Local governments in contemporary U.S. cities are caught between two dominant ways of understanding and conducting American politics: nonpartisan politics that is written into the laws and practices of most U.S. cities, and partisan politics that touches every aspect of American life. Throughout the twentieth century, nearly 75 percent of cities in the United States adopted nonpartisan local governments to ensure an orderly, impersonal, rational, and efficient approach to local affairs—an approach that could be universal in scope rather than serving the interests of a particular few (Welch and Bledsoe 1986; Liazos 2020). From the beginning, these local governments had to contend with a broader political environment dominated by parties and partisan interests that often tried to influence city leaders and mobilize local voters (Trounstine 2008).
Scholars of urban governance have long examined how this tension between partisan and nonpartisan politics shapes local elections, policy decisions, and civic engagement (Einstein and Kogan 2016; Einstein, Palmer, and Glick 2019; Schaffner, Rhodes, and La Raja 2022). But there has been less attention paid to how politicians and citizens navigate the cultural performance of politics in these cross-pressured institutions. This is a crucial question because the hopes often attached to local government are profoundly cultural: it can be a place where people learn how to be democratic citizens (Tocqueville 2002), where leaders and citizens can come to mutually agreed-upon understandings of issues (Mansbridge 1983), and where the construction of a shared sense of community can transcend partisan—and other—divisions (Levine 2021). This paper examines how local actors strategically perform the conflict between partisanship and nonpartisanship in city politics to pursue their political and policy goals.
Wisconsin is a critical context for examining the performance of this conflict. Wisconsin combines an enduring partisan division and competition with a robust history of nonpartisan politics (Cramer 2016; Kaufman 2019). A 1912 law established nonpartisan local government in every city in the state. At its adoption, political leaders were already aware of cultural tensions in this new form of government—tensions between a government that could be expert-run and neutral and one that could be accessible and interpretable by citizens. Progressive reformer Governor Francis E. McGovern framed his support for nonpartisan reform as a way of navigating this tension:
The question is no longer whether or not Milwaukee shall have nonpartisan elections. It is rather whether such elections and the making of nominations leading up to them shall hereafter be conducted openly or clandestinely; by the many or by the few; pursuant to lawful authority exercised in an orderly way so every one may have an equal voice or by manipulation in the interests of those who have an axe to grind.1
But others, especially those with ties to Milwaukee’s growing Socialist Party, saw nonpartisan reform as explicitly obscuring government from the people. Nonpartisan officials, they argued, were more likely to be responsive to business interests and other elites and less likely to listen to regular people and their needs. Nonpartisan reform, as Milwaukee Mayor Emil Seidel said, led to “Fewer men elected by the people and [giving] these fewer men more power.”2
While the difficulty of managing both partisan and nonpartisan politics is not new, there is reason to believe that the public performance of this management has taken on a new importance. First, changes to federal funding models and capital investment have increased the need for local governments to perform their unity and ability to collaborate (Pacewicz 2016; Levine 2021). Demonstrating nonpartisanship is critical to securing grants, protecting funding, and attracting investment. Second, as partisanship grows both more intense and more personal (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012), there is a greater likelihood that citizens are pulling local leaders in more partisan directions. Finally, technological changes have raised the stakes of the public performance of local politics. Local politicians understand that when they speak, they speak not just to each other or to the audience in the room but to people watching on TV, on Zoom, and potentially many more through social media. Local officials today must pay particular attention to how they engage in partisan and nonpartisan politics and there are significant risks and rewards for strategically navigating the two.
To examine the cultural performance of politics in local government, this paper draws on a qualitative study of video recordings of city council meetings from several small cities in Wisconsin in 2020 and 2021. I examine how local leaders in these meetings invoke nonpartisanship and partisanship, discuss what is within and outside the boundaries of nonpartisan local government, and discipline the politics of their colleagues and constituents. My data provide a unique window into the self-conscious performance of partisan and nonpartisan politics across several institutions as they confront a variety of political issues. Some (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) show up in several communities and some (e.g., a lakefront redevelopment plan) are unique to a particular place. The speeches, arguments, emotional tenor, and physicality captured in these video recordings better highlight the cultural conflict between partisan and nonpartisan politics than traditional meeting minutes or voting records.
Cultural sociologists have discussed the repertoire of vocabulary, rhetoric, and emotion that political actors use in such public performances as “scene styles” (Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014). These are patterns of interaction—specific ways of speaking and engaging with one another—that create an understanding of what an institution is, who its members are, and how they should behave. Following this tradition, this paper presents partisanship and nonpartisanship as distinct scene styles: contrasting repertoires for performing politics in local government. Building on previous research, this paper finds that political actors may strategically shift between scene styles at different moments (Marom 2023; Stiman 2024). However, the concept of scene style does not capture the deep uncertainty and prolonged conflict that characterizes these performances.
