Nonprofit organizations as political actors: avenues for minority political incorporation (1).

Contemporary urban politics in the United States provides a fascinating paradox. One can point to the dramatic electoral success of minority politicians, particularly African-American politicians in the nation's cities. Certainly the changing electoral fortunes of minority leaders and the raised political expectation those successes created are well documented. Excepting southern cities during the Reconstruction period, no major city in the nation had elected an African-American mayor prior to 1967. Following successful campaigns by Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary in the late 1960%, African-Americans came to dominate the political apparatus of many large American cities. All 50 of the nation's largest cities with a strong mayor system and with at least a 40 percent African-American population have now elected at least one African-American mayor. Typically this type of success extends to other elective offices such as the city council and school board (Pohlman, 1993). Yet many argue that the policy outcomes resulting from that success are, at best, very modest. The apparent lack of clear policy payoffs led to questions about the capacity of local minority leadership to direct fundamental social and economic change. Indeed, some argue that the level of incapacity is so profound that capturing local political institutions is an "empty prize" (Frisema, 1969).

A number of alternative explanations for these negative results quickly emerged. Some saw the modest impact of minority political leadership as a function of the overall institutional weakness of cities that are seen as largely bankrupt and in a process of irreversible decline. Taking political power in such an environment was seen as largely futile, since it will almost certainly lead to failure. From this view, significant social or political change is possible only if an external agent able to marshal the necessary political and economic resources imposes it. A somewhat different institutional argument was made by (Peterson, 1981) who claims that American cities have never been able to implement broad social policy. This lack of capacity is the result of the structure of the American federal system, and, in particular, the relatively free movement of capital permitted in the national economy. Efforts to tax and reallocate private capital by one local jurisdiction will simply force the controllers of that capital to leave that jurisdiction. The constraints imposed by mobile capital are not weakened by the election of minority office holders. Indeed, to the extent that such elections alienate the holders of local capital, political leaders will be even less effective in promoting a particular policy agenda.

Yet another explanation of the modest impact of minority political leadership has been framed within the dynamics of the local electoral process itself. A number of scholars have argued that minority candidates sometimes engage in "deracialized" politics. McCormick (1993) defined deracialization as an "electoral strategy in which the black candidate attempts to defuse the polarizing effect of race by avoiding explicit race-specific issues and emphasizing those issues which are perceived as racially transcendent." Such a strategy provides a mechanism for African-American politicians to build a successful multiracial electoral coalition. It is an electoral strategy that has been reported successful in a number of jurisdictions (Perry & Stokes, 1987; Underwood, 1997). (2) However, it seems likely that following a successful election effort such a coalition would take up a political agenda that is framed in racial terms.

Each of these views is based on a strong intuitive argument and describes genuine constraints that local political leaders face in implementing a broad policy agenda, whether or not a specific agenda is targeted to the interests of racial minorities. (3) We would argue, however, that the existence of such constraints does not render the local political system irrelevant to the interests of minorities. In fact there is strong evidence to the contrary. Recent work on the impact of minority electoral success suggests that minority regimes have generated positive outcomes for minority constituents (Browning et al., 1984; Karnig & Welch, 1980; Meier & England, 1984). Moreover, the view that minority regimes are incapable of pursuing a racially relevant agenda ignores a number of alternative institutional structures which community leaders have sometimes created to move such an agenda forward. Such organizations are created with the specific goal of increasing the political capacity of the local regime. Unfortunately, relatively little is known about the role such organizations can and do play in local politics. It is the structure and potential of such alternative institutions that defines the focus of this paper.

Expanding Civic Capacity Through Non Public Institutions

The very real, if modest, returns to African-Americans assuming political authority shows that local political institutions can serve as a framework by which disenfranchised minorities can begin to move toward a more complete social and economic incorporation. However, there is ample evidence that simply capturing local elective offices will not be sufficient to bring about anything like a restructuring of social and economic relations in the cities. Indeed, minority politicians face a set of difficulties in establishing both electoral and governing coalitions not typically experienced by their white colleagues. Shared history and common social and economic relationships typically tie key partners of these coalitions together. Minority leaders often find themselves outside those networks. In particular, minority electoral coalitions are likely to suffer from two sorts of structural weaknesses. The first is an under-developed set of community level linkages both within the minority community itself, as well as linkages to other communities. A second disconnect is likely at the elite level between political leaders and private sector economic leaders. These weaknesses follow from, at least, two important characteristics of American society. The first is simply the impact of race itself, and its continued capacity to divide American society. The second is the relative economic weakness of central cities.

Recognizing the limited capacity of electoral coalitions to implement a broad policy agenda, political and community leaders have crafted a number of efforts to induce the development of the sort of broad based governing coalition described by Stone. (4) Sometimes external agents have explicitly designed programs to promote political incorporation. For example, a number of federal policy makers saw the statutory requirement in the 1960's War on Poverty for "maximum community participation" as demanding the creation of new local institutions dominated by the poor with the capacity to design, support and ultimately implement an antipoverty program. (5) For a time the Congress seemed to endorse the view by requiring governing boards for local community action agencies be composed of at least one-third poor people. In the late 1960's, however, the Congress responded to demands of local government, and dramatically reduced the independent authority of the local boards. (6) A more limited version of community participation was mandated in local Model Cities Programs (Bailey & Kaylor, 1997; Greenstone & Peterson, 1973; Marris & Rein, 1982; Skocpol, 1996; Smith & Lipsky, 1993; Swanstrom, 1997). More recently, federal Empowerment Zone legislation has required the broad participation in the design and implementation of local programs. The language requiring community engagement is particularly interesting in that it emphasizes community empowerment rather than participation. Bailey and Kaylor (1997) argue the goal driving this shift is a more complete incorporation into the local political regime rather than participation in a specific federal program. (7) Although specific actions have at best been uneven over the years, the federal government does have a history of allocating resources to "revitalize cities ... and bring blacks and other marginal groups into local polities as full participants" (Warren, Rosentraub, & Weschler, 1992 p. 402).