there are also good reasons—I will briefly discuss two—for putting greater effort into understanding how education interests wield political power and influence in local school districts. For one thing, the demise of local control in American education is surely exaggerated. One need to look no further than the COVID-19 pandemic to see that localism remains a powerful and enduring force in American education. The role of teacher-union interest groups in policy debates over school reopenings, for example, was waged most consequentially at the local level. Even after many public health experts began to conclude that schools could reopen safely (Bailey 2021; Zimmerman et al. 2021), two American presidents and countless governors found that they had little practical power to compel districts to reopen. Moreover, the inability of many districts to negotiate reopening agreements with their local teachers’ union helped contribute to a year of entirely remote learning for a significant number of students. Unsurprisingly, several studies found that districts’ decisions about when and how much to reopen schools were influenced by local teacher-union strength (Antonucci 2021; DeAngelis and Makridis 2021; Flanders 2020; Grossmann et al. 2021; Harris, Ziedan, and Hassig 2021; Hartney and Finger 2020; Marianno et al. 2021). In one of these studies (Hartney and Finger 2020), the authors found a direct relationship between districts’ use of remote-only instruction and the rate of political activity (PAC donations) mobilized by the local teachers’ union. Marianno (2021) explains why education scholars are likely to underestimate teacher-union influence when they focus narrowly on union power in federal and state politics: 61

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There are far more education interest groups and competing education policy ideas at the state level, making it much more difficult for a single organization to garner a dominant voice among policymakers. When these [school reopening] decisions are brought down into local school board meetings, there remain only a few organizations that are organized enough to exert influence. The teachers’ unions are the largest elephant in the room… Second, even when higher-level political authorities do assert themselves, local education officials are the ones who ultimately implement education policies on the ground. This matters for two reasons. First, since implementation is itself a political process rife with contestation (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984), local governments will tend to resist top-down federal and state reforms that undermine their own authority. We saw this, for example, when local school districts were asked to implement the choice and accountability provisions in the federal No Child Left Behind law—provision that ran counter to their own vested interests (Manna 2011). Second, and most relevant to the present study, local school officials can and often do face immense political pressure—including electoral pressure—to satisfy the preferences of those education interest groups—like teachers’ unions—that remain among the most organized and active groups in local school politics (Hess and Leal 2005; Moe 2005; Hartney 2022). Narrowly focusing on the behavior of education interests in federal-state politics will often cause us to overlook all of this important politicking that goes on in local school districts. In sum, the highly localized and heavily fragmented nature of American education provides myriad opportunities for teachers’ unions to shape education policy from the ground up (Moe 2011; Hartney 2022). Consequently, the degree of influence that teachers’ unions can bring to bear on education policy will often turn on the type of influence that they can exert as an interest group in local school board elections. After all, it is these electoral contests that determine, at least in part, who holds formal policymaking authority in local school districts.

Relevant literature To date, the most influential set of studies on union activity in school board elections were carried out by Terry Moe in the early 2000s (2005, 2006). Drawing on a survey of over 500 candidates in over 250 districts between 1998 and 2002, Moe found that unions were highly successful in getting their favored candidates elected. Among his key findings, union support was as powerful as incumbency in predicting a candidate’s likelihood of victory. Even after controlling for competitiveness, incumbency, and other measures of candidate quality, Moe found a strong relationship between union support and candidate electoral success. Overall, 76 percent of union-endorsed candidates in California won their elections––with 62 percent of challengers and 92 percent of incumbents emerging as winners. Moe’s studies offered two other important insights. First, he showed that occupational self-interest is at the heart of the unions’ successful mobilization efforts. Teachers who lived outside of the district where they taught were not especially Reprinted from the journal

