The Insulation of Local Governance from Black Electoral Power:
Northern Cities and the Great Migration
Jacob M. Grumbach⤉
Robert Mickey
✤
Daniel Ziblatt‡
October 2, 2023
Word Count: 12,611
Abstract
Why has America’s democratization remained incomplete? Democratic institutions in the U.S. are
decentralized, and lower level governments have the potential to counteract national
democratization. We argue that, in response to the threat of growing Black electoral power resulting
from the Great Migration, Northern cities moved to insulate governmental institutions from their
diversifying electorates. Using a shift-share instrument, we find that greater migration of Black
Americans from the South between 1940 and 1970 led cities to switch from mayor-council to city
manager systems, shifting the administration of local government, including budgeting and
bureaucratic hiring, in the office of an appointed manager. We illustrate how the Great Migration
shaped the decision of city elites to switch to city manager government through a case study of Santa
Monica, CA. Our findings show how, at a critical juncture in the course of the country’s national
democratization, local governments acted to stymie it.
___________________________
*For helpful discussions and guidance on data, we thank Ellora Derenoncourt, Jessica Trounstine, and Vesla Weaver. For
outstanding research assistance, we thank Rachel Funk Fordham, Brian Leung, Ewan McCartney, and Ben Rex. We are
grateful for the generous support of the Russell Sage Foundation (project grant G-2107-33329).
⤉
UC Berkeley
✤
University of Michigan
‡
Harvard University & WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Introduction
By nearly any formal definition of democracy (Dahl 1971), America’s twentieth-century
democratization was distinctive in two ways. First, it came relatively late—achieved only with the
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts, which promised civil and voting
rights for all Americans. Second, it reflected the unusual imprint of America’s federal political
system. While national level reforms promised political equality for all citizens, they did not erase
enduring local practices of racial authoritarianism (Weaver and Prowse 2020; Hinton 2021). Indeed,
the most striking gap between democracy’s promise of political equality and its practice is found at
the local level, where citizens interact most directly with the coercive apparatus of the state (i.e.,
police)—where they experience the uneven application of the rule of law on the basis of race and
ethnicity.
Why has racial inequality in American democracy persisted despite national democratizing
reforms? We provide an historical-institutionalist perspective to the problem. In particular, we
propose an answer that is anchored in America’s distinctive institutional path of democratization.
America’s late and incomplete democratization and its federal system meant that the most significant
resistance to democratization often happened at the local level—not only in the U.S. South but also
in the diversifying municipalities of the U.S. North. Our motivating proposition is that assessments
of America’s democracy must take into account not just state and national forces such as Jim Crow
laws and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also state governments, and—especially—local
governments. Thus, this question is key: why have local governments themselves over the 20th
century adopted insulating institutional reforms that have made them less accountable to voters?
Our argument begins by noting that, like elsewhere, America’s transition to democracy was
not conflict-free. As America has become more diverse and more democratic, efforts to secure key
1
democratic reforms have met the resistance of powerful actors who have sought to thwart, forestall,
and even subvert democratic changes. Promises of political equality, when combined with the reality
of greater ethnic diversity, have prompted pushback. As is true elsewhere, this pushback has meant
that America’s democratic transition has been incomplete, leaving traces of the past regime visible,
where former incumbents carved out zones of continued influence (Valenzuela 1992). Put
differently, we contend that, in response to democratizing impulses, incumbents effect a
“clawing-back” of political power from emerging coalitions and their officeholders. This dynamic is
familiar to scholars of democratization in other contexts. Democratic transitions often include efforts
to provide outgoing incumbents with a leg-up to protect their interests. This was the case at the
national level in Chile’s transition in the 1980s, as well as those in Poland and South Africa in the
1990s (Albertus and Menaldo 2018). Likewise, democratic changes often bring with them the
creation of independent or partly autonomous agencies—such as central banks and independent
judiciaries—that sit “beyond the reach” of the new majorities (Starr 2019.) In the American context,
these more general dynamics took a distinctive form because of its federal system: it was often local
incumbents who pushed back, insulating institutional reforms to dilute the impact of growing ethnic
diversity and a national context of greater civil rights.
In this paper, we focus on local pushback that came in a series of reforms to the structure of
municipal governments—particularly the introduction of “city manager” models of governments in
the twentieth century, which supplemented or replaced directly-elected mayors.
1
Strongly opposed
by local Black political interests across mid-20th century cities, these reforms reduced voter turnout
and weakened the link of accountability between voters and elected officials by transferring
authority over budgeting and bureaucratic administration from a directly elected mayor to an
appointed manager.
1
About two-thirds of U.S. cities still use at-large elections for city council positions (Abott and Magazinnik 2020: 717).
2
To test whether local institutional insulation was the result of racial threat, we investigate
whether the Great Migration of African Americans from the South led Northern cities to insulate
their political institutions by switching to city manager systems. To address threats of endogeneity,
we use a shift-share instrumental variable design to isolate exogenous variation in Black migration
(Derenoncourt 2022). Consistent with our argument, we find that greater Black in-migration led
Northern cities to switch to city manager systems. While the Great Migration of Black Americans
out of Jim Crow states was a democratizing force for the U.S. overall, White responses to the Great
Migration weakened local level democratization through the insulation of policymaking Northern
cities’ diversifying electorates. We illustrate the channels by which the Great Migration produced
institutional insulation through a case study of Santa Monica, California.
Today, the incomplete nature of subnational democratization remains evident in other ways
as well. For instance, Republican-controlled state legislatures, motivated by growing splits between
Republican rural areas and Democratic-run cities, have recently weakened hundreds of local
governments by preempting their lawmaking with state statutes (Briffault 2018). On scores of issues,
from police reform (Su, Roy, and Davidson 2022) to public health, from education to election
administration, state laws now block municipal and county governments from crafting their own
policies, thereby weakening local democracy.
Choice of Municipal Governance
The United States is distinctive for the dynamic nature of its municipal level governance
structures. This may be due in part to the Constitution’s unusual silence on polities below the state
level. Indeed, many of the country’s some 7,500 cities—in those states that allow them the
3
option—adopt their own “little constitutions” (Davidson 2020; Stevenson 2009) in the form of city
charters. Long-established cities continue to alter their formal structures (Svara and Watson 2010;
Hassett and Watson 2007; Frederickson 2003).
Municipal structures—for scholars focused on national politics, akin to systems of
inter-branch relations—establish frameworks within which the public official “sets the rules of
participation, exercises authority by making and carrying out the law (statues, ordinances, or
regulations), selects persons to politically represent all residents or some subset of residents, operates
a permanent bureaucracy, provides services, and determine who will pay what in taxes”
(Frederickson et al 2004: 321).
Over time, there have been just a few major such structures: a mayor-council system, a city
manager (also known as “council-manager”) system, a commission government, or—least
common—New England’s town meeting system. Until the onset of the twentieth century, the
mayor-council system dominated. In this system, a popularly elected, “strong” mayor invested with
substantial powers—usually including the power to veto decisions by a popularly elected (either via
district or at-large elections) council—governed a town or city. The mayor-council system has
always been very much a “separation of powers” structure in that executive and legislative functions
remain separated (Newland 1985).
Claiming (and often sincerely preoccupied by) a desire to stamp out corruption, partyism,
machine politics, and inefficient government, Progressive Era-reformers developed alternatives and
campaigned successfully for them through impressive national networks of experts and other allies
(Finegold 1995). Popular especially in the first two decades of the twentieth century was the
commission system, whereby three to seven officials, usually chosen at-large via nonpartisan
elections, each oversaw a particular policy domain—public safety, sanitation, education,
4
etc.—“while collectively they serve[d] as the policymaking council for the city” (Adrian 1955: 190;
Rice 1977). A ceremonial office of mayor was usually popularly elected from among those
candidates competing to serve as a commissioner. Commission governments avoided “separate
institutions sharing powers” (Neustadt 1990: 29) and instead fused legislative and executive
functions. Criticized for lacking a single, powerful chief policymaker, by 1950 fewer than 400 cities
retained the commission system (Adrian 1955: 194).