This paper introduces a new theoretical concept, civic drama, to show how the conflict between partisan and nonpartisan scene styles has become a central feature of local politics today. As in Goffman’s classic definition, drama refers to a process through which actors perform in order to make their work visible to others (Goffman 1956). It is not enough for politicians to make decisions about local issues; they must be seen doing so. Goffman’s understanding of drama also captures how actors can have competing understandings of a situation, its rules, and expectations, and how that competition can lead to conflict. Civic drama expands on previous discussions of the performance of politics by showing 1) that this conflict between partisan and nonpartisan politics becomes the overarching question of a local institution, encompassing many discrete issues, episodes, and strategies; 2) that this conflict orients the relationship between the main “cast” of the drama (local politicians in this case) and their audience; and 3) that this is a conflict that never fully resolves, but repeats in different variations.
To detail this civic drama, I define three strategic performances through which local leaders demonstrate the conflict between partisan and nonpartisan politics. Deferential nonpartisanship describes those moments when local leaders give voice to their partisan preferences and identities before deferring their actual decisions to the nonpartisanship of local government. Defensive nonpartisanship refers to performances in which leaders loudly defend the nonpartisanship of local government and denounce the partisanship of others, often to pursue their own partisan agenda. Finally, partisan cover illustrates a strategy in which actors explicitly fuse local issues to partisan identities and ideologies as a means of disciplining their colleagues and influencing issues. These specific strategies, and the broader concept of a civic drama, not only reveal important dynamics about how critical issues facing American cities are debated and addressed in local politics; they also tell us about how cultural performances work in a broader range of institutions that face competing cultural styles vying for dominance.
Local Politics, Nonpartisanship, and Polarization
The public meeting holds a storied and contested place in American democracy. Small, open, deliberative discussions on local issues have long promised a more cooperative and productive form of American politics (Mansbridge 1983; Tocqueville 2002). In today’s era of intense partisan polarization, there is a particular hope that local deliberation can offer a meaningful alternative—especially given so many local bodies are explicitly nonpartisan (Hersh 2020; Klein 2020). Yet the limits, biases, and challenges of public meetings are well established (Abramowitz 2010; Einstein, Glick, and Palmer 2020). Scholars remain divided on the influence of local debate in an era when governance has become more complex, layered, and bound up in public-private partnerships that reach far outside the city limits (Gottdiener 1987; Einstein and Kogan 2016). Despite the skepticism that they accurately reflect local interests or influence policy outcomes, public meetings continue to proliferate, and participatory democracy remains a significant part of local political life (Lee et al. 2015).
Scholars of political culture recognize that public meetings are meaningful to elected officials, city staff, and citizens—even when their effect on policy may not be clear (Polletta 2002). They educate citizens about local issues, justify decision-makers’ actions, allow citizens to express themselves, build community, develop skills and strategies, and more (Passerin d’Entrèves 2002). Local meetings also provide urban policies with a stamp of democratic legitimacy by showing that they have been carefully considered, debated, and decided on by elected representatives in full view of the public (Fung 2015). Even in this era of complex urban governance—perhaps precisely because of it—the policies hammered out by experts and interest groups behind closed doors still must go before local elected officials and receive this official mark of approval. The drama staged by local political actors still matters.
The Tension Between Nonpartisan and Partisan Politics
Today, the core function of the public meeting—binding together elite decision-making and the will of the public at-large—places local officials squarely at the intersection of nonpartisan and partisan politics. For more than a century, officeholders have been called to consider local affairs through a nonpartisan lens. When Wisconsin and many places across the country adopted nonpartisan local governments, they sought to ensure that expertise, predictability, and rationality defined local life (Liazos 2020). Throughout the twentieth century, strengthening nonpartisan norms and institutions was a strategy to shore up cities’ bureaucratic functioning, economic stability, and desirability (Almy 1977; Pacewicz 2016). Today, nonpartisanship still emphasizes these outcomes. On a deeper level, nonpartisanship is crucial to how local leaders understand their own identity, mission, and rules of behavior in office (Sweeting and Haupt 2024). Nonpartisanship becomes a regular discursive trope for city council members and constituents alike (Haack, Schoenebern, and Wickert 2012) and a means of maintaining order in a time of polarized conflict and uncertainty (Nickels, Clark, and Wood 2020).