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likely to vote in school board elections. But teachers who lived in the district where they worked turned out anywhere from two to seven times more than of other citizens. In other words, the ability of unions to mobilize their members to elect sympathetic candidates is driven by the rational self-interest of school employees—the chance for them to help elect their employers. Importantly, Moe then showed that union electioneering results in more union-friendly boards. Winning candidates who were endorsed by the union became board members who were far more likely to hold pro-union attitudes on policy issues compared to the unendorsed candidates they defeated. More recently, two other studies—also from California—have each linked union electioneering success to more union-friendly school board policymaking. An analysis by Strunk and Grissom (2010) found that boards that were comprised of more (1) educators and (2) union-endorsed members were more likely to adopt union-friendly contracts. In a similar vein, Shi and Singleton (forthcoming) found that districts that elected more educators to their school board increased teacher salaries and approved fewer charter schools. While more work is needed to fill in the bigger picture, it is clear that, to the extent that unions are able to shape the composition of boards in their favor, they can and do influence the tone and direction of local school policy. However, there are two reasons—one related to space and the other to time—to think that the extant literature may cause us to overestimate the current level of union influence in school board elections today. First, prior research has focused heavily on California––a state where unions are especially strong. Moreover, until recently, many California school board elections were held “off-cycle,” when research shows that teachers’ unions benefit from lower turnout (Anzia 2011, 2013). Second, as discussed in the introduction, since Moe first carried out his studies, teachers’ unions have lost some important political battles. The environment facing unions in the wake of the Great Recession has been characterized by greater austerity, labor retrenchment, and political polarization. After winning governing trifectas in the 2010 midterms, for example, Republican lawmakers in several US states immediately curtailed teacher bargaining rights. These retrenchment efforts sometimes restricted teachers’ unions’ access to payroll deduction, making it more difficult for them to collect dues and PAC contributions from members––which reduces unions’ revenue for electioneering (Finger and Hartney 2021). More recently, in 2018, the US Supreme Court eliminated a benefit that teachers’ unions had long enjoyed under American labor law: the ability to charge fees to nonmember teachers in states without right-to-work laws. By adopting these changes, the court imposed a new cost on unions, leaving them with less revenue for other organizational needs, including political advocacy and mobilization campaigns (Finger and Hartney 2021). How have these changes affected the political power and influence of teachers’ unions in local school board elections? One possibility is that teachers’ unions have lost some clout in federal and state education politics, but have nonetheless been able to maintain influence in local school board elections. On the other hand, recent evidence from a series of case studies argues that school reform groups have gained a greater foothold over unions and other establishment interests. Examining school board elections in five large districts, Jeffrey Henig and colleagues found that networks of wealthy donors often provided campaign contributions that enabled 63

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“reform candidates” to match or exceed the funds raised by unions-favored candidates. While these authors were careful to acknowledge that these trends are not necessarily representative of “the broad universe of districts with elected boards,” they nevertheless see more pluralist dynamics at work. “Teacher unions,” they explain, “have often been portrayed as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in local school politics—and our evidence already shows that this image is overblown—but the Janus decision throws up new barriers for unions’ political efforts” (Henig et  al. 2019, 186).

A new study Ultimately, measuring the level of teacher-union influence in school board elections is an empirical question. But until now, the absence of good data has made it a difficult one to answer. In what follows, I discuss the construction of a new data set tracking union endorsements in competitive school board elections across two states. These data allow me to tackle several important questions. First, I examine union electioneering across space—moving beyond a single state (Moe 2005) or a handful of districts (Henig et al. 2019). Second, I use these data to evaluate union electioneering success over time, both before and after the unions experienced setbacks like the Great Recession and Janus. Third, I consider whether union influence has narrowed geographically, confining itself to those districts where voters support unions and their policy agendas. Fourth and finally, I examine a panel of the same candidates seeking election/reelection in the same school districts over time to estimate the effect of receiving a union endorsement on the likelihood of candidate victory. Data and sample construction Quantifying the size and scope of teacher-union influence in school board elections presents a major empirical challenge. It is rare to have good data on local election results, let alone corresponding information on teacher-union endorsements.2 To overcome these limitations, I built my own original data set, tracking union endorsements in board elections across two states: California and Florida. The California data include endorsements in school board elections held annually between 1995 and 2020. In Florida, where board elections are held in even-numbered years, the panel runs biennially, from 2010 to 2020.3 These two states were chosen for strategic reasons, with each state offering specific analytic advantages and disadvantages. Since the primary aim of this study is to compare the state of union influence in school board electioneering today to that 2

  To my knowledge, Moe (2005) is the only scholar who has carried out a survey of candidates about union electioneering in a large sample of school districts. 3   In Florida, a statewide August primary election always precedes the November general election. If any board candidate earns more than 50 percent support, or if just two candidates are competing, the primary then becomes the de-facto general election contest.