Beginning in the early 1910’s, the city manager system quickly overtook commission
governance. Here, a city council, usually elected at-large, would hire a city manager, a professional
who would centralize and then devise policy and oversee local bureaucracies within (often very
broad) parameters set by the council. Like the commission, the city manager was not a
separation-of-powers system, but it did feature a chief administrator. In other words, it centralized
authority more effectively. In another departure from the commission system, the ceremonial post of
mayor was usually chosen by the council from among its own number (Banfield and Wilson 1963:
ch. 13).
The city manager—unconstrained by a delimited term in office and serving at the pleasure of
the council—could not be removed by the voters. Capturing the enthusiasm at the time for the
science of administration and the cult of business-like efficiency, advocates of this system viewed
the manager as a professional able to engineer efficient policy outcomes, freed from the corrupting
influence of party politics. In fact, nearly one-half of city managers surveyed in the 1930s had earned
a B.A. in Engineering (Stillman 1974: 39). The discipline of political science mainly concurred.
Early on, one scholar swooned, “Democracy need fear no setback through the introduction of this
new form of administration; and efficiency, so long absent from the councils of democracy, can
come into her own at last” (James 1914: 611-612). Four decades later, the discipline’s preference
5
continued: “[f]or many years city managers and their form of government have been the darlings of
political science professors from coast to coast” (Mathewson 1959: 183). Yet another political
scientist claimed that the system “allows the best possible combination of democracy and efficiency
in local government” (Alderfer 1956: 308). Banfield and Wilson (1963: ch. 13) show that much of
the support for city manager governance was based on expectations—later dashed—that this system
would result in lower tax burdens for middle-and upper-class residents.
Soon after World War II, the city manager system became the country’s modal municipal
structure (Adrian 1955: 197). Strong mayor systems dominated the country’s largest cities, while
weaker mayor systems were more common in small-to-medium-sized cities (but see Choi et al
2013). Since the 1980s, while the city manager system remains most common, differences between
the two dominant types of mayor-council and city manager have shrunk. Mayor-council cities have
hired and further empowered more technocrats, while city manager systems have somewhat more
powerful mayors and made other changes in the name of democratic accountability (Hassett and
Watson 2007). Still, despite some scholars’ claims that the differences have narrowed so much that
there is no longer a significant difference between them (Frederickson 2003), most view these two
systems as importantly different (Svara and Watson 2010).
Regionally, strong (and partisan) mayor-council systems have predominated in the country’s
northeast, as well as in the midwest (though more of these mayors are elected in nonpartisan
elections). The commission system and, soon after, city manager systems have been most common
in the South and West. Despite decades of research, efforts to explain variation in municipal
structures have produced contradictory and inconclusive answers (Wei et al 2019; Choi et al 2013).
Historians and social scientists have generally argued that social class has best explained
cities’ choices. Here, class has been critical either because of differences across classes in their
6
values or in their material interests (Hays 1964, 1974). The values or “ethos theory” (Banfield and
Wilson 1963) holds that the native-born (especially Protestant) White middle class, stuck between
the “private-regarding” ethos of working class European immigrants and the very wealthy, chose to
adopt reforms that would destroy the corrupt and inefficient politics of party machines.
2
In addition,
middle-class residents were demanding the efficient provision of local public goods in the areas of
education, transport, public safety, public health, and so on. Middle-class activists led the call for
structural reforms—and especially the city manager system—and their precincts strongly backed
referenda to revise municipal structures. Meanwhile, European immigrants and working class voters
and their allied organized interests, including labor unions, most strongly opposed the reform
movement (Bridges and Kronick 1999, Bridges 1997a). But because pre-World War II American
cities were “overwhelmingly working class” (Bridges and Kronick 1999: 693), efforts to explain
variation in municipal institutions with a class theory were unsuccessful (Gordon 1968; Knoke
1982).
Bridges and Kronick (1999) rescue the class approach by emphasizing the undemocratic
nature of much of the “reform” movement. They show that if scholars compare the class
composition of local electorates rather than populations, they would recognize that reformers won in
those cities—mainly in the South and West—where they succeeded first in rewriting rules to shrink
working class turnout. This sequence reprised the strategy of conservative Democrats in the late 19th
century South. There, Democrats first reduced Black and poor White turnout via statutes and only
then drafted and ratified state constitutions that founded one-party, authoritarian enclave rule
(Perman 2003; Kousser 1974; Mickey 2015: ch. 2). In 20th century cities, reformers triumphed in
citywide referenda to choose a new municipal structure less by persuading a majority of voters than
2
According to Banfield and Wilson (1963: 170), the “lower class . . . preferred favors, ‘friendship,’ and ‘recognition’ to
the public-serving and self-denying virtues of efficiency, honesty, and impartiality.”
7
by disarming their opponents and thereby “creating electorates more middle-class than the adult
population as a whole” (Bridges and Kronick 1999: 703).
Many of the same White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant activists in the North’s reform
movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also helped pass state and local measures restrict
immigrants’ access to the polls via long residency requirements, onerous new registration
requirements, literacy tests, and nonpartisan ballots (Keyssar 2000: ch. 5; Banfield and Wilson 1963:
114). Western reform activists did the same with respect to Asian and Hispanic (and Mormon) voters
(Bridges and Kronick 1999: 697-698). Usually, opponents in the largest cities were able to beat back
reform by relying on the partisan nature of big-city machines.
The largest cities may have resisted the city manager system because, as larger and more
heterogeneous with respect to culture and interests, their voters prized the greater “political
management” that a strong mayor-council system offered (Kessel 1962; Bridges and Kronick 1999:
695). Similarly, residents of smaller and more socially homogeneous communities were believed to
be more comfortable turning the keys of the city over to a city manager (Lineberry and Fowler 1967;
but see Wolfinger and Field 1966).
Again, these claims assume municipal institutional choices were made in a democratic
fashion and on the basis of persuasion. Big cities may have resisted reform because they could resist
suffrage restrictions. Already partly incorporated into local party politics and often relying on public
sector employment, the party allegiance of otherwise vulnerable working class and immigrant voters
helped them avoid “strict enforcement of literacy testing or other disfranchising laws” (Bridges and
Kronick 1999: 698). Bridges and Kronick (1999: 701) show that in cities where turnout was lower in
1908, the probability of a switch to city manager government by 1934 was much higher.
8
The assignment to various collective actors of preferences over municipal institutions must
be approached with care. Municipal reform in the 20th century encompassed a bewildering array of
reform ideas and movements and coalitions, and, at different moments and places, many coalition
members defied expectations. For instance, while by the eve of World War I, the National Municipal
League, the leader of the nationwide movement to reform the governance of America’s cities, landed
upon the city manager plan as its preferred system, for a time it offered a model city charter featuring
a city council elected by proportional representation (Stewart 1950; Santucci 2022). In other
moments, unions and other working class actors backed city manager systems and other structural
reforms (Liazos 2020).
