Creatures of the State

Abstract

Local politics is not self-contained. The authors break with existing scholarship to argue that the study of local politics requires the systematic study of state legislative politics. The state-local relationship cannot be easily characterized in terms of either interference or deference. Rather, U.S. local government and state politics appear to have been thoroughly intertwined in the period they examine. For evidence, they present a new and systematic data set consisting of all bills affecting local places-6,415 bills-considered by the legislatures of Alabama, Massachusetts, and Michigan for certain years in the period 1871 to 1921.