pp. 387-389
Reforming the City: The Contested Origins of Urban Government, 1890–1930, Ariane Liazos
The Progressive Era ushered in a number of reforms across the country, including the adoption of direct democracy in almost half the states, the direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, the income tax, and the prohibition of alcohol. While both academic and pedagogical sources have provided substantial coverage of these national- and state-level reforms, most high school graduates would struggle to identify one of the most successful Progressive Era reforms at the local level: the widespread adoption of the council-manager form of government. Such a deficiency in knowledge is unfortunate, as local governments tend to have an outsized impact on most citizens’ lives compared with state and national government. In Reforming the City: The Contested Origins of Urban Government, 1890–1930, Ariane Liazos has written a definitive account of how the council-manager system of governance—usually paired with at-large nonpartisan elections—became the dominant form of local governance, ultimately replacing ward-based partisan elections in many localities.
While the book does not explicitly approach its subject as a puzzle of policy diffusion, scholars of state, local, and urban politics will recognize that all policy innovations follow some pattern of diffusio
To continue reading, see options above.
Join the Academy of Political Science and automatically receive Political Science Quarterly.
Academy Forum | The Transatlantic Relationship and the Russia-Ukraine War
WEBINAR
Jimmy Carter's Legacy
Jimmy Carter's Public Policy Ex-Presidency
John Whiteclay Chambers II
Publishing since 1886, PSQ is the most widely read and accessible scholarly journal with distinguished contributors such as: Lisa Anderson, Robert A. Dahl, Samuel P. Huntington, Robert Jervis, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Theda Skocpol, Woodrow Wilson
view additional issuesArticles | Book reviews
The Academy of Political Science, promotes objective, scholarly analyses of political, social, and economic issues. Through its conferences and publications APS provides analysis and insight into both domestic and foreign policy issues.
With neither an ideological nor a partisan bias, PSQ looks at facts and analyzes data objectively to help readers understand what is really going on in national and world affairs.