Still—as echoed in our Santa Monica case study below—advocates and opponents of reform
agreed that efficiency and democracy were in tension or even outright conflict. working class
opponents of reform “saw in [these] proposals new institutions that would be less responsive to
them,” while “[m]iddle-class voters found reform arguments persuasive because they saw their own
interests aligned with the civic leaders proposing new charters.” The latter “continued to support
reform regimes as they delivered (for a time) growth, quality services, and low taxes” (Bridges and
Kronick 1999: 694; Bridges 1997a, 1997b). Consistent with this line of thought, Carreri, Payson, and
Thompson (2023) find that switches to city manager systems between 1901 and 1940 reduced voter
turnout.
Building on Bridges (1997a, 1997b), Trounstine’s (2008) landmark work urges scholars to
abandon the machine/reform dichotomy and instead see proponents of one-party machines and their
“good-government” reform opponents as united by a shared goal to establish political monopolies.
As many have shown (Erie 1988; Shefter 1994), strong-mayor systems in the context of machine
politics were, in numerous respects, highly undemocratic in their own right. But the insights of
9
Bridges and Trounstine help illuminate how many switches from mayor-council to city manager
system were doubly undemocratic: a system of government less responsive to residents—especially
working class residents and residents of color—was often forged by, in effect, democratic
backsliding on voting rights and the administration of free and fair elections.
Preferences for and Consequences of City Manager Government
Is our outcome variable, the city manager system, a meaningful proxy for institutional
insulation? It is conventional wisdom that directly elected officeholders are more responsive to the
electorate than appointed ones, both theoretically and empirically in the case of the direct election of
the U.S. Senate after the 17th Amendment, for instance (Gailmard and Jenkins 2009). But is this the
case with respect to municipal institutions and in the context of 20th century U.S. racial politics?
In terms of group preferences over municipal institutions, the answer is clearly yes.
African-American voices—at least those civic leaders and others given voice by Black
newspapers—generally opposed city manager government, and on the same grounds that ‘reformers’
championed it. In the view of Black commentators, by separating city management from ‘politics,’
the system diluted emerging Black electoral influence. For example, when reformers sought to
reinstate city manager governance in Depression-era Cleveland—defeated with the crucial help of
Black voters in 1931 (Durham 1963: 235-236; Davis 1966)—the African-American Cleveland Call
and Post (1935) framed these reformers as “anti-Negro.” The paper assailed both the return of the
centralization of policymaking authority in the hands of a manager as well as a move to at-large
elections, which the Call and Post saw as “a means of eliminating [Cleveland’s] three Negro
councilmen.”
10
Similarly, in 1940, when a “League for Efficient Government” sought to bring city manager
governance to Atlantic City, the Afro-American described a tense meeting of Black and White civic
leaders. One Black speaker suggested that the majority-black Third Ward would drop its opposition
to the plan if provided assurances that the city’s public accommodations would finally be
desegregated. After he received no answer, another African-American speaker pressed the plan’s
main advocate to describe how much authority would be situated in the office of a city manager. She
only stammered, “The colored man has . . . made his contribution to the cultural and economic life of
the country, and now he must give himself as a citizen, forget self and race and work for the interest
of the community as a whole.” For the Afro-American, this answer confirmed Black suspicions of
the consequences of city manager government.
Whereas the ex ante preferences of racial groups over city manager systems were clear, were
these Black voices right about their effect on local democracy? It is difficult to tell. Certainly, case
studies of city politics confirm the suspicion of Black communities that city manager government
would weaken Black political power (e.g., Bridges 1999). Large-n analyses focusing on our time
period of study have been rarer. Traditionally, the full reform package enacted by many mid-century
cities combined council-manager governance with non-partisan and at-large council elections
(Leland and Whisman 2014: 418). The fact that multiple institutional changes were made at once
complicates efforts to divine their impact. This package is thought to have a larger, additive effect on
political participation, the influence of various organized interests and social groups, and policy
outcomes.
One consequence about which there is a strong consensus is that city manager cities feature
lower levels of voter turnout (Carr 2015: 679; Hajnal and Lewis 2003; Carreri, Payson, and
Thompson 2023). Indeed, it makes sense that a rational, policy-motivated voter would be less likely
11
to vote as the payoff of voting, influence over the behavior of the elected officeholder, becomes
smaller as agency problems increase between the voter and the appointed officeholder. Moreover,
lower turnout—especially in combination with at-large (Davidson and Korbel 1981; Davidson and
Grofman 1994; Abott and Magazinnik 2020) and off-cycle elections—reduces the descriptive
representation of racial minorities (Hajnal 2010; Hajnal, Kogan, and Markarian 2022).
It is worth noting that research suggests a convergence between city manager and
mayor-council systems since the 1980s in terms of both institutional design and political outcomes.
Mayor-council systems have begun employing professional administrators in an effort to increase
their efficiency, while city manager cities have undertaken some reforms to enhance their democratic
responsiveness by, for example, strengthening their mayoral offices (Frederickson et al 2003). In the
contemporary period, these kinds of cities appear equally responsive to local aggregate public
opinion (Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2014). That said, other research on contemporary cities finds
that city manager governments with at-large elections were least likely to feature at least one
incumbent losing reelection. Moreover, for cities of almost any size, city-manager governments with
district elections were less likely to have a loser incumbent than mayor-council governments (Oliver
et al 2012: 129). While city manager governments conduct less spending has been contradicted more
recently (Hajnal and Trounstine 2010; Carr 2015; de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw 2016: 1136),
since the financial crisis, council-manager cities, “insulated from the demands of voters,” had more
solvent budgets than their mayoral counterparts (Jimenez 2020: 126) and implemented greater
austerity measures than council-mayor cities (Aguado 2018).
3
3
Most scholars, finding higher quality data in the contemporary period, focus their attention only after this blurring had
occurred. Thus, it may be that advocates and opponents of city manager governance were correct about its consequences.
Case study research concludes that, where reformers won, “off-year elections, at-large districts, [and] council-manager
forms of government . . effectively depressed participation among minority groups and lower-income, poorly educated
voters” (Erie and Kogan 2016: 314).
12
The Great Migration and Urban Institutional Choice
The Great Migration occurred in two large waves. In the first, from 1910 to 1930, about 1.25
million African Americans departed the former member-states of the Confederacy for the North and
West. In the second, from 1940 to 1970, more than double this number—3.37 million—left the
South. All told, across these decades, about 5 million African Americans and nearly 12 million
Whites (about one-half of whom later returned) departed the region. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s,
they were joined by more than one-half million Hispanic Americans, who streamed out of the
southern countryside for western cities (Gregory 2005: 15, Table 1.2, and 16).
4
Several forces fueled the first wave, including the pull of better-paying jobs, which was
prompted by the sudden demand in Northern cities for industrial labor in support of the Great War,
combined with the war’s halting of European immigrants (Wilkerson 2010; Tolnay 2003; Collins
2021). Even after the war’s end, chain migration momentum, growing recruitment by Northern
employers and Black media, continued repression within the authoritarian South, and agricultural
hardship continued the stream of migrants, three-fifths of whom settled in just five cities: New York,
Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia (Boustan 2017: 9). By 1930, the share of all African
Americans who lived outside the South had increased from ten percent in 1910 to twenty-five
percent; a majority did so by 1970 (Tabellini 2020: 8).
While African Americans continued to move north during the 1930s, the second wave began
in earnest in 1940. Its causes were the “push” of the economic devastation wrought by the Great
Depression, the unintended consequences of the New Deal’s cotton subsidies (which weakened
planters’ demand for farm labor (Whatley 1983)), continued political repression at home, and the
4
While the second wave is typically dated as 1940-1970, it is worth noting that during the 1970s, more
African-Americans left the South (1.55 million) than in any other decade, and another 2.66 million Whites also departed
(Gregory 2005: 15, table 1.2).
