Motivating National Data

[JohnCRuf]

This won't be interesting unless we can tie it to some broader national trends. For the DiD portion at least, we can tie it to the "community input" movement.

Is there any research showing that the use of community input has been rising or important recently?

[tmalthouse]

There's clear evidence (https://doi.org/10.1017/S146604660808037X ) that the burden of complying with NEPA-type laws (ideologically closely related to the community input movement) is increasing over time, but that seems to be a general trend (increased ability to mount lawsuits?).

For shocks: only thing I can think of is the Calfornia Housing Element stuff exempting a lot of housing from public input/discretionary approval. Unfortunately Chicago's closest equivalent (the eTOD) is very community-input-forward.

[JohnCRuf]

The burden of NEPA laws helps. It would be nice if some political scientist or sociologist had any evidence of a wider national trend for increased community input in decisions.

I'm not too worried about shocks or estimation for this issue. The reason for this issue is more along the lines of as a response to the question of "why do we give a fuck about aldermanic perogative outside of Chicago?" And I'd like the answer that by something like "Demand for community input has been increasing, aldermanic perogative is one way to have larger community input, so analyzing these institutions matter because if they're good they may be useful to implement elsewhere, if they're bad then they're not"

[JohnCRuf]

Inspired partially by this atlantic article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/local-government-community-input-housing-public-transportation/629625/

The problem is that they just kinda assume that community input is causing problems, without actually showing that the amount of community input is actually increasing.

[tmalthouse]

This is a great article (also has some top-tier alder quotes):

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1440&context=nulr

Another good piece, this one very NYC-centric:

https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/302.6_Who_Decides_-_Final.pdf

I can't seem to find it again, but I read a poli sci article a while back arguing that ald prerogative is more or less guaranteed to emerge when you have nonpartisan local elections.

For the question of why should people care about aldermanic prerogative: I think we can argue this is a feature of all legacy American cities (and to the extent any one city is special and unique, it's NYC), and the dynamics of misinvestment/bad procurement/distorted land use we see here will hold in those cities too.

[tmalthouse]

Also: another entry in the "Philly is Chicago but meaner" file:

https://www.inquirer.com/news/councilmanic-prerogative-philadelphia-city-council-20220321.html

[JohnCRuf]

Another line of inquiry for this is "participatory budgeting" movement that would allow this to be of more national relevance.