The Cities on the Hill

This largely quantitative chapter zooms out to describe urbanicity in Congress and explore the book’s original dataset of congressional place character to show the downstream effects of the developments in the previous chapters. Several original analyses chronicle the birth of a distinct, national, urban political order and a shift from a “bimodal” Democratic coalition of urban and rural representatives to one in which the relationship between urbanicity and partisanship is monotonic: the more urban a constituency, the more likely it is to be represented by a Democrat. This shift has important implications for urban policymaking: when Democrats are in the majority, big-city representatives are more likely to occupy leadership positions in key policymaking positions. When Republicans hold the majority, however, city representatives are virtually excluded from important chamber positions. While the Long New Deal was a heyday for the city’s place in the national imagination, the urban political order is potentially more powerful, though also more fragile, today.