13
increasing pull of recruitment from Black networks and communities in the North. Most important
was the onset of World War II. While the South quickly became the year-round training ground for
the military (Kryder 2000), the North and the West became home to military production. The federal
government’s rapid expenditure of more than $3 trillion (in 2018 dollars) in military supply contracts
and related investments (Rhode, et al 2018: 145) meant a massive demand to fill relatively
high-paying jobs.
Most importantly, the Great Migration transformed the demographics of the North and West.
On the eve of the Great Migration in 1910, less than 2 percent of the non-southern U.S. population
was African American.
5
While the typical non-southern city was 5 percent Black in 1940, by 1970
the African American share reached 22 percent (Boustan 2017: 1). This demographic shift, even
during the smaller first wave, meant a sharp rise in interracial contact, tensions, and crowd violence,
especially at the boundaries of racially demarcated neighborhoods, biracial public housing projects,
and in public leisure settings (Elkins 2018; Hirsch 1995; Sugrue 1995). This shift also accelerated
already existing segregation,
6
resulting in the consolidation of the “ghetto.” While in 1890, the
typical African American city dweller lived in a neighborhood that was 27 percent Black, by 1940
that share had risen to 43 percent, and by 1970 to 68 percent (Cutler et al 1999: 456).
Unsurprisingly, White residents and their local politicians in cities with even tiny Black
populations were responsive to racial demographics well before the Great Migration. Recent
research illustrates actions by both cities and White consumers that produced “White flight” as early
as 1910, before the first wave (Shertzer and Walsh 2018). And as early as the 1920s, cities in the
North and West used zoning to incentivize high-density construction in Black neighborhoods,
6
Drawing on their innovative new measure, Logan and Parman (2017) report much higher levels of segregation–in both
urban and rural settings, within the South and beyond it–much earlier than previously thought.
5
Among larger Northern cities, Philadelphia had the largest Black population share, but that share was less than six
percent. Smaller Northern cities–St. Louis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City–had more sizeable shares,
but none reached even ten percent of those cities’ populations (Collins 2021: 11 and fn. 28).
14
thereby contributing further to future residential segregation (Shertzer, Twinam, and Walsh 2019;
also see Trounstine 2018). Besides increasing levels of segregation, White responses to the Great
Migration served to shrink non-southern cities, as “each Black arrival encouraged more than one
White departure from the central city” (Boustan 2017: 94). Another recent study finds that influxes
of Black residents from the Great Migration reduced the perceived intergroup distance between
European immigrants and native-born Whites in Northern cities, generating assimilation into a
broader White American ethnicity. In other words, the new presence of African Americans helped
fuse a pan-ethnic White identity (Alba 1990), often to the detriment of African Americans, who now
faced off against a more unified adversary.
Besides remaking the racial demographics of the non-South (and the South, for that matter
(Gregory 2005)),
7
White consumers’ responses to the Great Migration had important fiscal and
political consequences. Noting that more than ninety percent of municipal revenues came from local
property taxes (Fisher 1996), Tabellini (2020) finds that, all else equal, the Great Migration
substantially reduced public spending and therefore public goods provision during the first wave.
Further, he finds that this decline was due not to a reduction in tax rates, but to a sharp fall in
assessed property values brought about by White residents’ refusing to purchase homes in Black or
liminal neighborhoods. Tellingly, he finds no change in the allocation of spending across budget
categories, which he would not have found had reductions in spending been driven by White
residents’ (or authorities’) resistance to spending that they considered redistributive or otherwise
7
Southern cities were major destinations for African Americans streaming out of the southern countryside (Gregory
2005: 32). Many of these cities experienced similar shifts to city manager systems in response to growing Black and
interracial working class power in local politics, especially after the abolition of the Whites-only primary in the 1940s
(which motivated African Americans to register and vote in non-partisan municipal elections as well as Democratic
primaries). During the 1950s in Little Rock, Arkansas, the expanding influence of Black and labor-affiliated voters in
mayoral elections prompted the “old guard” coalition of wealthy families and segregationists to champion a switch to the
city manager system. As historian Michael Pierce (2019: 168) concludes, “[t]he adoption of Little Rock’s city manager
system curtailed a biracial working class insurgency, ensured that real political power remained firmly in the hands of the
economic elite, and was helped along by virulent racists who worked to separate Whites and Blacks in public life.”
15
benefiting African Americans. Tabellini also argues that cities receiving more migrants during the
first wave were more likely to fragment their local jurisdictions via suburbs (Alesina et al 2004) and
special districts (Burns 1994), and more likely to resist annexation (Danielson 1976).
Political Consequences of the Great Migration
The Great Migration is now viewed as a key engine of the country’s democratization. As
Black Americans moved from Jim Crow states that enforced mass disenfranchisement to Northern
states with secure voting rights, the growing Northern Black electorate became a force within state
level Democratic parties and presidential elections and then pushed Northern politicians to support
landmark national civil rights legislation (Schickler 2016; Grant 2020). Particularly in the Great
Migration’s second wave, Black migrants broke through White unions. They helped pull the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to the racial left, thereby contributing to the development
of the ideology of racial liberalism, another motor of race reform agitation within the Democratic
Party (Schickler 2016: ch. 3; Zieger 1995; Korstad and Lichtenstein 1988; also see Frymer and
Grumbach 2021). The Great Migration also contributed to building a new Black militancy,
particularly during World War II. Besides helping forge immediate gains on fair employment at the
national (Kryder 2000) and state (Chen 2009) levels, these southern migrants used higher war
incomes to produce a seven hundred percent increase in the number of NAACP branches nationally,
as well as a boost to a broader and growing movement structure (e.g., Meier and Rudwick 1973). As
Sugrue (2008: ch. 5) shows, African-American activists not only battled to destroy Northern cities’
Jim Crow regulation of public accommodations, but became indispensable partners and resources to
the southern movement.
16
Of course, White urban residents responded to these trends, often in offsetting ways.
Calderon, Fouka, and Tabellini (2023) find that the Great Migration generally benefited the
Democratic Party, congressional civil rights legislation, and civil rights activism in the North, in part
through liberalizing White racial attitudes (but see Sahn 2021). That said, White residents also
sparked crowd violence against fellow Black residents, especially during World War II (Kryder
2000; Herman 2005). As Sugrue (1996) and Hirsch (1983) show, for instance, Detroit and Chicago
were both sites of “massive resistance” to a range of violations of the color line by Black residents,
many of them newly arrived. These cities thereby became key cogs in the liberalization of the
national Democratic Party, especially through their organized interests, their impact on state
Democratic parties, and congressional representatives (Ogorzalek 2018; Grant 2020), but
significantly ambiguous ones.
While Black migrants to the North earned better incomes, Derenoncourt (2022) finds that the
historical legacies of the Great Migration were much grimmer: all else equal, Northern cities that
received more Black migrants during the Great Migration produced lower rates of upward mobility
for Black children born in the 1980s.
8
Perhaps relatedly, these same cities spent less per capita on
education, and more on policing, than other cities (2022: 405). And Eriksson (2019) shows that the
Great Migration is responsible for a substantial increase in Black incarceration rates before World
War II. Thus, somewhat parallel to the work of political historians, economists trace from the Great
Migration contradictory legacies, many of which now serve as transmission belts of continuing racial
inequality in social and economic outcomes (Sharkey 2013).
Expectations for the Great Migration and Urban Institutional Choice
8
There was no such effect from white migration from the South on Northern cities.
17
Based on this discussion, we expect cities “treated” by the Great Migration to be more likely
to act to insulate their political decisionmaking and administration from diversifying electorates,
especially (but not only) via a switch to a city manager system. Consistent with the work of Alesina
et al (1999), Alesina et al (2004), Alesina and Glaeser (2004), and Alesina and Tabellini (2023), on
average we expect White voters and elites both to oppose sharing public goods with new African
American and Hispanic residents.