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of the past, returning to California for comparison makes sense because, as previously noted, the majority of empirical research on school board elections comes from California. However, one concern with focusing solely on California is the fact that public sector unions are especially powerful there. The state’s labor laws and its broader political culture provide one of the most teacher-union friendly environments in the USA (Winkler, Scull, and Zeehandelaar 2012). Florida provides an attractive alternative. It too is a large and racially diverse state. But labor law in the Sunshine State has historically been less favorable to teachers’ unions. Although Florida teachers have enjoyed collective bargaining rights since the mid-1970s, the state’s longstanding right-to-work law has made it more challenging to organize teachers there. Finally, Florida school board elections are held “on-cycle,” when turnout is higher and research has shown that unions may be less dominant (Anzia 2011, 2013).4 The process of gathering information on union endorsements required triangulating from several different sources. In California, I began by consulting Board of Directors Reports from the state’s largest teachers union: the California Teachers Association (CTA). In election years, these reports provide the names of local candidates who received financial support from the union’s political action committee (PAC). I next consulted the California League of Women Voters’ “Smart Voter” database, a Web site where candidates self-report their endorsements. Third, I performed online searches of news stories about school board elections using several different databases (e.g., Newsbank, LexisNexis, Newspapers.com). Finally, I visited both the Web sites and social media pages (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) of local unions and board candidates. In California, this approach yielded 4075 separate endorsements conferred on 3336 unique individuals running in 2345 elections in 468 different school districts.5 It is notable that these 468 districts—while by no means perfectly representative of California districts as a whole—combine to represent roughly half of all of the state’s regular local school districts. Moreover, the 2345 elections where I was able to find evidence of union electioneering combine to represent a little over 26 percent of all competitive school board elections held between 1995 and 2020 in the Golden State (according to data provided by the California Elections Data Archive (CEDA) at the Institute for Social Research at Sacramento State University).6 4   This is not to say that Florida is the “weakest” union state that one could study. But as one of the 30-plus states that have kept a mandatory teacher bargaining law in place, Florida is a more representative state than are the handful of states (e.g., Arizona, South Carolina, Texas) that ban public sector bargaining altogether. An analysis in one of those states would no doubt provide an attractive opportunity to assess whether teachers unions shape school board elections in the absence of bargaining, but I leave it to other researchers to collect and analyze that data. 5   In some cases, I could only identify a partial list of endorsements in an election. To ensure that missing data did not bias my results, with the exception of the descriptive statistics presented in Table 1, all of my analyses are based on elections where the endorsement status of all candidates is known. Fortunately, for 3,369 of the endorsed candidates (or 84% of the total number of identified endorsees), I was able to confirm the endorsement status of every candidate that ran. 6   Not surprisingly, it was easier to uncover union endorsement information in board elections held after 2000. In elections held in the 2010s, for example, I was able to identify union electioneering in roughly one-third of all competitive school board elections in California.

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M. T. Hartney Table 1  Electoral outcomes for union-endorsed candidates over time (by incumbency status and state) Period

Pre-NCLB era (1995–2001)

Post-NCLB era (2002–2007)

Obama/Great Recession era (2008–2015)

Outcome

California

Florida

Endorsed incumbents Endorsed challengers

Endorsed incumbents

Won

90%

62%

–

Lost

10%

38%

Candidates (345)

(534)

Won

89%

62%

Lost

11%

38%

Endorsed challengers

–

Candidates (314)

(510)

Won

86%

60%

79%

50%

Lost

14%

40%

21%

50%

(811)

(63)

(126)

Candidates (578) Trump/Janus era (2016–2020) Won

81%

62%

89%

57%

Lost

19%

38%

11%

43%

(634)

(54)

(118)

Candidates (349)

Information on union endorsements from author’s original database. School board election data for California comes from the California Elections Data Archive (CEDA). In Florida, election outcomes are made available by the Florida School Boards Association (FSBA)