Yet city politicians, like all democratically elected officials, ultimately derive their power from their voters and a claim to represent the “community” (Levine 2021). The literature on polarization has long debated the relationship between polarization among political leaders and polarization among the general public (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2011; Enders 2021). Most literature suggests that political elites have become more partisan and divided over time, a division that sometimes echoes and influences the public (Hetherington 2001) and sometimes alienates voters from their representatives (King 1997). But the local public meeting is a site where politicians tasked with preserving nonpartisanship confront the partisan division of their constituents. Especially today, when Americans feel their partisan identity with increasing personal intensity, the public may be a polarizing force in local debates (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012). Those who regularly speak before public meetings are certainly unrepresentative, more politically engaged, and potentially more partisan than the average person (Einstein, Palmer, and Glick 2019). Moreover, the organizations and interests that shape local political life and connect people with their local leaders are bound up in partisan interests (Anzia 2021; Ternullo 2024). Thus, for local leaders in these meetings, representing their constituents often means respecting and reflecting their partisanship. This pull toward partisanship may be even greater for local nonpartisan politicians who owe their past elections—and possible future campaigns—to parties and partisan interests (Broockman et al. 2021).
At public meetings, local politicians are asked to stand up in full view to vote on policies in a way that their audience will respect. For this performance to be effective, local politicians must demonstrate democratic deliberation—asking questions, taking input, and making informed decisions. But this places them at the intersection of two styles of democratic politics—the nonpartisanship politics of their office and the partisanship politics of their constituents, supporters, and private interests—which results in civic drama.
Nonpartisanship and Civic Drama
This paper defines civic drama as the recurrent public performance of conflict over competing styles of politics. Civic drama is a critical way for local politicians to make their work visible, build shared understandings, and pursue their goals (Goffman 1956). Civic drama builds on the notion of scene styles, the rhetorical and conceptual repertoires that actors use in civic institutions (Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014), centering the conflict between partisan and nonpartisan styles in performance politics. Some scholars of political culture argue that the dramatic performance of politics becomes more important precisely as power becomes diffuse and uncertain (Alexander 2009). For reasons discussed above, contemporary U.S. cities find themselves in a position of profound uncertainty around questions of who governs, what guides local decision making, and what norms local leaders should follow. This makes local nonpartisan government a powerful example of civic drama.
A key driver of the civic drama in local government is the fact that, as an unmarked category, nonpartisanship is not a single frame or code with a fixed, shared meaning (Brekhus 1998; DeGloma 2023). Nor is there a coherent vocabulary of nonpartisanship, or a consistent set of words, rhetoric, or actions used to convey the nonpartisanship of local action. Instead, local politics constantly interrogate, contest, and redefine the concepts of partisanship and nonpartisanship. Within nonpartisan institutions, particular actors, issues, and communities are politicized and depoliticized, and made to seem partisan or nonpartisan (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003). Through performing this conflict, local leaders invite their audience to see new issues through partisan and nonpartisan lenses, gauge their reactions, and respond with new approaches (Lichterman 2017).
In part because of this unmarked nature of nonpartisanship, and in part because of the changing strategic interests of local actors, this civic drama never fully resolves. An important insight the concept of civic drama adds to the study of nonpartisan local politics is that it helps explain why local politics do not settle into a steady, consistent pattern. Prior research has shown how new frames develop in local governance, how competition between styles of politics can unfold, and how one approach may become the dominant path to local policy victory (Stiman 2021; Araos 2023). While these episodes certainly occur, the notion of a drama helps place them in a broader context of uncertainty, shifting roles and understandings, and a conflict that never quite ends. There is no one way to manage the competing goals of nonpartisan leadership and democratic accountability; there is no shared understanding of what nonpartisanship means in a polarized era. Rather, these performances require a kind of political creativity, a regular reimagining of the definitions and boundaries between nonpartisan and partisan politics that local actors must pursue to succeed in these institutions (Perrin 2009). The recurring nature of this drama, unfolding weekly in public meetings, is fundamental to understanding how it can be exploited, undermined, and reshaped in different ways over time.
This political creativity is on display on a daily basis in nonpartisan city councils. This paper finds that three strategic performances—deferential nonpartisanship, defensive nonpartisanship, and partisan cover—are a regular part of civic drama and are examples of how actors use this political creativity. In moments of high intensity (e.g., the culmination of long fights over major issues) and more mundane, daily actions of basic city management, local leaders strive to demonstrate their nonpartisanship and responsiveness to the (sometimes partisan) interests of their citizens (Lo and Eliasoph 2017). Some may alternate between more neutral and partisan approaches to manage competing interests and identities (Lichterman 1999). Some may perform skepticism, irony, and detachment to paper over or ease the contradictions inherent in this political position (Eliasoph 1998; Bennett et al. 2013). Some may use rigorous, intense boundary work to try to hold partisan and nonpartisan politics as separate as possible to protect the particular style of nonpartisan politics (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003, Neves and Neves 2024).
The findings discussed below highlight three types of political performances that develop from, exploit, and perpetuate the civic drama at the heart of local nonpartisan politics. There are certainly other types of strategic performances that also reveal this tension between nonpartisan and partisan politics in local government that could be further defined by future research. Similarly, while this paper argues that nonpartisan city councils are a powerful example of civic drama, there are likely other institutions defined by the conflict between political styles where it would be productive to extend this concept.
