The Economic Background of City Councilmembers
Graham Straus
Who are city councilmembers? One image might resemble a national politician — someone with strong partisan attachments, perhaps a lawyer by trade, who runs for office with ambitious policy goals. Alternatively, we might picture a local community member — someone well-known in their neighborhood, running for the part-time role not as a steppingstone to higher office, but to serve their community. Perhaps council is simply a natural next step in their career path. They might be elected because Republicans and Democrats alike trust their understanding of local issues and their commitment to schools and public safety.
A longstanding scholarly debate centers on the extent to which nationally forged partisanship shapes local politics. While Americans are deeply polarized on national issues, the responsibilities of local government often differ significantly from those at the national level. Some national issues, such as defense spending, have no clear local equivalent. Similarly, many local concerns, like managing roads and water systems, lack direct national parallels.
My article, “The Economic Background of City Councilmembers,” brings new descriptive data to the conversation. I concentrate on what city councilmembers did for work before they ran for city council. I use California ballot designations to categorize over 26,000 candidacies for city council from across the state between 1996 and 2021. Candidates get a few words on the ballot to describe their current occupation to voters. I place candidates in one of nine categories inspired by those used in the research of Nicholas Carnes (2013).
I ask two different questions in my article. The first is: Does city-level partisanship affect who the typical city council candidate is by occupation? The second is: Does a candidate’s ballot designation give voters some information about the candidate’s partisanship when the election is nonpartisan?
On the first question, I model the share of candidates and winners from each occupational category on their city’s two-party presidential voteshare. Including this variable and a host of other controls reveals a few career categories that trend with partisanship in the way we would expect. The figures below show that cities across the ideological spectrum have plenty of individuals from the “Politician and Staff Member” category – like an incumbent, for instance – but more Democratic cities have more non-profit workers and service-based professionals such as teachers and nurses running for and serving on council, whereas more Republican cities have more business owners and employees, police officers, and firefighters running for and serving on city council.
Figure 1: Share of City Council Candidates by Democratic Voteshare
Figure 2: Share of City Council Candidates by Democratic Voteshare
On the second question, I look up candidates in the L2 voter file and record their party affiliation when available. I only have candidates’ names, so I look them up in the city in which they run for council. If there is only one individual with that name or if every individual in that city with the given name has the same party affiliation, then I record the candidate’s party as it appears in the voter file. I observe party for about half of my sample. Career categories tell voters something about candidates’ likely past careers. It is not a perfect one to one mapping, of course, but the distribution of party across these career categories is substantially different.
Figure 3: Party Registration by Occupational Background
My research shows that the careers on city councils vary based on the partisanship of the city and that when a candidate tells voters her occupational background, she is offering noisy signals about her party affiliation.
These descriptive data align with many recent findings in political science. Police union endorsements polarize voters by helping conservative candidates while harming liberal ones (Gaudette 2024). This career category is strongly associated with more Republican candidates and more Republican-leaning cities. In mayoral elections, business owners tend to increase spending on infrastructure and reduce spending on redistributive programs (Kirkland 2021). However, disentangling the effect of owning a business from party identification is challenging because the career category correlates with Republican candidates and cities. Recent research using cast vote records demonstrates that nationally forged partisanship explains only a relatively small portion of the variation in voting in local nonpartisan elections, such as many city council races (Conevska et al. 2024). The emerging portrait of local politics is not entirely nationalized, but rather contextually so, and plenty of room remains for other levers of control in local affairs.
My article does not resolve the fruitful theoretical debate about the role of national parties in local politics. It introduces new data on a challenging-to-observe candidate trait: occupation prior to holding office. This aspect of local politics is highly correlated with national partisanship and is one of the few pieces of information voters have about candidates in low-information, local nonpartisan elections. While there is no quick or completely accurate way to document candidates’ occupational histories at scale, I hope future research will expand our knowledge of their career paths – beyond California, and beyond city councils. I also hope future research will consider how life experiences socialize us into our career paths and socialize us into our partisan political beliefs at the same time. Better understanding these occupational histories is essential as we refine our understanding of local political dynamics.
References
Carnes, Nicholas. 2013. White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making. Chicago Studies in American Politics Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Conevska, Aleksandra, Shigeo Hirano, Shiro Kuriwaki, Jeffrey B. Lewis, Can Mutlu, and James M. Snyder, Jr. 2024. “How Partisan Are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records.” OSF Preprints. November 11. doi:10.31219/osf.io/db3mj
Gaudette, Jennifer. 2024. “Polarization in police union politics.” American Journal of Political Science: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12932
Kirkland, Patricia A. 2021. “Business Owners and Executives as Politicians: The Effect on Public Policy.” The Journal of Politics 83(October): 1652–1668.
Graham Straus is a PhD candidate in political science at UCLA. His research interests include local politics, elections, political behavior, statistical methodology for the social sciences, and administrative data.