In Florida, there were 1109 board seats that were up for election between 2010 and 2020 (according to data made available by the Florida School Boards Association (FSBA)). However, just 722 of those seats generated any competition. I was able to identify union electioneering activity (endorsements) for 361 of these 722 competitive elections (50 percent coverage).7 These 361 competitive elections took place in 36 of the state’s 67 public school districts. An obvious limitation of my study is the fact that I can only study union electioneering in school districts where teachers’ unions are sufficiently active to issue endorsements and in districts where I am able to identify such activity. And there is no doubt that I am missing some endorsement data for some elections where unions did, in fact, make endorsements. For obvious reasons, missing data is more likely to be a problem in very small (and especially geographically rural) school districts where local newspapers either do not exist or do not have sufficient reporting capacity to cover interest group endorsements in local elections. Therefore, it is reasonable to ask how representative are the subset of school districts where I was able to find information on teacher-union endorsements compared to the school districts in California and Florida as a whole. To provide some context on sample representativeness, Table  4 in the Appendix presents descriptive statistics comparing the demographic (district-level)

7

  In rare cases, the union endorsed more than one candidate in the primary, which explains why there are slightly more endorsed candidates in Florida than elections.

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characteristics of my own sample of school districts (where I have information on endorsements) with the remaining districts in each state where I do not. As the table shows, although my samples are broadly representative of Florida and California districts on the whole, they are, as expected, much less likely to include small rural districts (e.g., fewer than 1000 students). On the one hand, this limits my ability to generalize my findings to very small and rural communities. On the other hand, the districts in my sample—those where unions regularly make endorsements—are the districts that serve the vast majority (roughly 90 percent) of all public school students in each state. Although the absence of information on union endorsements in small districts is a concern, I attend to this issue through a robustness test later in the paper. I also discuss some related limitations surrounding the generalizability of my findings in the paper’s conclusion. Before we can proceed to analyze union electioneering outcomes in California and Florida, it is important to briefly mention a few key differences concerning how school board elections work in these states. With the exception of districts that use district- or ward-based elections, California school districts hold “multi-seat elections” where citizens vote for several candidates in a single contest. By contrast, like many southern states, Florida districts are large countywide entities where voters only vote for a single candidate in each contest. Importantly, Florida holds its board elections entirely in even-numbered years whereas California has only recently transitioned to a system where elections are uniformly held “on-cycle.” These two factors—the use of on-cycle elections combined with larger countywide districts should, if anything, make it harder for any single interest—including teachers’ unions—to dominate district politics in Florida (see, e.g., Anzia 2011, 2013).

Results Table  1 displays the electoral outcomes for all union-endorsed school board candidates in my data set over four specific periods of time separately by state and candidate incumbency status. A few key patterns in the table stand out. First and foremost, teacher-union endorsed candidates do exceptionally well in the majority of competitive school board elections. Consistent with Terry Moe’s findings in his earlier studies, in California, union-backed candidates are the ones to beat. On average (across the time series) union-endorsed candidates won 71 percent of their races in California. Moreover, irrespective of the particular time period one examines, roughly 90 percent of union-favored incumbents in California secured reelection and two-thirds of union-backed challengers won their race. In Florida, where we have good reasons to anticipate that teachers’ unions won’t make nearly as strong of a showing, they do surprisingly well. Across the entire time period of the Florida sample (2010–2020), 63 percent of candidates who received the endorsement of their local teachers union prevailed, with union-backed challengers winning more than half of their races and union-backed incumbents winning about 80 percent of theirs. In short, despite the fact that Florida’s teachers’ unions operate at a comparative disadvantage (relative to teachers’ unions in California), 67

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80 70

Percent won

60 50 40 30 20

19

0

9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 9 20 9 0 20 0 0 20 1 0 20 2 0 20 3 0 20 4 0 20 5 0 20 6 0 20 7 0 20 8 0 20 9 1 20 0 1 20 1 12 20 1 20 3 1 20 4 1 20 5 1 20 6 1 20 7 1 20 8 20