Cases, Methods, and Data
Wisconsin is an ideal setting to study nonpartisanship and polarization because it combines robust nonpartisan institutions with intense partisan conflict and division. Several Progressive Era reforms help to strengthen both an institutional practice and a culture of nonpartisanship. As in about 75 percent of cities nationwide (Welch and Bledsoe 1986), local elections are officially nonpartisan: there is a nonpartisan primary, no parties appear on ballots, and local elections occur on a separate date from state and federal partisan races. Nonpartisan elections are bolstered by Wisconsin’s law requiring nonpartisan voter registration. Because voters in Wisconsin—and in 18 other states (Cook 2018)—do not officially register as Democrats or Republicans, there is no formal way to identify which candidates on the nonpartisan ballot are members of which party. Finally, strong open meeting laws prevent local officials from strategizing and deliberating in private, effectively preventing the formation of partisan caucuses in local government. Cumulatively, these factors yield a local political environment in Wisconsin where partisan identification is optional and strategic: reforms have done away with the parts of the political process that might require a nonpartisan official to identify with a particular party; if they do so, it is for their own political purposes.
Partisan division and polarization in Wisconsin are both intense and intimate. The state is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans—for the last 20 years, only a few percentage points have decided most statewide elections. While geographic polarization between rural and urban areas increasingly defines the state (Cramer 2012), this is an incomplete picture, and most parts of the state include significant numbers of Democrats and Republicans. Perhaps because of this, the intensity of partisan conflict in Wisconsin has escalated in recent years. The state has seen recall elections, mass protest movements, the most significant gerrymandering in the country, legislative reforms targeting political opponents, and rampant allegations of fraud and corruption. Close political divisions and intense conflict combine to raise the stakes of nonpartisan local politics: nearly every nonpartisan politician is accountable to large numbers of voters from both parties. There is a real fear of what partisan incursion could do to local government.
Small cities exemplify these dynamics more than anywhere else. In 2020, for example, President Biden won these cities by just 6 points. By contrast, he won Madison and Milwaukee (the only cities over 150,000) by 66 points, and lost communities smaller than 30,000 by 25. Out of the spotlight of state and national parties, small cities have also historically had stronger nonpartisan institutions (Welch and Bledsoe 1986; Bridges 1997). Given this, the struggle between nonpartisan and partisan politics is heightened in small cities; there is a real investment in nonpartisan institutions and a real possibility of polarized partisan conflict.
Among Wisconsin’s small cities, I focus on the 14 cities between 30,000 and 150,000 that are also their county’s administrative seat. County seats are usually the largest cities in their respective counties, have the most significant local governments in their areas, and are often the headquarters of local political parties. This makes it reasonable to assume that the tension between nonpartisanship and partisan polarization may be most significant in local governments in county seats. This choice omits ten cities in this population range that share a county with a much larger municipality (most of them adjacent to Milwaukee and Madison). I then look more closely at city politics in Fond du Lac, Oshkosh, Waukesha, and Wausau. These cities capture the range of partisanship and local institutions among Wisconsin’s small cities. Fond du Lac and Oshkosh have at-large city councils and professional city managers; Waukesha and Wausau both have traditional strong-mayor governments with district-based representation. Fond du Lac and Waukesha are both majority Republican; Oshkosh and Wausau are both majority Democratic.
I draw on official documents from all fourteen city councils to trace the broad trends of partisanship and polarization in these nonpartisan bodies. The first piece of this analysis looks at the 179 people who served on these 14 city councils from January 2020 to April 2021. I review endorsements made by local political parties (collected from these parties’ Facebook pages via CrowdTangle),3 federal election campaign finance records (there is no comparable, searchable database at the state level), and partisan election records for state and federal offices. These measures—whether someone received an endorsement from a local party, whether they have ever made a federal campaign contribution, and whether they have ever run for partisan office—are the best approximation of the partisan affiliation of a council member. I use this as a benchmark against which to measure voting and other behavior on city council: does it conform to or deviate from the partisan allegiances of various members? The second piece of this broader analysis reviews voting records for all 14 city councils from January 2020 to April 2021 to examine how closely voting patterns mirror council members’ partisan backgrounds.
Across four cities, I take a deeper dive and review video recordings of nearly 100 city council meetings in 2020 and 2021. I analyze every meeting in Oshkosh and Waukesha from January 2020 to April 2021 and in Fond du Lac and Wausau from January to July 2020. These are official, largely unedited recordings that capture everything said into the microphone during a city council meeting by council members, staff, and members of the public. These videos are posted on city websites, run on local public access television, and are sometimes uploaded to YouTube. This provides an opportunity for a much more qualitative, substantive analysis of how local nonpartisan politics intersect with partisan conflict and polarization. In reviewing these videos, I transcribe and code them for explicit discussions of nonpartisanship, invocations of parties, partisan politicians, and ideologies, as well as subtler rhetoric and interpersonal interactions that may reflect an unspoken partisan conflict. These form the bedrock of my analysis of the qualitative performance of politics on city council, which is not always captured by official minutes.