A quick glance at the policy domain of policing supports this expectation. Black residents
and organizations acting on their behalf held views on policing and state violence at mid-century that
differed greatly from those of most local authorities (Francis 2014). In particular, these residents and
organizations sought to reduce rampant police brutality, a problem so severe that President Hoover’s
own commission on law enforcement devoted an entire volume to “lawlessness in law enforcement”
(Wickersham 1931: vol. 13; Elkins 2018: ch. 2). They also sought to reduce crime and improve
police-community relations, in part through the hiring of Black police—a policy demand with
important fiscal and coalitional ratifications given the place of public sector employment in the
maintenance of urban coalitions. For example, Chicago’s NAACP focused a great deal on policing
during the Great Migration. However, the city machine’s reliance on a highly politicized police force
frustrated the ability of Black voters and organizations to make and secure their policy demands
(Balto 2019; Krinitsky 2017). This fact points again to the importance of municipal level formal
institutions, as well as structures of local electoral coalitions, in mediating how—and how
successfully—new residents could secure change through democratic channels.
Given that suffrage restriction by midcentury was more difficult to engineer, especially
outside the South (Keyssar 2000), weakening the potential electoral influence of non-White voters to
avoid paying for these public goods would require either a vote dilution device (such as at-large
18
election districts for council seats) or a greater reliance on policymakers out of the direct reach of
these voters. Relatedly, research on American political development also suggests that the addition
of non-White voters would trigger an institutional response by urban incumbent elites. While many
Northern states refused to reenfranchise (after a Jacksonian era wave of disfranchisement (Bateman
2018; Masur 2021)) Black voters after the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment in the long run
succeeded in safeguarding non-southern voting rights. We could imagine that their own racism, their
own perception of having different policy preferences than African Americans, or their own
concerns for the impact of Black voters on their own governing coalitions might have motivated
them to frustrate the electoral participation and political influence of non-White voters.
But it is significant that, in the latter half of the 19th century, the reentry of Black voters into
Northern elections bore few costs for political incumbents precisely because there were so few such
voters (Walton et al 2012; Davis 2011). The Great Migration could thus alter those calculations. In
other words, we imagine that the Great Migration raised the prospect of the long-delayed potential
costs of Black reenfranchisement for local authorities. In the 20th century, a new wave of suffrage
restrictions might have been opposed by a diverse set of actors; thus, insulating municipal
policymaking from non-White voters may have been a common response to a rapidly diversifying
electorate.
There are multiple pathways to effect such insulation. For instance, as Black voters grew
more numerous, city authorities in Oakland, CA intentionally transferred policymaking bodies
involving policing, economic planning, and other matters to non-profits more easily controlled by
incumbent elites and out of reach of the city’s voters (Rhomberg 2004: ch. 7). At the limit, political
elites use their influence in state legislatures—some of them so gerrymandered as to be classified as
“countermajoritarian” bodies (Seifter 2021)—in effect to override democratically elected authorities
19
through the state level appointment of emergency managers (Berman 2019: ch. 7). This corrosion of
local democracy is much more likely in areas with larger African-American populations (Seamster
2018; Nickels, Clark, and Wood 2020). However, the most common pathway for municipal
authorities, was, and remains, the city manager system.
Data and Methods
Great Migration Instrument
We use the Great Migration shift-share instrument developed by Derenoncourt (2022).
Building on a Great Migration shift-share instrument from Boustan (2017), Derenoncourt uses the
complete count 1940 Census microdata on the entire population of Black southern migrants into
Northern cities to create a dataset of all possible dyads of southern counties and Northern
commuting zones (CZs). Importantly, Boustan (2017) and Derenoncourt (2022) find that, in general,
even nearby southern counties had very distinct patterns of Black migration to Northern cities.
Derenoncourt (2022) then uses machine learning to predict inflows and outflows of African
Americans between these dyads based on many characteristics of local economies and societies. For
instance, she finds that domestic World War II spending was especially helpful for explaining
differences in outmigration from high-military spending areas in Virginia, where many Black
residents moved to Baltimore, in contrast to Alabama, where many Black residents moved to Detroit
after negative shocks to the cotton economy (2022: 379-380).
Based on these machine learning predictions, predicted Great Migration patterns serve as an
instrument for actual migration patterns of the Great Migration. The instrument isolates exogenous
variation in Black migration to Northern cities by estimating the amount of migration that is above
or beyond what the model would predict based on observed local characteristics. For example, some
cities were very high on both predicted and actual Great Migration influxes, such as Gary, Indiana.
20
Other cities, such as Burlington, Vermont, had low predicted and actual Great Migration influxes. By
contrast, some cities like San Diego, California had low predicted but high actual Black
in-migration, while other cities, such as nearby Santa Barbara, had real Great Migration influxes that
were far smaller than the shift-share instrument would predict.
Figure 3: Destinations for the Great Migration of Black Americans, 1940-1970
Note: Figure 3 shows the distribution of Black migration (1940-1970) to US counties in non-southern states
(Derenoncourt 2022). Migration is measured at the commuting zone level; commuting zones are clusters of counties.
The final sample of Great Migration destinations for our main analyses includes commuting zones in
states that, on net, increased their Black populations between 1940 and 1970: states in the
northeastern, midwestern, and western Census regions, as well as Maryland and Delaware.
9
9
The cities of Boise City, ID; East Providence, RI; Huntington Park, CA; West Haven, CT; and Warwick, RI were not
included due to missing historical Black population data.
21
Local Political Institutions
Our data on cities’ political institutions come from historical issues of the Municipal
Yearbook (published by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA)). Research
assistants scanned physical copies of Municipal Yearbook tables and cleaned the digitized datasets
for errors in optical character recognition. Municipal Yearbook data has been used in major studies
of political competition in urban regimes (Trounstine 2008), enforcement of the Voting Rights Act
(Ang 2019), proportional representation in local government (Santucci 2022), race and municipal
employment (McClain 1993), and land zoning (Sahn 2021). However, we believe that ours is the
first study to use a measure of switches to city manager systems over this time period.
Figure 4: Switches to City Manager System, 1940-1972
Note: Figure 4 shows Great Migration destination counties in our sample in which no municipalities switched to a city
manager system (gray), or at least one municipality switched to a city manager system (red).
22
In 1940, 15 percent of cities in our sample featured city manager systems. By 1972, that
number had grown to 42 percent, a 27 percentage-point increase. Of the 167 cities in our sample that
switched to city manager government between 1940 and 1972, 125 switched from a mayor-council
system. Three switched from town meeting systems, and 39 from town commissions.