10

California

Florida

Fig. 1  Union electoral success over time, by state. Note. Figure displays the percentage of unionendorsed candidates winning their school board election contest in each given year, separately by state

they appear to have been remarkably successful at overcoming the headwinds of oncycle countywide elections and a more politically conservative electorate. The results presented in Table  1, however, are just a starting point. To more closely evaluate whether teachers’ unions remain influential in school board elections today, we need to examine their rate of electioneering success over time, examining patterns from one year to the next. Figure 1 presents some basic evidence on this score—showing how union endorsed candidates have fared in competitive board races held in each state over the past two decades. The figure highlights a number of important patterns. First, union-endorsed candidates are consistently more successful than are unendorsed candidates, irrespective of the prevailing political environment toward teachers’ unions in the USA at any given time. Across twenty-five separate election cycles in California, in no year do union-endorsed candidates win fewer than 60 percent of the time. In Florida, union-backed candidates meet or exceed the 60 percent win rate in all but one election cycle (where they narrowly miss it at 56 in 2012). These consistent levels of electioneering success are especially noteworthy when we consider all of the various challenges that unions have faced during these two decades. In 2001, unions had to deal with the new accountability and choice provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. NCLB shined a spotlight on student achievement, giving school reformers a new data point to wield against incumbents in districts with chronically low levels of student achievement (see, e.g., Payson 2017). Then, in 2007, the Great Recession and the rise of the Tea Party Reprinted from the journal

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set into motion a new political and fiscal climate that disadvantaged the unions. Yet teacher-union support in school board elections continued to confer—at least descriptively—a sizeable electoral advantage in each and every year of the time series shown in Fig. 1. Consider the effects of the much ballyhooed Janus Supreme Court decision handed down in 2018. Careful attention to the patterns displayed in Fig. 1 highlight the resilience of teachers’ unions in the post-Janus era. The comparison between Florida and California in 2016 and 2020 is instructive. Florida’s right-to-work law prohibited teachers’ unions from charging nonmember teachers agency fees prior to Janus. The decision, therefore, had no direct practical effect on Florida’s unions.8 California, however, is a different story. The law there had mandated that all teachers—union member and nonmember alike—pay union fees. To the extent that Janus weakened teachers’ unions politically then, we should see a decline in their power in California. Yet the data show no such reversal in either state. Unionendorsed candidates in Florida won 68 percent of the time in 2016 and 72 percent of the time in 2020. In California, union-favored candidates won 66 percent of their races in 2016 compared to 69 percent in 2020, a statistically indistinguishable “difference-in-difference.” Another possibility to consider is that teacher-union power has simply narrowed to blue communities, so that union electioneering only packs a punch in school districts with liberal, prolabor electorates. Although Moe’s original analysis found no such evidence for this dynamic, increased partisan polarization, including in US local politics (Hopkins 2018), could have narrowed union influence in the intervening years. To examine this possibility, I analyzed the win rates of union-endorsed candidates in California districts (where such data was uniquely available) with significantly different types of political environments.9 First, following Moe (2005), I divided districts by political culture. Conservative (Republican) districts were classified as those where 55 percent or more of the voters who registered with one of the two major parties were registered as Republicans. Similarly, districts where 55 percent or more of partisan registrants aligned themselves with the Democratic party were classified as Democratic districts. The remaining districts were deemed “Independent.” Table 2 shows that union-endorsed candidates fair equally well in both Republican and Democratic districts. In fact, just like Moe found in his analysis, I too find that union-backed candidates do slightly better in Republican-leaning districts. Of course, these results do not account for the fact that unions likely endorse less unionfriendly candidates in more politically conservative districts. Examining surveys of the candidates themselves, Moe found that unions are forced to make some concessions with the candidates they support in more conservative districts. Endorsed 8   See Finger and Hartney (2021) for a discussion of some possible indirect effects of Janus on teachers unions in right-to-work states. 9   Here, I focus on California because I have access to multiple measures of citizens’ political attitudes and voting behavior at the school district level. In Florida, I would only have access to partisanship. However, it is worth noting that I find similar results for partisanship in Florida whereby union electioneering is equally successful in both Republican- and Democratic-leaning Florida districts.

