Representation in American Cities: Who Runs for Mayor and Who Wins?

Abstract

Business leaders emerge as key players in canonical accounts of urban politics, but data limitations have hampered efforts to quantify their role in city politics. Drawing on an original dataset that includes gender, race, occupational, and political experience for over 3,500 mayoral candidates from 259 cities over fifty years, I document who runs for office and who serves as mayor, with a focus on candidates who are business owners and executives. Overall, the data indicate that mayors tend to be White and male with prior political experience and white-collar careers. Business owners and executives account for nearly one-third of the candidates in the sample, but I find no indication that they win elections at higher rates than other candidates overall. However, my results do suggest that business owners and executives have better electoral prospects in more conservative cities, especially those that hold nonpartisan elections.

Local Gun Safety Enforcement, Sheriffs, and Right-Wing Political Extremism

“…While white men from particular backgrounds are overrepresented in other local (and state and federal) elected offices (Barnes, Beall and Holman 2021; Holman 2016; Kirkland 2021; Shah 2015), the patterns for sheriffs are far more extreme: sheriffs are almost exclusively white (92%) men (99%) from law enforcement backgrounds (98%). Given that these groups also are more likely to become right-wing extremists in the United States (Belew 2018; Cooter 2022; Jackson 2019 b ), sheriffs may have been already inclined to join these movements.…”