Focusing on the period between the late fourteenth century and the outbreak of the Catalonian Civil War in 1462, Chapter 2 examines municipal government. Two new regimes arose during this period. The first, the Nou regiment, blended direct election with a method preferred by tradespeople, namely, the random selection of officeholders. Moreover, it gave tradespeople a numerical majority within the town’s executive magistracy, or consulate, as well as within the town council. The Nou regiment rolled back older measures enacted by burgher- and merchant-dominated governments; modestly but noticeably, it advanced tradespeople’s interests. Burghers and merchants opposed and worked to undermine the Nou regiment. In 1449, they toppled it and instituted a regime called the Nova forma. The Nova forma restored oligarchical power through a novelty of its own: the Nova forma redefined the town’s occupational groupings and thereby substituted burgher and merchant majorities for those of tradespeople within the consulate and town council.

This chapter explores a fresh wave of conflicts in the 1790s. These clashes revolved around the relationship of the University of Charcas and the cabildo to the intendant, the audiencia, and the ecclesiastical hierarchies. This process reveals the blatant inability of the higher colonial officials to dictate the terms of public life. The first section deals with the contentious approval of new university statutes. In a society where tradition was the source of law, the university’s faculty created its governing rules at its own discretion, selectively drawing on the regulations of other universities. The second section turns to numerous disputes over municipal matters, which the urban elites treated as a single confrontation over the preservation of municipal freedom and independence, which in turn hinged on the unwavering respect for the majority vote of the cabildo officials. By the turn of the century, open disobedience had become routine, direct, and ideological. The final section shows that it is no coincidence that one of the most penetrating critics of late Spanish colonialism, the Aragonese jurist Victorián de Villava, wrote his devastating treatises on the state of the empire while serving as fiscal (prosecutor) of the audiencia of Charcas.

One remarkable feature of market imperialism as it has affected welfare provision is just how deep it has become entrenched in the act of caring for people. Here, Clotworthy describes how the provision of eldercare in Denmark has been taken over by a system that aims to create idealized, active, and independent older people. Eldercare is thus increasingly subject to a “competition state” focused on optimizing costs by “responsibilizing” both care providers and senior citizens as rational and independent decision-makers. What Clotworthy shows, though, is that creating a welfare system with this sort of ideal in place runs the risk of ignoring the actual person sitting in front of you. The system acts more as a gatekeeper than a care provider, and thus leaves people alienated in their old age. Clotworthy contrasts this with eldercare systems that make a direct provision of care in order to show another way of caring for older adults.

Chapter 2 describes the launching of the first nationwide local government elections amidst political contention in 1999 in Tehran, Khorasan, Fars, and Kurdistan and the institutionalization of elected local government within the parameters of the velayi regime. The chapter documents the rapid institutionalization of the new city councils throughout the country and in cities of different sizes. It reports on the impressive efforts of newly elected local representatives to carry out their new responsibilities within the limited legal powers afforded the new councils as well as depending on the social capital and trust of the local societies. Tehran City Council, for example, was initially marred by turmoil and dissolved by the central government, but stabilized over time. It has been an important bellwether of political trends elsewhere. The chapter documents the frustration of many councilors with what they perceived to be the narrow range of local powers defined by the local government law, patterns that would remain in place, part of the success of electoral authoritarianism in Iran.

The themes animating this volume are on stark display at the local level in American politics. A great deal of scholarship focused on who governs cities explores how authority is exercised to allocate resources, and how markets, economic power, politics, and policy interrelate (Dahl 1961). The evidence suggests that high-resource actors utilize local political institutions to maintain their economic and social dominance.

Industrialization was the catalyst for the spread of urban modernity across China in the first half of the twentieth century, although most factories were in large coastal cities and the northeast in Manchuria. The Japanese invasion of 1937 forced the Nationalist government and millions of people to move west, and cities such as Chongqing and Kunming grew substantially. Cities were now connected via rail, road, telegraph, telephone, and air travel, and the urban system was reconfigured along these new communications networks. Chinese cities acquired commercial and industrial districts, new administrative zones, parks, and residential areas, while new building technology and architectural styles transformed urban skylines. Experiments in municipal governance came together in a suite of new laws passed after the Nationalist government came to power in 1927 that sought to impose order and standardization across the country, and urban plans were produced for many cities, although many never made it off the drawing board. No longer was American, European, or Japanese culture confined to coastal treaty ports. Teachers, doctors, engineers, shop girls, bank clerks, and factory workers across the country were all able to purchase global brands, watch films made in Hollywood or Shanghai, and listen to jazz in clubs.

Houston, Texas is a city of roughly 2.3 million people, located in the southeastern portion of the state, near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It has a dynamic economy, with two dozen Fortune 500 companies, the nation’s second-most-active port, and significant energy, technology, aerospace, medical, and manufacturing sectors. Although the city has a white-plurality population (37.3 percent of residents identify as white), it is very racially diverse, with 36.5 percent of residents identifying as Hispanic/Latino; 16.6 percent identifying as African American; 7.5 percent identifying as Asian; and 2 percent identifying as “Other.” Compared with many cities of similar size, Houston boasts an attractive combination of abundant jobs, affordable housing, and exciting cultural amenities.