Table 1: Switches to City Manager System, 1940-1972
City 1940 1972 City 1940 1972 City 1940 1972
Globe, AZ MC CM DeKalb, IL MC CM Lodi, NJ MC CM
Albany, CA MC CM Downers Grove, IL CO CM Ridgewood, NJ CO CM
Martinez, CA MC CM Glen Ellyn, IL MC CM Newton, NJ TM CM
Fresno, CA CO CM Hinsdale, IL MC CM Batavia, NY MC CM
Hanford, CA MC CM Lombard, IL MC CM Long Beach, NY MC CM
Arcadia, CA MC CM Naperville, IL CO CM Geneva, NY MC CM
Bell, CA MC CM Villa Park, IL MC CM Troy, NY MC CM
Bev. Hills, CA MC CM Wheaton, IL CO CM Ogdensburg, NY MC CM
Culver City, CA MC CM Elgin, IL CO CM Bronxville, NY MC CM
Hunt. Park., CA MC CM Highland Park, IL CO CM Hastings, NY MC CM
Inglewood, CA MC CM Decatur, IL CO CM Mount Kisco, NY MC CM
Lynwood, CA MC CM Wood River, IL MC CM Ossining, NY CO CM
Monrovia, CA MC CM Centralia, IL CO CM Peekskill, NY MC CM
Montebello, CA MC CM Woodstock, IL MC CM Rye, NY MC CM
S. Fernando, CA MC CM Bloomington, IL MC CM Delaware, OH MC CM
San Gabriel, CA MC CM Normal, IL MC CM Zanesville, OH MC CM
S. Monica, CA CO CM Peoria, IL MC CM Sidney, OH MC CM
Torrance, CA MC CM Joliet, IL CO CM Corvallis, OR MC CM
Whittier, CA MC CM Burlington, IA CO CM Eugene, OR MC CM
Napa, CA MC CM Des Moines, IA CO CM Albany, OR MC CM
Anaheim, CA MC CM Sioux City, IA CO CM Salem, OR MC CM
Fullerton, CA MC CM Lawrence, KS MC CM Dormont, PA MC CM
Santa Ana, CA MC CM Hutchinson, KS CO CM Oakmont, PA MC CM
Corona, CA MC CM Wellington, KS CO CM Wilkinsburg, PA MC CM
Riverside, CA MC CM Brunswick, ME TM CM Hollidaysburg, PA MC CM
Colton, CA MC CM Augusta, ME MC CM Bristol, PA MC CM
Ontario, CA MC CM Gardiner, ME MC CM Lehighton, PA MC CM
Redlands, CA MC CM Rockland, ME MC CM West Chester, PA MC CM
Natl. City, CA MC CM Bath, ME MC CM Meadville, PA CO CM
Lodi, CA MC CM Gloucester, MA CO CM Mechanicsburg, PA MC CM
S. Luis Ob., CA MC CM Concord, MA TM CM Middletown, PA MC CM
Burlingame, CA MC CM Lowell, MA MC CM Indiana, PA MC CM
Daly City, CA MC CM Medford, MA MC CM Allentown, PA CO CM
S. Barbara, CA MC CM Worcester, MA MC CM East Stroudsburg, PA MC CM
Santa Maria, CA MC CM Albion, MI MC CM Stroudsburg, PA MC CM
Santa Clara, CA MC CM Battle Creek, MI CO CM Pottstown, PA MC CM
Santa Cruz, CA CO CM Marshall, MI MC CM Tamaqua, PA MC CM
Santa Paula, CA MC CM Charlotte, MI MC CM Oil City, PA CO CM
Woodland, CA MC CM Adrian, MI CO CM Warren, PA MC CM
Englewood, CO MC CM Roseville, MI CO CM Latrobe, PA MC CM
Longmont, CO MC CM Midland, MI MC CM Barrington, RI MC CM
Canon City, CO MC CM Berkley, MI CO CM Newport, RI MC CM
La Junta, CO MC CM Holland, MI MC CM East Providence, RI MC CM
Pueblo, CO CO CM Port Huron, MI CO CM Ogden, UT CO CM
23
Hartford, CT MC CM Ann Arbor, MI MC CM Saint Albans C., VT MC CM
Norwich, CT MC CM Ypsilanti, MI MC CM Puyallup, WA MC CM
Champaign, IL CO CM G. Pointe Pk., MI MC CM Tacoma, WA CO CM
Brookfield, IL MC CM Springfield, MO CO CM Anacortes, WA MC CM
Elmwood Prk, IL MC CM Independence, MO MC CM Spokane, WA CO CM
Evanston, IL MC CM Joplin, MO CO CM Yakima, WA CO CM
La Grange, IL MC CM Clayton, MO MC CM Menomonie, WI CO CM
Maywood, IL MC CM W. Groves, MO CO CM Eau Claire, WI CO CM
Oak Park, IL MC CM Concord, NH MC CM Fond du Lac, WI CO CM
Park Ridge, IL MC CM Portsmouth, NH MC CM Whitefish Bay, WI MC CM
Skokie, IL MC CM Dover, NH MC CM Oshkosh, WI MC CM
DeKalb, IL MC CM Fair Lawn, NJ MC CM
In summary, our treatment variable is a measure of Black migration at the commuting zone
level, and our outcome measure, switching to a city manager system, is measured at the municipality
level clustered within commuting zones.
Not all kinds of cities tend to have or switch to city manager systems during the 20th century.
City manager systems are mostly concentrated among smaller and midsize cities rather than the
U.S.’s largest metropolises. It is worth noting that in 1950, a majority of Americans inhabiting cities
lived beyond the one hundred largest cities (authors’ calculations, 1950 Census). Comparing cities
that do and do not switch to city manager government between 1940 and 1972, the median
populations are similar: 32,263 for cities that switch to city manager, and 35,862 for cities that do
not. However, the country’s largest metropolises, virtually all of which retain mayor-council
government, produce more distinct mean populations: about 46,500 for cities that switch to city
manager, and 126,000 for those that do not. (In our sample overall, the mean city population as of
1972 is about 104,000, and the median is about 33,500.) This is apparent in Figure 3 below, where
we plot the distribution of city populations of cities that do and do not switch to city manager. As we
describe in more detail in later sections, the fact that no large U.S. metropolis switches to a city
manager system prompts us to perform additional empirical analyses that focus on smaller and
midsize cities.
24
Figure 5: Switches to City Manager System by Population
Estimation Strategy
We implement our instrumental variables design with traditional two-stage least squares
models, which provide our main results of the effect of the Great Migration on municipal
institutions. Our preferred specification uses a binary indicator of city manager status in 1972 as the
dependent variable and adjusts for 1940 city manager status (a lagged dependent variable) to
estimate the effect of the Great Migration on change to a city manager system.
10
We also follow
10
Robustness checks in the Appendix instead use a “change score” that takes on a value of 1 if a city changes to a city
manager system between 1940 and 1972.
25
Derenoncourt (2022) in our main specification by adjusting for Census region fixed effects and
pretreatment (as of 1940) educational upward mobility, the share of the labor force in manufacturing
in commuting zones, and Black in-migration. We show in Appendix Table A3 that these
pretreatment covariates are relatively balanced across cities that do and do not switch to city
manager systems.
We cluster standard errors at the commuting zone level in all specifications because this is
the geographic level at which the Great Migration instrument is assigned. For the main two-stage
least squares estimates, we report both traditional cluster-robust (CR1) standard errors and
bootstrapped standard errors based on the cluster bootstrap-t procedure in Cameron, Gelbach, and
Miller (2008).
Table 2: First Stage
Note: Table 2 presents the first stage regression for predicted Great Migration as an instrument for the actual Great
Migration. Robust standard errors clustered on commuting zone are in parentheses.
Table 2 shows the results for the first stage of the two-stage least squares estimator. As
expected, predicted Great Migration flows are strongly and significantly correlated with real
26
education flows. The F-statistic in this first-stage regression, which helps us understand the strength
of the instrument (Bound, Jaeger, and Baker 1995), is 47.8 for the specification without controls and
59.9 for the specification with controls, suggesting that the Great Migration instrument is reasonably
strong.
Results
Table 3 presents our main results of the effect of the Great Migration on switching to a city
manager system. As a reminder, the OLS results are from a regression of city manager system on a
city’s Great Migration percentile; the reduced form (RF) results are from a regression of city
manager system on predicted Great Migration; and our IV specifications are from a two-stage least
square model using predicted Great Migration as an instrument for actual Great Migration patterns
with city manager system as the outcome.
