American Cities and the Politics of Party Conventions , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - David Swindell , Suzanne M. Leland , Eric S. Heberlig

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135 pages

English

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Political party conventions have lost much of their original political nature, serving now primarily as elaborate infomercials while ratifying the decisions made by voters in state primaries and caucuses. While this activity hasn't changed significantly since the 1970s, conventions themselves have changed significantly in terms of how they are recruited, implemented, and paid for. American Cities and the Politics of Party Conventions analyzes how and why cities advance through the site selection process. Just as parties use conventions to communicate their policies, unity, and competence to the electorate, cities use the convention selection process to communicate their merits to political parties, businesses and residents. While hosting such a "mega event" provides some direct economic stimulus for host cities, the major benefit of the convention is the opportunity it provides for branding and signaling status. Combining a case studies approach as well as interviews with party and local officials, Eric S. Heberlig, Suzanne M. Leland, and David Swindell bring party convention scholarship up to date while highlighting the costs and benefits of hosting such events for tourism bureaus, city administrators, elected officials, and the citizens they represent.
Preface

1. Who Wants Circus Politicus?

2. Matchmaking: The Politics of Site Selection

3. Paying for Conventions

4. Unconventional Conventions: Protests, Hurricanes, and Other Logistical Nightmares

5. The Political Benefits of Political Conventions

6. Conventions as Economic Development: Do They Matter?

7. Generating Support for Mega-Events

Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Political party

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	19 septembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438466408
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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American Cities and the Politics of Party Conventions
American Cities and the Politics of Party Conventions
Eric S. Heberlig, Suzanne M. Leland, and David Swindell
On the cover: Vice President Joe Biden speaks on the final night of the DNC in Charlotte, North Carolina, September 6, 2012. Photograph by Todd Sumlin ( Sumlin-tsumlin@charlotteobserver.com ). Courtesy of the Charlotte Observer.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Dana Foote
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Heberlig, Eric S., 1970– author. | Leland, Suzanne M., 1971– author. | Swindell, David, 1966– author.
Title: American cities and the politics of party conventions / Eric S. Heberlig, Suzanne M. Leland, and David Swindell.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016045128 (print) | LCCN 2017007997 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438466392 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438466408 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political conventions—United States—Planning. | Political conventions—Social aspects—United States. | City planning—United States.
Classification: LCC JK2255 .H43 2017 (print) | LCC JK2255 (ebook) | DDC 324.273/156—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045128
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface
1 Who Wants Circus Politicus ?
2 Matchmaking: The Politics of Site Selection
3 Paying for Conventions
4 Unconventional Conventions: Protests, Hurricanes, and Other Logistical Nightmares
5 The Political Benefits of Political Conventions
6 Conventions as Economic Development: Do They Matter?
7 Generating Support for Mega-Events
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
The origins of this project should be easy to guess. On February 1, 2011, the Democratic National Committee announced that Charlotte would host the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Having just lived through North Carolina’s new status as a competitive state in the 2008 presidential election, and the media attention that came with it, the potential to add the media saturation of a party convention on top of it seemed overkill. How could we get any academic research done? We couldn’t study the convention since conventions don’t “matter” anymore, according to the conventional wisdom in political science. Then Gene Alpert of The Washington Center provided the direction we needed when he observed that no one had studied conventions from the city’s perspective. Indeed, cities do a tremendous amount of work to recruit and implement presidential nominating conventions, and parties have developed extensive site selection processes to choose the best host. The parties and the cities partner to make themselves look good in the national and international media and to avoid repeats of the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. We sought to understand how and why parties and cities developed their partnerships during the conventions and the implications for understanding how cities operate.
Our vision from the beginning was that this project would be of interest to multiple audiences, and our academic backgrounds reflect that multidisciplinary approach. Heberlig studies political parties, elections, and campaign finance. Leland studies public administration, city planning, and intergovernmental relations. Swindell studies urban policy and economic development, particularly with regard to sports.
