untempered authority over a wide range of services. The current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, won
authority to appoint the Chancellor of the New York City school system. Virtually all governmental
functions, save the mass transit system, the port authority, and the City University, are under his or her
purview. The City Council is relatively numerous, with 51 members, or about 70 percent more council
members per capita than Los Angeles. All elections are partisan, Democratic nominees win almost all
elections for city office except for the mayoralty, and regular party organizations exercise a considerable
degree over the outcome of the party primaries, sometimes by using arcane election regulations to knock
challengers off the ballot. The city budget for the fiscal year ending in 2006 was $54 billion, or roughly
$6,750 per resident, almost five times larger than the LA city budget.
The two cities therefore provide a theoretically alluring setting for comparison – one can “control”
at least in rough terms for economic and demographic structure and examine the impact of varied political
structure on the desired outcomes. This has led scholars to create a small post-industrial cottage industry
of studies comparing the politics of the two cities (Halle 2003, Kaufmann 2003, Logan and Mollenkopf
2003, Mollenkopf, Olson and Ross 2001, and Wong 2006). Each city has, of course, generated large
literatures of its own, including many works by two authors of this paper, many of which were done with a
“weather eye” on the other city (Sonenshein 1993, 2004; Mollenkopf 1992, 2004). For example, perhaps
making a virtue out of necessity, scholars at UCLA and USC have sought to create a “Los Angeles
School” of urban studies that argues that the peripheries of LA, not the central core of New York, are the
model for the world’s urban future (Scott and Soja 1996, Soja 1996, Dear 2002). Meanwhile, scholars of
New York blithely find fitter comparisons with London (Fainstein 2001).
Accepting the fact that city government, city politics, and indeed the content of civic engagement
may take quite different forms in the two cities, and that these different forms may shape political
outcomes in important ways, this paper seeks to use the 2005 mayoral elections in Los Angeles and New
York to explore how race, class, ethnicity, nativity, gender, and place interact in the formation of a majority
electoral coalition. In particular, we are interested in how the rise of new immigrant ethnic or minority
groups may be altering the previous contours of racial political alignments in the two cities. The kinds of
Convention