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M. T. Hartney Table 2  Election outcomes for union-endorsed candidates, by district type Political culture

Republican districts

Independent districts

Democratic districts

Percent won

72

74

69

Percent lost

28

26

31

Number of candidates

(633)

(540)

(1680)

Union sentiment

Pro-union districts

Anti-union districts

Percent won

70

72

Percent lost

30

28

Number of candidates

(1700)

(1155)

School reform attitudes

Pro-charter districts

Anti-charter districts

Percent won

71

70

Percent lost

29

30

Number of candidates

(1298)

(1557)

Election and voter registration data used to classify California districts come from the Statewide database at UC-Berkeley

winners in conservative districts, for example, had slightly less favorable views toward collective bargaining than endorsed winners in liberal districts. It is unfortunate that I do not have similar survey data of candidate attitudes to explore this dimension of constraints on union power in politically conservative districts today. However, what we can conclude, at least in California, is that union-endorsed candidates, irrespective of the partisan nature of the local electorate, are far more likely to win their competitive school board elections than unendorsed candidates. Partisanship, however, is just one dimension that could work to constrain union power in school board elections. In fact, while partisanship has grown more acute in local politics in recent years, unlike other policy issues, education has not been divided as predictably along conventional party lines (Hartney and Wolbrecht 2014; Houston 2019). Recall that within the Democratic party a significant number of elites embraced major market-based reforms opposed by the unions these past two decades. Since partisan differences may not adequately capture public attitudes toward unions and market-based education reforms in a particular school district, I consider two additional ways of classifying local electorates as union friendly or unfriendly. First, I classify California school districts as anti-union if a majority of a district’s electorate voted in favor of Prop. 75, a 2005 statewide a ballot measure that threatened to make it harder for unions to raise PAC donations through a procedure that union opponents call “paycheck protection.” Second, I classify districts as pro-charter school based on whether a majority of voters supported charter school advocate Marshall Tuck over union-favored incumbent Tom Torlakson in the state’s 2014 race for superintendent of public instruction. Rows 2 and 3 in Table 2 show, quite clearly, that teachers’ unions are equally successful at getting their endorsed candidates Reprinted from the journal

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Teachers’ unions and school board elections: a reassessment

elected in both pro- and anti-union districts as well as in both pro- and anti-charter districts across California. In other words, irrespective of district partisanship, attitudes toward labor unions, or support for charter schooling, teachers’ unions reliably win 70 percent of the school board elections in which they make an endorsement. Multivariate analysis So far, I have presented simple descriptive data, comparing the election outcomes for endorsed and unendorsed candidates over time and across different types of districts. Though the results have begun to tell a story in which teacher-union endorsements are still influential, more elaborate statistical models are needed to firm up these descriptive patterns. To that end, I estimate a series of regression models where the outcome of interest is a simple binary indicator for whether a given school board candidate prevailed in their election alongside dummy (predictor) variables indicating whether a candidate (1) received the union endorsement and (2) whether they were the incumbent. Following Moe’s (2006) empirical approach, I use OLS (for ease of interpretation), along with election-specific fixed effects, to account for differences in the number of candidates and seats available in a specific election (a necessity in analyzing multi-seat election contests). Finally, because my aim is to assess whether union electioneering power has narrowed in the intervening years, I run four models that (separately) pool together elections held in the following time periods: (1) the period prior to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (1995–2002), (2) the post-NCLB era preceding the Great Recession (GR) (2003–2007), (3) the Obama/GR era of labor retrenchment (2008–2015), (4) and the Trump/Janus era of conservative dominance (2016–2020).10 Figure  2 displays the point estimates of these four period-specific regressions for the two main variables of interest (incumbency and union endorsement). As the figure shows, even after controlling for incumbency and electoral competitiveness, teacher-union endorsements are a strong predictor of candidate electoral success during all four time periods, even in those periods where unions faced much greater political opposition, and lost some major battles in education politics at the federal and state levels. It is important to note that, although the influence of union endorsements visually appears to be slightly weaker in later periods, these differences are not statistically significant. In fact, the only statistically significant difference in the strength of these predictors across time periods is for incumbency, which declines in relative importance during the most recent period of elections in California that I examined (from 2016-present).11 Like Moe then, I find suggestive evidence that union support is possibly a stronger predictor of candidate success than incumbency, though the difference between the endorsement and incumbency coefficients are 10   Because I only have data on union endorsements in California across these four time periods, I focus exclusively on the results from that state in these models. Later in the paper, when I examine patterns in union electioneering success with candidate fixed-effects, I examine endorsement effects in both states. 11   To confirm these patterns, I ran an additional robustness test where I interacted a dummy variable for each for the four separate time periods with a candidate’s incumbency status. I also did the same (interacting each time period with a candidate’s union endorsement status).