In our main IV results, we find that a one-percentile increase of in-migration of Black
Americans to a city’s commuting zone increases a city’s likelihood of switching to a city manager
system by between 0.23 (no controls) and 0.75 (controls) percentage-points.
11
In other words, an
exogenous increase in Black migration that is equivalent to the difference in Black migration to the
Lancaster-Reading-Harrisburg-Lebanon-Carlisle commuting zone (44th percentile of Great
Migration destinations) on the one hand, and the Philadelphia-Vineland-Millville-Bridgeton
commuting zone (89th percentile of Great Migration destinations), on the other, would translate to a
10 to 34 percentage-point increase in the probability of switching to a city manager system. We
believe this effect size is substantial. For context, recall that 27 percent of cities in our sample switch
to city manager systems during this time.
11
We do not include stars for significance, but the p-values for these treatment effect estimates are 0.088 and 0.039,
respectively.
27
Table 3: Effect of Great Migration on City Manager System
Note: Table 3 presents OLS, reduced form (RF), and instrumental variables (IV) estimates for the effect of the Great
Migration (1940-1970) on switching to a city manager system (1940-1972). Robust standard errors clustered on
commuting zone are in parentheses. We provide additional cluster bootstrap standard errors for the IV models.
As discussed earlier and presented in Figure 3, smaller and midsize cities are those that tend
to switch to city manager systems. If large metropolises have virtually zero probability of switching
they would make problematic comparison cases. We therefore run our models on a restricted sample,
eliminating cities that have 1972 populations above 654,153—the population level of the largest US
city with a city manager system as of 1972 (San Antonio, TX).
12
Table 4 presents these results,
which are very similar to our main results in Table 3. In general, the magnitude of the estimates and
the standard errors are very slightly larger using the restricted sample in Table 4.
12
This restricted sample eliminates the following cities (in descending order of 1972 population): New York, NY;
Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Detroit, MI; Baltimore, MD; Cleveland, OH; Indianapolis, IN;
Milwaukee, WI; San Francisco, CA; San Diego, CA; Boston, MA; and St. Louis, MO.
28
Table 4: Effect of Great Migration on City Manager System (Excluding Large Cities)
Note: Table 4 presents OLS, reduced form (RF), and instrumental variables (IV) estimates for the effect of the Great
Migration (1940-1970) on switching to a city manager system (1940-1972) on a sample of cities with 1972 populations
below 654,153. Robust standard errors clustered on commuting zone are in parentheses. We provide additional cluster
bootstrap standard errors for the IV models.
Taken together, the results show a robust relationship: exogenous influxes of Black residents
increased the likelihood that Northern cities switched to city manager systems. Next, we delve into
the possible mechanisms behind this relationship with a case study of Santa Monica, CA.
The Case of Santa Monica, California
29
Santa Monica, California illustrates these dynamics well.
13
This might seem surprising given
its reputation as a haven for the New Left and racial liberalism, and its status as the political base of
Tom Hayden’s highly successful rent control movement (Kann 1986). However, as we show here,
White elites’ concerns about the political consequences of the Great Migration sparked an overhaul
of the city’s political system in 1946 that insulated policymaking from residents of color and
organized labor.
In 1906, Santa Monica, like most California cities, adopted a city charter providing for a
strong mayor (with the power to veto council-approved ordinances) and a seven-member city
council whose members were elected via districts. As efforts to spread commission government
increased, in 1914 it switched to a commission system. Each of three commissioners, elected at
large, would supervise one of three domains: public safety, public works, and finance. The Public
Safety Commissioner was also ex officio Mayor and Commission chair (Kousser 2018: 6; Santa
Monica City Council 2021). In the citywide referendum on the new charter, the only opposition
came from the city’s poorest precincts (Kousser 2018: 52-53).
By the early 1920s, national discussions pointed out several flaws with commission
government. In particular, critics considered the division of policy areas—one per commission
member—as discouraging city administrators from seeing the city and its interrelated problems as
one whole. National networks of reformers soon coordinated on their preference for centralizing
political authority in a single city manager (Rice 1977; Stewart 1950).
As World War II drew to a close, Santa Monica’s elites, led by the Chamber of Commerce
and encouraged by the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, the city’s dominant (and right-wing)
13
This case study benefits from many years of litigation concerning the city’s likely violation of the California Voting
Rights Act (Greenwood and Stephanopoulos 2023). This has yielded vast amounts of material in the form of amicus
briefs and, most importantly, the expert testimony of Morgan Kousser (2018). The California Supreme Court ruled on
this case last week (Aug. 24, 2023) largely in favor of the plaintiffs.
30
newspaper, formed a “citywide” Citizens Charter Committee. This Committee called for elections to
a “Board of Freeholders” that would draft a new charter. All fifteen freeholders elected were White;
14 lived in the town’s wealthiest area, and 13 received the endorsement of the Evening Outlook
(Pico Neighborhood Association v. Santa Monica 2020: 3; Kousser 2018: 6). The freeholders
proposed a switch from a commission to a city manager system. Rather than three commissioners,
voters would elect seven city councilors, all at-large. As with most city manager governments, Santa
Monica would retain a mayor, but the merely ceremonial office would be chosen and filled by a
member of the city council (Santa Monica City Council 2021).
Critiques of commission governance were old hat by 1920; why did Santa Monica wait until
1946 to consider seriously a switch to a city manager system? Perceptions of the city’s demographic
changes clearly provide part of the answer. The town had long been home to a large non-Hispanic
White majority, a small Hispanic minority, as well as smaller communities of Asian-and
African-Americans. However, Santa Monica grew sharply during the war. This growth was spurred
by the Douglas (later McDonnell-Douglas) Corporation’s military transport aircraft factory, which
itself employed more individuals (43,000) than lived in the town in 1930 (about 37,000) (Parker
2013: ch. 2). The city had grown by 44% from 1930 to 1940, to 53,500. Six years later, Santa
Monica’s population had grown another 26%, to more than 67,000. While the share of non-Anglos
remained small, the Evening Outlook repeatedly discussed the city’s non-White population.
Segregated in a small area, it had grown by 69% in just six years, more than half of that growth
driven by an influx of African-Americans (Kousser 2018: 54, 191). Moreover, more than six
thousand African-Americans moved to neighboring Los Angeles each month in 1943; 200,000
arrived in the 1940s alone (Sides 2003: 43).
31
Interracial tensions were also growing, as was inflammatory rhetoric among White elites
about California’s demographic transition. This transition, and the growing support among
Democrats and some Republicans (including Republican Governor Earl Warren) for state level
actions to reduce racial discrimination, increased the political salience of race relations and anxieties
about demographic change (Chen, Mickey, and Van Houweling 2008; HoSang 2010).
In a series of editorials in favor of the switch to city manager government, the Evening
Outlook argued that the city “can and should develop into a remarkably homogeneous community. . .
The cry that ‘minorities must be represented’ ” should be rejected. The Freeholders “s hould not
allow special groups to write any part of the charter for them.” Moreover, the “interests of minorities
is always best protected by a system which favors the election of liberal-minded persons who are not
compelled to play peanut politics,” a mode of politics made much more likely in the absence of the
centralization of authority in a city manager and in a world without at-large elections (Kousser 2018:
7, 60).
Opponents of the new charter agreed that district elections would help elect
African-American, Hispanic, and pro-labor candidates. More importantly for our purposes, they
echoed charges across the country by working class interests that the centralization of authority in
unelected (and unrecallable) managers was undemocratic, even—in the words of labor spokesmen in
Houston—a system fit for “Hitler” (Bridges 1997a: 113). As Santa Monica’s “Anti-Charter
Committee” argued,
[w]ith seven councilmen elected at-large . . . and a city manager
responsible to the seven councilmen plus a dictatorship that has so
long ruled Santa Monica (without regard to minorities) where will
these people be? The proposed ruling groups control the chief of
police . . . and through him the police force . . . and the city attorney,
the personnel director, the health officer, etc. Where will the laboring
man go? Where will the Jewish, colored, or Mexican go for aid in his
32
special problems? . . . The proposed charter is not fair — it is not
democratic. It is a power grab (quoted in Kousser 2018: 61).
