The Public Assistance Policies of Cities and the Justice Concerns of Elected Officials: The Centrality of the Floors Principle in Addressing Urban Poverty

City councils are significant, though seldom central, actors in local policy networks providing public assistance to disadvantaged residents. Mayors and council members in 12 American cities more often support than oppose public assistance initiatives. They claim that their own normative judgments are more important to their preferences and voting behavior on such matters than are public opinion, group demands, or economic considerations. While such elected officials hold a variety of justice principles, the most important of these affecting their positions on public assistance issues is the “floors” principle. A broad ethical commitment to providing social minimums enhances support for living-wage ordinances, for linking subsidies for economic development to assistance to less advantaged citizens, and for exempting spending on social services from budget cuts. We discuss the implications of these findings for major theories of urban politics and policies—collective-action theory, regime theory, and pluralism—and for advocates on behalf of the urban poor

House or Home? Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation

In many political systems legislators face a fundamental trade-off between allocating effort to constituency service and to national policy-making activities, respectively. How do voters want their elected representatives to solve this trade-off? This article provides new insights into this question by developing a conjoint analysis approach to estimating voters’ preferences over their legislator's effort allocation. This approach is applied in Britain, where it is found that effort allocation has a significant effect on voter evaluations of legislators, even in a political system where other legislator attributes – in particular, party affiliation – might be expected to predominate. This effect is nonlinear, with voters generally preferring a moderate balance of constituency and national policy work. Preferences over legislator effort allocation are not well-explained by self-interest or more broadly by instrumental considerations. They are, however, associated with voters’ local-cosmopolitan orientation, suggesting that heuristic reasoning based on underlying social dispositions may be more important in determining preferences over representative activities

Why Symbolic Representation Frames Parliamentary Public Engagement

The UK Parliament’s activity in public engagement has recently expanded considerably. Faced with declining levels of trust, it has invested considerable time and resources to new activities focusing specifically on engagement: educational resources and cultural events among many others. This embodies a new role for parliament of increasing importance particularly in the context of the twenty-first century parliament. This article analyses the aims of public engagement and its consequences for representation. We explore the potential representative role of public engagement, identifying key changes that have affected the relationship between public and parliament. We utilise evidence from documentary analysis and elite in-depth interviews with parliamentary officials to show that public engagement planning aims to develop amongst the public a sense of connectivity that relies on more collective and symbolic forms of representation, which seek to present the institution detached from its actors and politics. We utilise constructivist representation theories to support our analysis