When Cities Lobby

In a political environment characterized by intense urban-rural polarization and growing hostility between cities and state legislatures, When Cities Lobby explores how local officials use lobbyists to compete for power in state politics.When Cities Lobby tells the story of what happens when city officials rely on professional lobbyists to represent their interests in state government. In a political environment characterized by intense urban-rural polarization and growing hostility between cities and state legislatures, the ability to lobby offers a powerful tool for city leaders seeking to amplify their voices in state politics. The cities that lobby at the highest rates include large urban centers that havehistorically faced obstacles to effective representation in our federal system, and, increasingly, blue-leaning cities engaged in preemption battles against Republican-led legislatures. But high-income places have also figured out how to strategically use lobbyists, and these communities have become particularlyadept at lobbying to secure additional grant money and shift state funding in a direction that favors them. How did we end up with a system where political officials in different levels of government often choose to pay lobbyists to facilitate communication between them, and are the potential benefits worth the costs? Author Julia Payson demonstrates that the answer is deeply rooted in both the nature of the federal system and the evolution of the professional lobbying industry. While somestates have recently debated measures to restrict lobbying by local governments, these efforts will likely do more harm than good in the absence of structural reforms to the lobbying industry more broadly.

The book offers political science, public policy, and public administration students an informative outlook on the process of resource allocation and power struggles in the American case study, and its consequences on political decision making. Hence, the target audience for this book is both practitioners and academicians., Payson's book provides the critical first step in launching future studies on the role of lobbying in shaping local politics, city-state relationships, the political power of cities in the face of growing partisan polarization., When Cities Lobby is a stunning account of an underappreciated side of power and influence in American politics—one in which the lobbyists are governments themselves. In this meticulously-researched, beautifully-written book, Payson pulls back the curtain on how common it is for city governments to lobby their states, why they do it, and how it makes a difference. This is a must-read for anyone interested in how American government works., American cities, counties, and other local governments are intricately dependent on their state governments for their very existence. Yet as Payson shows in this important and ambitious book, they do not wait around passively for handouts from their states. Rather, U.S. local governments collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year lobbying their state governments. Employing an expansive new dataset and careful statistical analyses, Payson shows that while intergovernmental lobbying can help address representational gaps, it comes with an all-too-familiar bias by advantaging wealthier jurisdictions. A must-read for scholars of city politics and policy, interest groups and lobbying, and American federalism., In a federal system, cities are at the mercy of state governments which shape and constrain local policies and revenues. Julia Payson reveals that many cities rely on lobbying to ensure that they do not remain powerless in this system. With sophisticated methods, novel data, and clear writing, Payson skillfully maps the landscape of intergovernmental lobbying. She convincingly demonstrates that cities see important returns to their efforts, but unequally so. As is so often the case in the American political system, the wealthiest communities reap the most rewards.

Julia Payson is an Assistant Professor of Politics at New York University.