In this creative and important book, Eric Oliver and his coauthors offer a comprehensive analysis of a largely overlooked phenomenon, electoral behavior in smaller communities, here defined as jurisdictions with populations under 100,000. In the broadest sense, the central theme of the book is that elections are different in these small jurisdictions from what theories and empirical analyses of national, state, and big-city elections have made familiar. More specifically, they argue that a triumvirate of jurisdictional characteristics—1) population size, 2) scope (i.e., the extent to which institutional arrangements provide government officials with powers on a broad array of matters), and 3) bias (i.e., the extent to which government distributes resources in something other than an evenhanded fashion)—are crucial factors shaping the behavior of voters and candidates and, hence, are the essential character of elections. In separate chapters analyzing who votes, who runs for office, what shapes incumbent advantage, and what shapes voter choice, the authors explore hypotheses developed in their overview chapter about how size, scope, and bias impact each of these aspects of local elections.

This project is both important and stunningly ambitious when viewed in the context of the current level of underdevelopment in the study of local elections. There are many reasons for the dearth of systematic studies of local elections (see Melissa J. Marschall, “The Study of Local Elections in American Politics,” in Jan E. Leighley, ed., The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior, 2010). Not least of these reasons is the lack of a comprehensive database on characteristics of local election contests in the numerous local jurisdictions in the United States. Oliver and his coauthors are to be credited with making creative use of a variety of existing databases that are at least partially relevant (such as the 1990 American Citizen Participation Study, International City/County Management Association [ICMA] surveys, and a survey of voters in 30 suburbs), as well as constructing two original data sets—one on turnout data for 492 municipalities and the other a 2008–9 survey of local officials and candidates in three Chicago-area counties.

Two nagging problems create difficulties for the task at hand, however. First, it is difficult to empirically assess the impact of city size when the study is delimited to smaller jurisdictions. A crucial explanatory variable is censored on the up side. And because, as the authors acknowledge, size is intercorrelated with scope and bias, variation in the triumvirate of explanatory variables is artificially restricted as well.

This problem is most apparent in the chapter on who runs for office. The authors theorize that the smaller the size, the more limited the scope, and that the less the bias of a jurisdiction, the more likely that those seeking and winning office will be intrinsically motivated (i.e., driven by civic duty) rather than extrinsically motivated (i.e., concerned with personal advancement, ideology, or material rewards for favored groups). The arguments laying out these expectations are strong and compelling. But the empirical evidence is limited to office seekers surveyed in Chicago-area suburbs—jurisdictions that, as Oliver and his coauthors acknowledge, vary relatively little on any of these dimensions. Hence, except for one analysis showing that elected officials in larger suburbs spent more money and time on campaigns than did counterparts in smaller suburbs, much of the evidence from this survey of suburban officials is not directly analyzed vis–à-vis size, scope, and bias. Instead, these officials' apparent tilt toward intrinsic motivations for office seeking must be interpreted in the light of assumptions about what the corresponding pattern of motivations would look like in larger, broader scope or in more biased communities.

More generally, their response to the problem of size- (and scope- and bias-) delimited cases is to supplement empirical analysis of the cities in the smaller-jurisdiction data sets with other kinds of analyses or with examples and information from studies of other kinds of jurisdictions. In the chapter on who votes in local elections, for example, they offer compelling argumentation that the issue of bias in turnout boils down to one of whether the relatively small number of voters in small-city elections are or are not representative of the broader community. Individual-level analyses of data from well-known national sample surveys are then used to identify the characteristics of individuals most likely to vote in local elections, as well as preferences of voters and nonvoters for government action on various issues. In other chapters, there are implicit or explicit comparisons between the results of the authors' analysis of small-city data sets and the parallel, but usually contrasting, results from the research literature examining big-city or national-level elections. In short, the evidence is sometimes indirect but skillfully marshaled.

The second challenge for this project is that the concept of bias is so multifaceted and situation specific that it is difficult to be nailed down empirically. The authors acknowledge the “slippery” nature of the bias concept (p. 37) and make the case for several proxies that they believe help to capture it. Their suggestion that reform-style government institutions signify less bias whereas unreformed institutions and patronage practices signify more bias is relatively noncontroversial. However, there may be more controversy over their suggestions that bias is a function of racial or ethnic diversity and that bias is more likely in poorer democracies. While they carefully include language intended to avoid all-out stereotyping of poorer or racially diverse jurisdictions, their suggested proxies for bias in local government may generate more resistance than acceptance. Overall, treatment of the bias concept is the least compelling part of the book.

Oliver and his coauthors' findings, and their interpretations of them, are provocative with respect to what we should make of the character and quality of small-scale democracy. The key to their interpretation comes early in the book in the form of an important and intriguing distinction between “existentially relevant” elections and “managerial elections” (p. 28). In existentially relevant elections, voting is a way of expressing one's position on major societal divisions, such as those reflected in ideological position, ethnic or racial identity, and the like. By contrast, managerial elections are those in which voters are simply signifying whether they approve or disapprove of the ways that governing leaders are handling routine and relatively mundane functions that do not invoke major and durable societal divisions.

Set with their initial discussion of government scope, this distinction at first appears to be only a way of explaining why local elections tend to be less divisive and fiercely contested than national elections. But as the book unfolds, it becomes clear that the distinction is more important than that, especially if we think configuratively about city size, scope, and bias (which the book frequently does, and which may be necessary because they are empirically confounded). As Oliver and his coauthors argue in the concluding chapter (p. 184): “Because most American localities are socially homogeneous, have a narrow scope, and are relatively unbiased, they have few of the permanent political divisions that exist on the national or state level. They are managerial democracies.” To the extent that managerial democracies are defined by these features, some of the empirical findings about elections in small communities can be deproblematized.

In the chapter on who votes, for example, they show that turnout is not only relatively low in many local elections but also dominated by certain kinds of voters—long-term residents, the better educated, and, most especially, homeowners. However, they conclude that this is not a threat to the representativeness and vitality of local democracy because smaller jurisdictions tend to be homogenous, their governments are limited in scope, and there is no evidence of other preferences being neglected by their tendency toward attentiveness to the typical concerns of homeowners. Similarly, while there is a bias in who runs for and attains office in these smaller jurisdictions (older, better educated, professional-class individuals), concern about a biased governing elite is obviated both by survey evidence of their civic-duty motivation and by their characterization of the communities that they govern as being smaller, narrower in scope, less biased in service delivery than core cities, and having “few opportunities for massive commercial land speculation” (p. 115).

Parts of the interpretation thus appear to use the concept of managerial democracy as an apologia for suburban politics, touting the low-turnout, incumbent-dominated elections in these largely professionally managed communities for their lack of bias or enduring conflicts. In the concluding chapter, however, Oliver and his coauthors take a broader view. Here, they most clearly acknowledge that low bias within suburban jurisdictions stems from homogeneity—purchased at the expense of the cross-jurisdiction heterogeneity and bias that suburbanization trends have yielded. This and his discussion of a disconnect between managerial democracy and theories of participatory democracy yield a thought-provoking conclusion.

Oliver and his coauthors offer us much to consider in this important book. Their synthesis of local politics literature with a much broader literature on electoral politics is in itself a worthy contribution. The numerous empirical analyses raise the curtain on the relatively hidden world of suburban elections and make us question the applicability of urban politics theories to that world.