Setting the Stage for Nonpartisan Civic Drama
Nonpartisanship in local government is neither self-evident nor self-executing. The bureaucratic barriers surrounding city councils—nonpartisan nomination papers, primaries, ballots—do not prevent partisan politicians from winning local elections. The rules of local government do not prevent debates and decisions from breaking down along partisan lines. This heightens the need for explicit performances of nonpartisanship: council members must demonstrate that they are living up to the promise of nonpartisan local government, and sometimes, they need to signal that they can respond to partisan interests.
Examining the members of city councils across Wisconsin, I find that more than 60 percent had some identifiable partisan connection. This is roughly consistent with previous studies that find most local politicians have a partisan identity (de Benedictis-Kessner et al. 2023). Moreover, little in the rules of how nonpartisan councils operate can prevent council members from acting like partisans when they so choose. Indeed, there are key moments when councils divide perfectly along expected partisan lines: in Oshkosh, for example, every Democrat on city council supported mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, while every Republican opposed them; in Fond du Lac, every Republican voted in favor of an anti-abortion resolution over the opposition of every Democrat. Again, the frequency with which local issues are divided along partisan lines is consistent with prior findings (Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2014; de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw 2016; Burnett 2019).
The fact that partisanship cannot be kept out of local government places even more importance on the public performance of nonpartisanship. Local politicians must prove to stakeholders, the public, and themselves that city politics can orient around something other than partisan division. This desire to perform nonpartisanship explains much of the symbolic trappings of local government, their seating, titles, rituals, and interactions. The COVID-19 pandemic put a strain on many of these symbolic performances (preventing councils from sitting together, saying the Pledge of Allegiance together, or directly addressing one another), accentuating the real value that council members see in these displays of nonpartisan unity.
The need to perform nonpartisanship also creates a particular civic drama where council members strategically perform their willingness to defer to, exploit, and weaponize the expectations of nonpartisanship in local government. These performances also give people the opportunity and the language to tilt this drama toward polarization and partisan conflict. Recognizing the importance of a nonpartisan image, council members can step into these debates and attempt to cast them in a partisan light. These are mirror images of nonpartisan strategies, a set of partisan practices that cannot be fully excluded from local government.
The first step in this drama is creating the physical and temporal space for nonpartisan performances. Many local issues are included in a “consent agenda” and passed without comment or recorded vote at the beginning of each meeting. Even many issues that do receive a formal recorded vote pass unanimously without fanfare or deliberation. These votes embody a kind of nonpartisanship, highlighting unanimity among council members and deference to committee process and staff recommendation, but they don’t present the kind of ostentatious cultural display of nonpartisanship this paper argues is so important. Indeed, the fact that this quiet passage of policies is an option only serves to spotlight those moments when council members make their performance of nonpartisanship explicit.
Every issue that requires a recorded vote also allows for council debate. While specific rules vary by council, most enable each member to speak for up to 3-5 minutes on each issue, and some permit “second opportunities” to speak. While most of this time goes unused, some council members regularly step into the allotted debate to explain their thinking, raise questions for staff, or restate constituents’ concerns. In the regular order of business, opening this space for debate often allows for a show of unity. In Oshkosh, for example, a Democratic-backed mayor and a Republican-backed council member speak on nearly every issue—usually just to thank staff and explain their support. When there is disagreement, these members are nearly always at odds; giving them space to perform their agreement signals the nonpartisanship of most of the council’s work. Creating this space, however, also makes room for performances of partisanship and division that undermine that nonpartisan message. The more divisive and controversial an issue is, the more space it takes up on the agenda and the more attention it draws from outside. Performing public deliberation, critical to nonpartisanship, can also give considerable airtime to partisan division.
Given this, it is unsurprising that the rules governing how much time is given to this performance of politics are often ripe for conflict. Both Oshkosh and Fond du Lac saw extended debates about reforming council rules to alter the amount of space given to discussion and debate. In Oshkosh, the mayor proposed limiting the time allotted for each council member to speak during debates and increasing the barriers to raising matters for discussion. In Fond du Lac, a liberal council member sought to broaden the opportunity for council discussion, increasing speaking times and fast-tracking the process for council members to bring issues to the floor. In both cases, opposition to the proposal to change the rules of debate cut across partisan lines, and both initiatives ultimately failed. But these conflicts highlight the weight politicians give to the ability to stage debates in nonpartisan local government; they must preserve their ability to perform public deliberation and maintain the power to rein in those public displays of politics.