This book will appeal to those interested in urban management, policy and planning, economic development, party politics, interest groups, and general public administration. It should also be of interest to community leaders such as members of the chamber of commerce, city council members, county commissioners, mayors, city and county staff, and reporters who wonder: “Why did the convention end up there? How does a city pull this off? Is it really worth it for our city to do this?”
We owe our thanks to numerous people who have contributed to this project. First, we thank Rye Barcott and Elizabeth Terry of Duke Energy for supporting local universities’ engagement with the 2012 DNC and for generously providing the funds for us to partner with Winthrop University’s Social and Behavioral Research Lab and its director, Scott Huffman, to survey residents of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, about their experiences with the convention. The analyses of the citizens’ views on paying for mega-events, the political effects of conventions, and residents’ evaluations of mega-event development strategies in chapters 3 , 5 , and 7 are made possible with this survey data. We thank the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, especially Chancellor Phil Dubois, Provost Joan Lorden, Special Assistant to the Chancellor Betty Doster, and Dean Nancy Gutierrez for their consistent and enthusiastic support of the 49er Democracy Experience that engaged UNC Charlotte students (and their faculty leaders!) with the convention. We thank the many officials of the Democratic National Convention Committee, the Charlotte in 2012 Host Committee, and the city of Charlotte, who participated in classes and other academic forums, provided documents, and sat for interviews (often multiple interviews) about the convention. A full list of interviewees is provided in appendix 1 . In particular, we thank former mayor Anthony Foxx, two of his chiefs of staff, Tracy Montross and Kevin Monroe, city attorney Bob Hagemann, and assistant to the city manager Carol Jennings for opening doors for us. And we thank the many graduate students who assisted with interviews and searched through countless NewsBank articles, especially MPAD 6184 fall 2012 students. Finally, we thank our Charlotte Research Scholars, Mark Shields and Justin McCoy, undergraduates who gathered much of data for the site selection and mayoral advancement, respectively, sections of the book. Shields was a coauthor of “The Disruption Costs of Post-911 Security Measures and Cities’ Bids for Presidential Nominating Conventions,” published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, an earlier version of parts of chapter 2. McCoy was a coauthor of “Mayors, Accomplishments, and Advancement,” published in Urban Affairs Review, parts of which form the “Mayor’s Careers” and “Do They Win?” sections of chapter 5 . Finally, we thank our families for their patience with this (seemingly) never-ending book project. We dedicate this book to them:
Tracy, Colin, Mena, and Ellie
—Eric
Dan and Max
—Suzanne
Jennie and Alex
—David
1
Who Wants Circus Politicus ?
The political convention … demands organizational skill and manipulative genius—both of which qualities are exceeding useful in democratic government.
—Pendleton Herring, 1965
Professor Herring was referring to presidential candidates in this quote, but its relevance to them has declined as presidential nominating conventions have largely ratified decisions made by primary and caucus voters since the reforms of the 1970s. Today, we argue the quote more aptly applies to the cities that host the conventions. Cities develop bid strategies and compete with one another to entice the national party committees to choose them. Cities are at the center of complex intergovernmental and public-private networks to plan and implement political conventions. Cities decide how much to invest in infrastructure to attract tourism generally and mega-events specifically as part of their economic development efforts. When presidential nomination conventions or other mega-events come to town, cities can benefit from the short-term boost in delegate spending and the longer-term reputational benefits brought by the national and international media attention. While the potential benefits of mega-events are relatively clear, how and why cities weigh the costs and benefits of pursing them change over time, how they implement these strategies differently than a normal tourism promotion strategy, and how local politicians (as opposed to the city collectively) can benefit from them are more open questions.
Political scientists have devoted little recent attention to presidential nominating conventions. As the preeminent scholar of conventions, Byron Shafer (2010: 264) puts it, “[C]onventions are widely overlooked—marginalized, even disrespected—as research sites for understanding partisan politics in the United States.” This marginalization is understandable. Since the reforms of the presidential selection process in the 1970s, party nominating conventions no longer decide who the party’s presidential nominee will be. 1 Voters in state primaries and caucuses have made that decision; the convention makes their selection official. We argue that the politics of the convention is now outside the conventional hall. The story of contemporary presidential nominating conventions is less about the nomination of presidential candidates than about the partnership between the parties and the cities to capture the media attention and advance their own goals. Conventions “inseparably linked a city and a political party in their quests for national respect” (Sack,