Can strong mayors empower weak cities? On the power of local executives in a federal system.

• Author: Schragger, Richard C.
• Position: Symposium on Executive Power

ESSAY CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. THE STRONG-MAYOR MOVEMENT II. THE WEAK MAYOR IN THE PAROCHIAL CITY A. How the Formal Separation of Functions Weakens Cities and Mayors B. How Vertical Competition Weakens Cities and Mayors III. THE STRONG MAYOR IN THE DEMOCRATIC CITY CONCLUSION Things could be worse. I could be a mayor.

--Lyndon Johnson (1)

INTRODUCTION

Mayors have a special status in American political mythology. The institution of the mayoralty is vaguely disreputable yet deeply democratic, often associated with corruption but also lauded for urban civic achievement, an office that gives voice to underrepresented interests but that has often been an organ of elite manipulation. Like the city it represents, the mayoralty embodies the ambivalences of the democratic experiment: the simultaneous attraction and revulsion to the exercise of political power, the professed allegiance to--and deep skepticism of--democratic self-government, especially by and for local people. City government--and municipal affairs more generally--has often been understood as requiring a tradeoff between democratic responsiveness and managerial competence, between politics and administration. (2) Unlike the presidency or the governorship, the mayoralty has been suspect because it seems to pose the starkest choice between democracy and good government.

The history of the modern mayoralty has tended toward the suppression of the former in favor of the latter. Indeed, the most conspicuous characteristic of the modern mayoralty is its lack of power, which can be attributed in the first instance to the successful municipal reform efforts of the early 1900s. Since 1915, the National Municipal League--the leading instrument of municipal reform--has repudiated the mayoralty. It has instead championed the council-manager form of government, a structure that is designed to divide politics and administration by vesting executive and legislative authority in an elected council and administrative authority in a professional city manager. In this regime, the mayor is normally a figurehead, and political power is purposefully fragmented. In small and medium cities, and some large ones, this reformist vision of expert administration, insulated from democratic control and independent of political power, has dominated.

Mayoral powerlessness is being reconsidered however, at least as a formal matter. A number of cities have recently revised their "council-manager" or "weak mayor" municipal charters in favor of a "strong mayor" structure, giving mayors veto powers and increased powers over appointments, and, in some cases, eliminating the city manager. Other cities with traditional "mayor-council" structures have successfully lobbied state legislatures to give the mayor control over important municipal institutions, like the school system, that have traditionally been outside mayoral authority. There are a number of reasons for this centralizing tendency, many of them specific to the politics of particular cities. What strong-mayor movements have in common, however, is the belief that a diffuse constitutional structure creates problems of accountability. Today's reformers have reversed two assumptions that animated earlier reforms: that politics should or can be screened from administration and that centralized power in an executive invites corruption. Reformers now believe that a more executive-centered institutional structure can yield tangible governance benefits.

This Essay considers the strong-mayor movement in the context of a political and constitutional system in which cities are relatively weak. Scholarly considerations of city government often concern the relative internal advantages or disadvantages of the council-manager or mayor-council structure (or variations on those structures). The strong-mayor movement is just the most recent attempt to address the problems of urban governance through institutional design; it reflects the reformer's inclination to use procedural fixes to address substantive problems.

But urban governance is highly constrained governance. Cities are simply not significant wielders of power in our political and constitutional system. Thus, the city's political structure--whether reformed or unreformed--and the strength of the city's mayoralty may have little to do with city leaders' ability to pursue desired policy outcomes. The mayoralty is "constitutionally" weak; its power is limited by the same forces that limit city power more generally.

The mayor's constitutional weakness can be explained in part by America's history of anti-urbanism, which was early articulated by Thomas Jefferson, reached its reformist heights at the end of the nineteenth century in reaction to the urban political machine, and culminated with the rise of the suburbs and the fall of post-New Deal urban liberalism. Suburbanites continue to embrace the notion that municipal governance is primarily administrative or technical. Indeed, suburban locales--most of which adhere to a weak-mayor or council-manager structure--offer an explicit alternative to the "messy" politics of the city, an image of governance in which executive power--indeed, the exercise of political power of any kind--is submerged and repressed.

A more structural explanation (and the one I want to emphasize here), however, is federalism. The primary form of American political decentralization is regional rather than municipal--states, not cities, are the salient sites for constitutionally protected "local" governance. As a result, cities and their leaders are three levels down the political food chain and must normally ask the states for whatever powers they have or wish to exercise. This city subservience has an effect on political culture. Mayors have experienced periods of influence in national policymaking, but, except in rare circumstances, mayors are not serious players in national politics and rarely use the mayoralty as a stepping stone to national political prominence. The mayoralty is both a thankless job and often a dead-end one. (3)

This may explain why almost nothing has been written about the mayoralty in the legal literature. When addressing the issue of executive power, legal scholars tend to think in terms of the presidency and the Federal Constitution's horizontal separation of powers. The executive, however, can assume numerous forms. Indeed, the prevalence in most local governments of a nonunitary executive that exercises both executive and legislative powers indicates that the national model is not at all dominant. And the variety of local charters and the apparent ease with which cities experiment with new ones illustrate the fluidity of constitutional structures.

Mayoral power is a function of the relationship between "formal" and "real" power--between law and politics. Part I of this Essay examines these twin aspects of mayoral power from inside the city, describing the context in which city-charter and other strong-mayor reforms are being pursued. Part II examines how the larger constitutional structure of federalism affects the mayoralty. Mayors are underpowered in part because cities are underpowered, and I argue that federalism is partly to blame. Though the United States has often been characterized as having a highly decentralized political system, that decentralization is often formal or legal rather than informal or political. Mayors may exercise some power within their sphere but their effectiveness is constrained by their lack of a national political role.

Finally, Part III makes a democratic argument for a strong municipal executive. For early-twentieth-century reformers, the strong mayor was too democratic; reform-minded elites feared a municipal government that was too responsive to the urban and ethnic masses. This mistrust of urban democracy continues to the present; strong-mayor reform charters are promoted on the grounds of efficiency, not democracy. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the democratic argument for strong mayors is much more compelling than the technocratic argument. A strong mayoralty provides accountability and transparency while serving as a potential site of populist political energy. For those who believe that local governments are important components of a federal system intended to promote democratic self-government, mayoral power might be a worthwhile vehicle for increasing city power. I conclude with some tentative thoughts about how the strong mayoralty might be responsive to the political fragmentation and subordination of the democratic city.

1. THE STRONG-MAYOR MOVEMENT

   It may be surprising that mayoral power is so formally constrained in the United States. The notion of the strong executive is deeply embedded in American political culture, at least as applied to the presidency. In municipal government, however, the notion of the unitary, energetic executive has never been dominant.

   Indeed, the mayoralty itself has generally been a disfavored office except for a brief period at the turn of the twentieth century. In the late 1800s, an era in which city government was characterized by many as a "conspicuous failure," (4) the mayoralty seemed to hold promise as a possible instrument for reform. Early Progressive reformers like Frank Goodnow, John Bullitt, and Frederic Howe advocated a strong mayoralty, arguing that centralizing power in the executive would promote accountability, transparency, and democracy. (5) The reformers had in mind a mayoralty that could act directly for the people, untarnished by the city machines, uncorrupted by the ward leaders and the parochialism of the city councils, and independent of big business interests. An elected, centralized executive with complete authority over appointments and city departments was endorsed by the National Municipal League in its first Model City Charter, adopted in 1900. (6) An elected city council would serve as the legislative branch, with an independent...