A second conflict from Fond du Lac demonstrates how making space for local debate can become a fully polarized partisan conflict. In June 2020, the Fond du Lac City Council sought to issue its first-ever proclamation in honor of LGBTQ Pride Month. The largely symbolic action—like all proclamations—was to be offered at the beginning of the meeting, without discussion or debate, and with the council president speaking in the council’s (presumptively unanimous) voice. This time, however, a conservative council member with ties to the local Republican Party and statewide “Family Values” organizations took several extraordinary steps to force debate. He used a “point of privilege” to ask to amend the council’s agenda for the night so that discussion could happen before the council president issued the proclamation. He then demanded that public comment precede the resolution. Finally, he proposed and debated a series of rule changes that would alter the scope, allow for discussion, and potentially require a recorded vote on all resolutions. The short-term impact of these moves was to enable an hours-long debate on Pride Month that saw intense partisan conflict; the long-term impact was to create the potential to regularly transform this performance of unity into an outlet for division and polarization. While the council member’s proposal was unsuccessful, the following weeks saw people try to bait council into a partisan debate through proclamations on gun rights, abortion, and more.
As the next section explores, there are many reasons local politicians want to perform their nonpartisanship publicly. For that performance to function, literal space needs to be made for it on an agenda, or on a dais. However, the more space given to the public performance of nonpartisanship, the more space is open for its potential undoing. There is a constant push and pull on nonpartisan councils between opening the floor to highlight the nonpartisan, unanimous nature of much of their work and the risk of giving too much space to points of division and disagreement.
Strategic Performances of Nonpartisanship and Partisanship
The previous section illustrates that although local politicians do not need to publicly demonstrate their nonpartisanship, as issues can move through the process without comment or attention, politicians often go out of their way to give such a performance. This section turns to the question of why. What political ends does this civic drama serve? Some performances embody the nonpartisan scene style, explicitly invoking nonpartisanship and couching political strategy in terms of rejecting polarization and division; others reveal how local actors lean into performances often associated with partisan politics. Drawing on qualitative analyses of city council meetings, I identify three recurring strategies that local officials employ in these performances: deferential nonpartisanship, defensive nonpartisanship, and partisan cover. These are examples of “working the binaries,” where local actors accept a division between nonpartisan and partisan scene styles in local civic life but do not agree on the contours or substance of that divide (Alexander 2010). Each of these strategies demonstrates how politicians can use the civic drama central to contemporary nonpartisan local government to seek political power and pursue particular ends.
Deferential Nonpartisanship
The contemporary mix of partisan polarization and nonpartisan local government gives competing incentives to local politicians. A local politician may want to appear to represent a particular partisan or ideological camp (whether to manage their supporters’ demands, gain attention, build a campaign for a partisan office, or for some other reason). At the same time, they may not want to be seen as a roadblock to local progress or as an antagonist to colleagues, city staff, and constituents. Deferential nonpartisanship is one strategy to manage these competing interests. Here, politicians take pains to state their particularistic or partisan concerns about an issue while ultimately saying that they will defer to city staff and the majority on council. Through this strategy, politicians can save face in a Goffmanian sense (Goffman 1967). In a moment that risks violating the expectations of competing audiences, local officials can perform a partisan political style while pursuing action that reinforces nonpartisanship—paying some respect to their partisan constituents while deferring to the nonpartisan institution.
Two examples of this nonpartisan performance, when local politics must directly engage the broader partisan environment, come from Oshkosh and Waukesha. In Oshkosh, a group of local activists and Hmong-American community members urged the city council to issue a resolution denouncing the Trump Administration’s plans to allow the deportation of Hmong-Americans to Laos and Vietnam.4 One conservative council member emphasized his skepticism about the resolution, arguing that political activists had exaggerated and distorted the issue.
“First of all, let me apologize to everybody in the room for whatever knucklehead politician got you guys all worked up and scared like this, it’s terrible.” He went on to explain that staff for Wisconsin’s Republican senator had assured him that this would only affect a few people before saying, “I guess we’re here because of political pandering and fear-grabbing.” He concluded by stating that “nothing has legally changed federally or anything else that we’re all speculating in this room right now.”
These statements allowed the council member to distance himself from criticism of the Trump Administration, tie himself to local Republican officials, and cast doubt on the claims of activists and community members. In short, they allowed him to own the style of a partisan Republican in this moment when the council is considering wading into partisan politics. But, whether out of deference to the majority of council, fear of alienating Hmong constituents, or a sense that it was an empty gesture, the council member voted in favor of the resolution—which passed unanimously.
