Cities in American federalism: evidence on state-local government conflict from a survey of mayors

Previous scholarship on American federalism has largely focused on the national government's increasingly conflictual relationship with the states. While some studies have explored the rise of mandates at the state level, there has been comparatively less attention on state–local relationships. Using a new survey of mayors, we explore variations in local government attitudes towards their state governments. We find some evidence that, regardless of partisanship, mayors in more conservative states are unhappy about state funding and—especially—regulations. More strikingly, we also uncover a partisan mismatch in which Democratic mayors provide especially negative ratings of their state’s funding and—even more strongly—regulations. These findings have important implications for state–local relations as cities continue to become more Democratic and Republicans increasingly dominate state-level contests

Do mayors run for higher office? New evidence on progressive ambition

The mayor’s office potentially offers a launchpad for statewide and national political ambitions. We know relatively little, however, about how frequently mayors actually run for higher office, and which mayors choose to do so. This article combines longitudinal data on the career paths of the mayors of 200 big cities with new survey and interview data to investigate these questions. While we find that individual and city traits—especially gender—have some predictive power, the overwhelming story is that relatively few mayors—just under one-fifth—ever seek higher office. We suggest that ideological, institutional, and electoral factors all help to explain why so few mayors exhibit progressive ambition

Partisanship and preemption: mayors on local autonomy

Contribution to spotlight in PS: Political Science & Politics: Home Rule Be Damned: Exploring Policy Conflicts between the Statehouse and City Hal

Few big-city mayors see running for higher office as appealing

Former mayors are not unknown in Congress and in governors' mansions - but does running a big city act as a springboard for higher office? To answer this question, Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, Maxwell Palmer and Robert J. Pressel collected data from nearly 200 large US cities and interviewed 94 mayors. They find that mayors are not likely to seek higher office, and tend to have little interest in doing so – especially if they are women or black

Gaps and Opportunities: Supporting Bostons BIPOC Small Businesses

Small businesses play a central role in cities: they foster growth and innovation in local economies, provide critical jobs for residents, contribute to the vibrancy of urban corridors, and help to anchor neighborhoods. However, over the last two years, the pandemic has devastated the small business community, forcing many to shutter their doors. Nationally, the number of active business owners fell by 22 percent from February to April 2020. Black-owned businesses closed at almost twice the rate of other businesses, experiencing a 41 percent drop during that time.Against this more recent backdrop, the racial wealth gap continues to persist, as systemic bias contributes to white households both earning more and having more — and more valuable — assets on average than households of color. These gaps not only manifest in personal and household wealth, but in small business creation and operation as well. Boston has the potential to be a model for other cities by moving aggressively and intentionally to close these gaps, including by addressing biases that limit the opportunities of small business owners and entrepreneurs of color.Based on in-depth, structured, qualitative interviews with leaders across 30 nonprofits, community-based organizations, city agencies, and others, this report seeks to:reveal the strengths and weaknesses of Boston's ecosystem of small business advocates, funders, and technical assistance providerscapture their views on the challenges confronting our region's BIPOC small business owners and entrepreneurs, andcollect their ideas for changes in the future. It endeavors to provide new intelligence and insights, not just for Boston but for other cities

City learning: evidence of policy information diffusion from a survey of U.S. mayors

Most studies of policy diffusion attempt to infer the processes through which policies spread by observing outputs (policy adoptions). We approach these issues from the other direction by directly analyzing a key policymaking input—information about others’ policies. Moreover, we do so by investigating policy diffusion in cities rather than states. Using a survey of U.S. mayors, more specifically, mayors’ own lists of cities they look to for ideas, we find evidence that distance, similarity, and capacity all influence the likelihood of a policy maker looking to a particular jurisdiction for policy information. We also consider whether these traits are complements or substitutes and provide some evidence for the latter. Specifically, we find that, at times, mayors eschew similarity and distance to look to highly respected “high capacity” cities but that there is no tradeoff between distance and similarity.Accepted manuscrip