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Fig. 2  Union endorsements still matter in local school board elections. Note. Figure displays regression coefficients (with 95% confidence intervals) estimating the effect of incumbency and union support on California candidates’ electoral outcomes across four time periods (1 = victory, 0 = defeat). All models include election specific fixed effects with standard errors clustered by election. See Table  5 in the Appendix for full regression results

only statistically significant in the most recent period (since 2016). In sum, there is very little evidence to suggest that unions have lost influence in local school board elections. If anything, at least in California, the union endorsement appears to provide a stronger benefit than incumbency in recent years. Robustness tests Across both time and geographic space, and irrespective of the prevailing political environment facing unions in education politics at the federal or state level, unionfavored school board candidates have continued to do exceptionally well in local school board elections. After accounting for incumbency and the overall competitiveness of the elections that union-backed candidates run in, the union endorsement remains a very strong predictor of candidate success. However, despite these clear and consistent patterns in the data, it is still somewhat unclear how much union support itself makes the difference of school board candidates on Election Day. In this section of the paper, I address three specific shortcomings in the analysis that has been carried out so far: (1) the absence of equal amounts of endorsement data in smaller rural/township districts, (2) the lack of any observable measures (beyond incumbency) of candidate quality, and (3) the possibility that union endorsements are a proxy for unobserved conditions in a district that drive voters to support the union-favored candidate. One issue—acknowledged at the outset of the paper—is the difficulty of finding information on union endorsements in smaller school districts that are located in rural and township communities. These missing data could create some obvious biases. For example, if union-backed candidates tend to do worse in the type of Reprinted from the journal

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Teachers’ unions and school board elections: a reassessment

smaller rural and township districts that comprise a smaller portion of my data set, then we may be putting too much weight on observations from city and suburban districts where unions are (potentially) more likely to win. To address this concern, I re-estimate the main results presented in Fig.  2 (and also Table  5) earlier in the paper but include only school districts that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) classifies as rural or township school districts. Table 6 in the Appendix presents the results of this subset analysis. In these much smaller districts (where I have fewer elections to analyze), I find no evidence that union endorsements are less important predictors of candidate performance. In fact, the coefficient on the endorsement variable is uniformly similar in magnitude to the coefficient in the full sample. In one time period (where I observe just 78 candidates running in 32 elections), the endorsement variable narrowly misses statistical significance (p = 0.102). But on the whole—and accounting for the much smaller sample size—these results look similar to the baseline estimates using the full sample of California elections. A second concern with the analyses carried out so far is that—aside from incumbency—I have not been able to account for other differences in candidate quality. If teachers’ unions endorse higher-quality candidates who are more likely to win (irrespective of union support), without accounting for measures of candidate quality, we may misattribute the success of union-backed candidates to the power of the union endorsement itself. To get at this concern, I draw on data that has been made available by other scholars for a subset of the candidates in my California data set to measure candidate quality. Specifically, using data on candidates’ racial/ethnic backgrounds provided by Kogan et al. (2020) and information on candidate gender and occupational background from Atkeson and Hamel (2020), I once again re-estimate the main results presented in Fig. 2 (Table 5) controlling for a variety of individual (observable) candidate characteristics. The results of this robustness test are shown in Table 7 in the Appendix. Although these data are only available in California and in elections prior to 2016, I am able to confirm my main finding that union endorsements are robustly associated with a significantly higher likelihood of candidate victory, even after accounting for the prestige and relevance (in terms of running for school board) of a candidate’s occupation along with a candidate’s gender and racial background. Finally, I address the possibility that union endorsements are a proxy for unobserved conditions in a school district––conditions that drive voters to support the union-favored candidate. Specifically, in Table 8 I re-estimate a pooled analysis of my baseline specification but introduce (in the years for which such data are available) information provided by the state of California on district-level growth in teacher salaries and district-level growth in academic achievement (proficiency). This robustness test is designed to test the possibility that unions simply endorse candidates that are presiding over positive changes in the district that both they and the local electorate approve of, and thus, that the association I find between candidate success and endorsements is simply driven by these broader changes. The results of this robustness test appear to rule out this concern. Looking separately at incumbents and challengers (see columns 1–4 of Table  8 in the Appendix), I find no evidence that the strong relationship between union endorsements and candidate 73