A similar dynamic occurred when the Waukesha City Council discussed a proposal to provide law enforcement support to the City of Milwaukee during the 2020 Democratic National Convention (DNC). One conservative council member repeatedly criticized the proposal, calling the decision to host the DNC a “self-inflicted wound.” Beyond the specifics of this event, he took a moment to attack the City of Milwaukee more broadly, saying, “I’m all about partnerships… but to be completely frank, we are very rarely ever going to rely on the help of Milwaukee Police Department, they can barely take care of the city as it is. So, they need us more than we need them.” This presented an opportunity for the council member to perform his partisanship by criticizing both the DNC and the Democratic leadership of Milwaukee. He also put forward the idea that Milwaukee is lawless, unsafe, and poorly run—a common refrain in conservative circles in Waukesha and across Wisconsin.
Other conservatives on the council, however, took a different tack. Several nodded to their partisan commitments and interests while performing an explicitly nonpartisan style of politics. One said: “I think everyone knows my political affiliations by now, but I think it is extremely important that we support this convention. There are dignitaries from across the country here, and I want them to be safe.” Another echoed: “We should be proud of the fact that there is such partnering, planning, staging as we move forward to have a safe Democratic convention, and we would want that if it was either party.” One more—who happened to be the father of the council member raising the strongest objections—concluded by saying he was deferring to the police: “Bottom line for me is I am supporting the police department and their judgment call. That’s their call; they are a professional organization.” Here, again, the vote to approve the mutual aid agreement was unanimous—even the first council member voted in favor.
In the contemporary era of intensely held partisan beliefs, nonpartisan politics always asks local officials to keep their partisan politics in check and focus on consensus-building and local needs. Deferential nonpartisanship is a way of performing that drama—that internal conflict between styles of politics—for the public. There are several strategic reasons politicians might pursue such an approach. First, it may help them save face among their partisan supporters, allowing them to say that they publicly criticized their opponents and their proposals. Second, they can posture as paragons of nonpartisanship, willing to put personal political interests aside in the name of local unanimity and standing with a particular constituency (Hmong-Americans, law enforcement, etc.). Finally, it can serve as a way of hedging one’s future options: if the proposal is popular or receives little attention, the member was part of the consensus that voted in support; if the proposal becomes a problem, the member can say they raised objections at the time. Deferential nonpartisanship functions as an outlet for polarization on a nonpartisan council, allowing partisan politics to have a moment of visibility without disrupting the operation of the body as a whole.
Defensive Nonpartisanship
While deferential nonpartisanship describes a performance where council members check their own partisan identity for the sake of local government, defensive nonpartisanship is about anticipating and defusing the partisanship of others. There are two primary versions of defensive nonpartisanship: first, a prophylactic strategy that tries to insulate local government from the partisan politics waiting outside the walls of city hall; second, a strategy that weaponizes the language of nonpartisanship to accuse opponents of wrongdoing. Defensive nonpartisanship is anticipatory, reacting to the threat of partisan incursion and, as such, reflects the biases and suspicions that local actors hold about the ills of partisan politics. Defensive nonpartisanship is a different kind of civic drama that council members perform for their constituents. Instead of the internal struggle performed in deferential nonpartisanship, it is an outward-facing conflict between a style of politics they believe belongs on council and a style they deem as out of bounds.
The more prophylactic version of this nonpartisan performance occurs in large and small ways in the course of city council operations, sometimes invoked in discussions of minute policy decisions and sometimes dominating all-consuming debates about the nature of local government. A conflict in Oshkosh in June 2020 over an evangelical church’s desire to hold a mass prayer event at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates this approach to nonpartisanship.
The debate was tense because it immediately followed several large Black Lives Matter protests in the community. Several people tried to raise the partisan stakes of the discussion: a Republican state legislator made a rare appearance to lobby on behalf of the church; a conservative council member argued it was hypocrisy to allow mass protest but not mass prayer; a liberal member criticized the church representatives for not wearing masks. Two council members—a liberal and a conservative—asserted that they had to approach this issue as nonpartisans, but they disagreed about what that meant. “I don’t want to get into a debate of ‘we had demonstrations, and now we have a Christian event’ that is not our role; we are nonpartisan,” said one council member. “So, I’m going to support it because I think they’re doing it the right way.” Her colleague agreed that they must remain nonpartisan but came to the opposite conclusion: “Regardless of the content, we have science and health advice that tells us that these kinds of events are not helpful to our situation.”
In this example, the threat of partisan incursion into the nonpartisan city council is not hypothetical. The partisans are literally at the door, making demands of the city council and threatening to exploit the events of that night for partisan gain. These council members perform defensive nonpartisanship as a way of managing the competing interests of local constituencies and the values embedded in nonpartisan local governance. By showing that they understand the partisan interests of their constituents, while asserting that they must preserve a nonpartisan politics within council, they actively perform the boundary between nonpartisan and partisan politics. The contrasting answers from the liberal and conservative council members show how this prophylactic nonpartisanship can be a point of unity. This iteration of civic drama in local politics demonstrates a nonpartisan style shared by council members with differing ideological lines and conflicting positions on specific issues while reinforcing the boundary between the politics council members practice and the politics others might bring from outside.