Proposition 11, a statewide ballot referendum appearing on the same November, 1946 ballot
as a referendum to accept or reject the city’s switch to city manager government, called for
California to establish fairly robust anti-discrimination regulation of workplaces through a state level
Fair Employment Practices Committee (Chen, Mickey, and Van Houweling 2008). Ecological
analysis of voting returns for Proposition 11—which failed by more than a two-to-one
margin—makes clear two important dynamics. First, Republican precincts throughout the state were
highly opposed to Proposition 11, despite backing from party leadership; this held true for Santa
Monica’s political leaders (as evidenced by the Evening Outlook) as well (Kousser 2018: 58).
Meanwhile, Democratic Party-aligned organized interests, party leaders, and voters strongly backed
the measure.
Second, in Santa Monica, support for the new charter and opposition to a state level FEPC
were highly correlated: about 85% of residents who opposed the FEPC backed the new charter,
while more than two-thirds of those who supported the FEPC opposed the charter (Kousser 2018:
63-65). Given the usefulness of the Proposition 11 referendum as a window onto racial attitudes
(Chen, Mickey, and Van Houweling 2008; HoSang 2010), these high correlations suggest a strong
racial dimension to voters’ preferences over municipal governance. Further, they corroborate our
view that racial demographic change motivated efforts to insulate municipal policymaking from
more racially diverse electorates.
The effects of the change in Santa Monica’s governance have continued to reverberate for
decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, the all-white, elite-dominated city government implemented “urban
renewal” and freeway construction that decimated Hispanic and African-American neighborhoods
and dispersed thousands of their residents, many of them outside of the city (Kousser 2018: 67).
33
Municipal elections remain highly polarized by race, with Hispanics, now about 13% of the
population, “usually quite cohesive in their voting behavior,” and non-Hispanic whites “sufficiently
cohesive as to insure that Latino candidates usually lost.” In the sixty years since the switch to an
at-large, city manager system, fifteen of sixteen Hispanic candidates have failed to capture a local
office (Kousser 2018: 32). Indeed, the self-styled racial liberals running the city since the late 1970s
(Kann 1986) have continued to block changes to the city’s political structure, in large part because
their ‘party’—Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights—has benefited from slate nominations that
benefit from the continued use of at-large elections (Kousser 2018: 91-92, 94). As Morgan Kousser
told a journalist, in light of Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and other cities’ experiences, “we’ve
realized California is not all that different from the South” (Kramer 1992; Kousser 1999: ch. 2).
Conclusion
The conventional story of democratization in the 20th century United States highlights the
triumph of national democratic reforms over the subnational authoritarianism of Jim Crow states.
More recently, scholars have highlighted a counter-narrative that stresses the incompleteness of this
democratization on the ground, with its manifestations in racially authoritarian policing (Soss and
Weaver 2017) and persistent and even expanding de facto segregation in housing and education
(Massey and Denton 1989). Additional research has documented how many state governments,
enabled by Supreme Court decisions, have rolled back democratization through extreme
gerrymandering and voter suppression laws in recent decades (Grumbach 2022). Importantly, much
of this research on America’s incomplete democratization, especially research on policing and mass
incarceration, has focused on the local level.
34
Yet even as we have learned much about the local manifestations of unequal democracy and
the role of state governments in weakening democratic institutions, we know much less about the
role of formal local institutions in the incomplete democratization of the U.S. These local institutions
are key because they mediate the relationship between political inputs, such as the political
preferences and participation of local residents, and outputs, such as the rise of authoritarian policing
(Gonzalez 2020) and mass incarceration. Here, we consider the effect of the Great Migration on
local institutions. The Great Migration expanded Black electorates in northern cities, creating new
incentives for politicians to respond to the concerns of Black Americans and increasing the presence
of Black elected officials. But why did this diversifying democracy in northern cities fail to create a
more racially egalitarian democracy?
We argue that one answer to this question is that, in response to the Great Migration,
Northern cities moved to insulate their political institutions from their increasingly Black electorates.
We study this question quantitatively using a shift-share instrument that isolates exogenous influxes
of Black Americans to northern cities. We find that greater influxes of Black migrants caused
northern cities to switch to city manager systems, which insulate municipal administration from
voters. Our finding helps make sense of incomplete political incorporation and continuing political
inequality (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 2003a, 2003b; Mollenkopf 1991) brought about by
disempowering city council members, mayors, and their Black supporters in local electorates.
Relatedly, our study helps to make sense of other findings in the political economy literature, such as
the finding that the Great Migration led to an increase in police spending per capita but not education
per capita at the local level (Derenoncourt 2022), and intensified efforts to displace residents of color
via “urban renewal” (Shi et al 2022).
35
Our inquiry opens up paths for further research on democratic institutions at the local level.
In comparative view, America’s democratization was shaped to an unusual degree by its distinctive
federal system. We thus see a need to study the links between municipal institutions and downstream
outcomes related to local policy and bureaucratic responsiveness to constituents, as well as outcomes
related to civil rights and liberties in practice. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the area of
policing, where, despite nominal democratic equality in law, policing remains highly authoritarian
and unresponsive to race-class subjugated communities. What is the relationship between municipal
institutional structure and racially authoritarian policing?
Reflecting on an analysis of a century of efforts to build political monopolies at the local
level, Jessica Trounstine (2009: 93) concludes, “[T]hose in power can be expected to build defenses
against durable shifts in governing authority, and when they succeed, as both machine and reform
coalitions did, portions of the population are likely to suffer.” We believe that Trounstine’s
conclusion has broad implications for American democratization as a whole. The decentralized
system of American federalism means that any assessment of American democracy must account for
the state of democracy at the national, state, and local levels, as well as feedbacks among these
levels. Despite increased scholarly attention on the role of the state level in American democracy,
literature on local democracy has been relatively isolated from mainstream literature on American
democracy as a whole. We argue that this has obscured how changes at the local level served to
corrode many of the gains of national democracy reforms in the 20th century.
36
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Appendix for
“The Insulation of Local Governance from Black Electoral Power:
Northern Cities and the Great Migration”
45
Robustness Checks
Table A1: First Stage (Alternate Specification)
Note: Table A1 presents the first stage regression for predicted Great Migration as an instrument for the Great Migration.
In contrast to the main specifications in Table 2, Model 1 and Model 2 do not control for 1940 municipal government
type. Robust standard errors clustered on commuting zone are in parentheses.
Table A2: Main Results (Alternate Specification)
Note: Table A2 presents OLS, reduced form (RF), and instrumental variables (IV) estimates for the effect of the Great
Migration (1940-1970) on switching to a city manager system (1940-1972). In contrast to the main specifications in
Table 3, these models use change to a city manager system as the dependent variable and therefore do not control for
1940 municipal government type. Robust standard errors clustered on commuting zone are in parentheses. We provide
additional cluster bootstrap standard errors for the IV models.
46
Table A3: Balance on Pretreatment Covariates
Treatment Black Migration
(1935-1940)
Upward Mobility
(1940)
Manufacturing Share
(1940)
Switched from city manager system 0.03 56.13 20.69
Did not switch 0.13 54.25 25.47
Switched to city manager system 0.15 55.11 22.21
47
PNA 