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electoral outcomes is attenuated after controlling for changes in district test scores or teacher pay during an incumbent’s term in office. Do union endorsements really make the difference? My findings thus far appear to confirm (and strengthen) Moe’s conclusions from the early 2000s that unions exert significant influence in school board elections. Across time and space, irrespective of the political or geographic environment, union-backed candidates are much more likely to win than their unendorsed counterparts on Election Day. One potential criticism of this conclusion—a criticism that Moe himself anticipated and acknowledged—is the issue of selection bias. Union endorsements—like any interest group endorsement—are not randomly assigned to candidates and instead are driven by a mix of considerations, including strategic calculations about which candidates are likely to win.12 Like Moe, I have only limited (observable) measures of candidate quality (e.g., occupation, incumbency) to account for these sorts of unobserved differences between candidates. I do, however, have one advantage that enables me to address this type of selection bias and more credibly estimate the causal effect of receiving a union endorsement: time. Since my data set tracks union endorsements across the same districts over decades, I am able to observe many of the same candidates running in different elections within the same district over time. In fact, nearly 500 candidates in my data set are observed running in multiple elections where they sometimes receive (but other times do not receive) the endorsement of the local teachers union. Using this panel of repeat candidate observations for which I can observe variation in each candidate’s endorsement status, I estimate a series of regression models that assess the relationship between electoral outcomes and a candidate’s endorsement with the inclusion of individual candidate-specific fixed effects. The introduction of these candidate-specific fixed effects are not a panacea, but they do allow me to rule out any time invariant unobserved differences between candidates, better isolating the effect of the union endorsement itself. The results of these estimations are arrayed in three columns in Table 3. In column 1, I present the results for the full sample of candidates in both states— a sample that includes 487 candidates whom I was able to observe running with and without union support in at least one competitive election.13 Even after the heavy bar of including candidate-specific fixed effects, I continue to observe both a strong and statistically significant relationship between candidate performance and union endorsements. Although the inclusion of candidate-specific fixed effects (as expected) somewhat attenuates the coefficient on the union endorsement variable (compared to the baseline model presented earlier in Fig.  2 and reported in Table  5), the electoral value of earning the union endorsement remains statistically significant and substantively meaningful: the very same candidates are significantly more likely to win election when they run with a union endorsement compared to when they run without it. 12

  As Moe (2006, 11) put it, “while union support may boost a candidate’s probability of winning, the unions may also tend to support ‘good’ candidates who are likely to win anyway, which would inflate estimates of union impact”. 13   Specifically, I observe 439 such candidates in California and 48 in Florida.

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74

Teachers’ unions and school board elections: a reassessment Table 3  Estimating the effect of union endorsements with candidate-specific fixed effects All candidates

Only incumbents

Only challengers

0.254***

0.239***

0.300***

[0.025]

[0.050]

[0.061]

Candidates running

−0.031***

−0.012

−0.011

[0.010]

[0.021]

[0.022]

Seats available

0.039

0.138

−0.083

[0.039]

[0.109]

[0.084]

Incumbent

−0.080**

–

–

Union endorsement

[0.034] Year FE

Yes

Yes

Yes

Candidate FE

Yes

Yes

Yes

Observations

1205

254

201

Number of candidates

487

104

92

0.26

0.49

0.48

Adjusted R2

Dependent variable is the outcome for an individual candidate in a specific election (1 = won, 0 = lost). Cell entries are OLS regression coefficients with standard errors clustered by candidate beneath in brackets All measures are two-tailed tests. *p