Local officials can engineer their electorate with policy comfort and discomfort.
Evidence
Although some selection effects along these lines will be unintentional, strategic politicians have every incentive to manipulate policy for the purpose of shaping their electorates and entrenching their hold on power. A famous example is the “Curley Effect,” described by Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer. James Michael Curley, who served four terms as the mayor of Boston during the first half of the twentieth century, was supported by a political base of lower-income Irish residents but opposed by Boston’s wealthier Anglo-Saxon voters. To increase his own electoral prospects, Curley was interested in keeping poor Irish in the city and in encouraging the wealthy Anglo-Saxons to leave. With no formal immigration law at his disposal, Curley instead used his control over public projects, patronage, zoning laws, and the like to make things as hospitable as possible in Boston for his own voters and as uncomfortable as possible for his opponents. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 281
Categorization
- DEFINE: Names and defines the ‘Curley Effect’ — a concrete labeled mechanism for electorate-shaping entrenchment without formal law changes.
- XREF: Directly instantiates the chapter’s claim (ch4/ch5) that when formal entrenchment is blocked, actors substitute functional levers. — connects to: Disenfranchisement entrenched white Democratic supremacy in the South for nearly a century — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 83; Seemingly substantive policy domains conceal underlying partisan self-entrenchment battles. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 536; Some policies are self-consciously designed to entrench themselves and their creators. (+1 more)