Who participates in local government? Evidence from meeting minutes

Scholars and policymakers have highlighted institutions that enable community participation as a potential buffer against existing political inequalities. Yet these venues may bias policy discussions in favor of an unrepresentative group of individuals. To explore who participates, we compile a novel data set by coding thousands of instances of citizens speaking at planning and zoning board meetings concerning housing development. We match individuals to a voter file to investigate local political participation in housing and development policy. We find that individuals who are older, male, longtime residents, voters in local elections, and homeowners are significantly more likely to participate in these meetings. These individuals overwhelmingly (and to a much greater degree than the general public) oppose new housing construction. These participatory inequalities have important policy implications and may be contributing to rising housing costs.Accepted manuscrip

Evolutionary trajectories in rugged fitness landscapes

We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a single genotype, the most populated genotype \textit{jumps} from a local fitness maximum to another and eventually reaches the global maximum. We use a strong selection limit, which reduces the dynamics beyond the first time step to the competition between independent mutant subpopulations, to study the dynamics of this model and of a simpler one-dimensional model which ignores the geometry of the sequence space. We find that the fit genotypes that appear along a trajectory are a subset of suitably defined fitness \textit{records}, and exploit several results from the record theory for non-identically distributed random variables. The genotypes that contribute to the trajectory are those records that are not \textit{bypassed} by superior records arising further away from the initial population. Several conjectures concerning the statistics of bypassing are extracted from numerical simulations. In particular, for the one-dimensional model, we propose a simple relation between the bypassing probability and the dynamic exponent which describes the scaling of the typical evolution time with genome size. The latter can be determined exactly in terms of the extremal properties of the fitness distribution.Comment: Figures in color; minor revisions in tex

Cost-effectiveness of financial incentives to promote adherence to depot antipsychotic medication: economic evaluation of a cluster-randomised controlled trial

Background: Offering a modest financial incentive to people with psychosis can promote adherence to depot antipsychotic medication, but the cost-effectiveness of this approach has not been examined. Methods: Economic evaluation within a pragmatic cluster-randomised controlled trial. 141 patients under the care of 73 teams (clusters) were randomised to intervention or control; 138 patients with diagnoses of schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorder or bipolar disorder participated. Intervention participants received £15 per depot injection over 12 months, additional to usual acute, mental and community primary health services. The control group received usual health services. Main outcome measures: incremental cost per 20% increase in adherence to depot antipsychotic medication; incremental cost of ‘good’ adherence (defined as taking at least 95% of the prescribed number of depot medications over the intervention period). Findings: Economic and outcome data for baseline and 12-month follow-up were available for 117 participants. The adjusted difference in adherence between groups was 12.2% (73.4% control vs. 85.6% intervention); the adjusted costs difference was £598 (95% CI -£4 533, £5 730). The extra cost per patient to increase adherence to depot medications by 20% was £982 (95% CI -£8 020, £14 000). The extra cost per patient of achieving 'good' adherence was £2 950 (CI -£19 400, £27 800). Probability of cost-effectiveness exceeded 97.5%at willingness-to-pay values of £14 000 for a 20% increase in adherence and £27 800 for good adherence. Interpretation: Offering a modest financial incentive to people with psychosis is cost-effective in promoting adherence to depot antipsychotic medication. Direct healthcare costs (including costs of the financial incentive) are unlikely to be increased by this intervention. Trial Registration: ISRCTN.com 7776928

Evaluation of machine-learning methods for ligand-based virtual screening

Machine-learning methods can be used for virtual screening by analysing the structural characteristics of molecules of known (in)activity, and we here discuss the use of kernel discrimination and naive Bayesian classifier (NBC) methods for this purpose. We report a kernel method that allows the processing of molecules represented by binary, integer and real-valued descriptors, and show that it is little different in screening performance from a previously described kernel that had been developed specifically for the analysis of binary fingerprint representations of molecular structure. We then evaluate the performance of an NBC when the training-set contains only a very few active molecules. In such cases, a simpler approach based on group fusion would appear to provide superior screening performance, especially when structurally heterogeneous datasets are to be processed