City Politics in Britain and the United States
| Published date | 01 June 1969 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1969.tb00636.x |
| Date | 01 June 1969 |
| Author | K. Newton |
| Subject Matter | Notes and Review Articles |
NOTES AND REVIEW ARTICLES
CITY POLITICS IN BRITAIN AND THE
UNITED STATES
K.
NEWTON’
University
of
Birmingham
IN
the past fifteen to twenty years social scientists have devoted
a
great deal of time and energy
to comparative studies of British and American political institutions and behaviour. The cross-
national comparative literature covers
a
wide variety of areas, from political parties and pressure
groups to political leadership and voting behaviour, but it does not include any systematically
comparative studies
of
city politics. The single exception is D. C. Miller’s work, which
I
shall
discuss later, in which he compares the power structures
of
an ‘English City’ (Bristol) and an
‘American City’ (Seattle).t This lack of comparative data and theory about Anglo-American
city politics is due, in part,
to
the difference in
type
and quantity of research in the two countries.
There is
a
whole library of books, monographs and articles on American city politics,l but
a
sad
paucity of British equivalents although no lack of work published by students of British local
government and administration. However, some of these gaps in British political science are
rapidly being filled, for there has been a recent wave of interest in urban politics and more than
a
dozen research teams are currently working on city politics research projects. The time
is
approaching when it will be possible to make some reasonably precise statements and generaliza-
tions about city politics in Britain and the United States, and it is hoped that the present essay
will
contribute towards the first, tentative steps in this direction. Its aim is to pick out some of the
more general similarities and differences between British
and
American urban political systems,
to state some of the lessons which might be learnt from the American experience, and to attempt
to assess the relevance of some
of
the American literature for British research.
In
order to keep
the discussion within manageable limits
I
shall concentrate mainly on the decision-making
processes of local politics and the role of parties and pressure groups in them.
There are numerous superficial similarities betweenBritish and American city politics. They all
have their
own
problems of housing, town planning, rush-hour traflic, conurbations, urban
sprawls and crime waves.
All
of them are controlled, loosely
or
rigidly, by some higher political
authority, whether State
or
national government. Local authorities
in
both countries are able to
do
only
what the higher authority expressly allows them to do. Most cities in both Britain and
America show
a
basic social and economic cleavage between their outer circles of high-income
suburbs and their industrial and poorer inner cores, and hence both have similar geographical
I
I
am
most grateful to Dr.
J.
D.
Stewart for reading and commenting on
a
draft of
this
paper
and to
the
Social Science Research Council for financing the project of which it is
a
part.
D.
C.
Miller, ‘Decision-Making Cliques
in
Community Power Structures:
A
Comparative
Study of
an
American and
an
English City’,
American Journal
of
Sociology,
Vol.
64
(November
1958).
pp.
299-310;
‘Industry and Community Power Structure;
A
Comparative Study of an
American and
an
English City’,
American Sociological Review,
Vol.
23
(February
1958),
pp.
9-15;
‘Democracy and Decision-Making in the Community Power Structure’, in
W.
V.
D’Antonio and
H.
J.
Ehrlich (eds.),
Power
and
Democracy in America
(Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press,
1961),
pp.
24-71.
3
Fortunately much of this work has been synthesized by E. C. Banfield and
J.
Q.
Wilson, in
their excellent volume
City Politics
(Cambridge, Mass.
:
Harvard University Press and M.I.T.
Press,
1963).
See
also
the useful and more recent book by
L.
Goodall,
The American Metropolis
(Columbus,
Ohio:
Charles
E.
Merrill,
1968).
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