In other moments, city council debate demands a more fundamental examination of what local government is and what it means to be nonpartisan. Such debates move beyond questions about specific policy decisions to a more consuming discussion of the norms of local politics. The Fond du Lac debate about the LGBTQ Pride Month proclamation illustrates how this uncertainty around nonpartisanship and polarization encompasses a nonpartisan council’s purpose and work. After they were asked to issue a proclamation in honor of LGBTQ Pride Month, one council member warned that this was opening the floodgates to polarization. He argued that if council could issue proclamations whenever groups asked, there was no end to the divisive issues constituents could force them to consider:
We’re going to have [citizens] ask City Council members every single week to take stances on things like Trump’s wall, what are our stances on things like immigration? What are our stances on things like reproductive rights or anti-Israel? I just don’t think that’s a really productive thing for our community…
In response, he proposed a series of measures designed—he claimed—to further insulate local government from partisan polarization: they could only issue proclamations on “noncontroversial issues,” they could allow public debate on proclamations, they could vote on all proclamations, etc. However, these proposals themselves proved to be divisive and polarizing for his colleagues. Another council member argued that bringing debate and votes on proclamations would only further endanger nonpartisan local government. The anonymity and unanimity of proclamations made in the voice of the whole council, she argued, helped preserve nonpartisanship:
I feel like we would be going down a slippery slope, a rabbit hole. I personally don’t want to sit up here and debate each proclamation that comes forward and then take a stand on which side I’m going to go on. Because I want to remain as neutral as possible. Because I support all of Fond du Lac, not just this part of Fond du Lac or this part of Fond du Lac. Because I represent all of Fond du Lac. So, I don’t want to be criticized each and every meeting that I come here now and have to defend a position.
Both of these statements embody a prophylactic performance of nonpartisanship. They see partisan conflict as something that poses a threat—not just to the success of a particular policy or community support for a decision, but to the very functioning of local government. Without action to buttress nonpartisanship, both members argue, polarization will consume the city council and prevent it from doing its core tasks of managing local affairs. Notably, the two members disagree about what actions will effectively reinforce nonpartisan politics. This highlights a key challenge of prophylactic nonpartisanship: politicians cannot know what will spark a partisan backlash. They can work from their suspicions and preferences, but there is no guarantee they will be right or their colleagues will agree. In this iteration of civic drama, local actors must anticipate the partisan political performances that may come from outside of city council and find alternative performances that will defuse them. Especially for local representatives in politically divided cities, this prophylactic nonpartisanship helps preserve some neutrality and some ability to represent all one’s constituents.
A second version of defensive nonpartisanship occurs in moments when local politicians seek to weaponize the nonpartisan political style against their political opponents. Here, local actors use the language and values of nonpartisanship as a cudgel against their colleagues. Through an ostentatious performance of their commitment to nonpartisanship, council members allege that certain people, behaviors, or policies are out of bounds for local government. Often, the partisan stakes of these moments are crystal clear, and nonpartisan rhetoric becomes yet another tool for polarization and conflict.
Weaponized nonpartisanship featured prominently in the fight over the LGBTQ Pride Month proclamation in Fond du Lac. The chief opponent of the proclamation was a conservative council member. Having received the endorsement of the local Republican Party and working for a conservative “family values” organization, his partisan commitments were quite clear. Yet, he took pains to frame his opposition as a defense of nonpartisanship, claiming that it was the proponents of the proclamation who were violating the norms of local government:
I also want it to be known that in no way is this discriminatory towards [the council member who introduced the proclamation]. This is purely based on what we have with this specific proclamation… a political special interest group that also does have a partisan leaning. I want to make it clear as well that this is the first time in Fond du Lac City Council history that we have had a partisan political body endorse or support a proclamation or an ordinance or resolution. And this is also the first time, as far as I’m aware, that we have had different partisan lines—with a State Assembly candidate or whatever else, whether at State Senate or Congress—we should not be having partisan politics get into our city council.
This statement, along with several others where he repeatedly said that this issue was part of a “party platform,” shows how claims of partisanship can be leveled against proposals in local government. This council member uses the fact that members of a political party, its leaders, and its formal organizations have supported an issue to argue that it is beyond the scope of local government. Of particular concern—especially to those who worry about the biases and exclusion embedded in nonpartisan politics—it is not clear that there is any role for LGBTQ issues in local government that would match this definition of nonpartisanship.
In other cases, local leaders weaponize this defense of nonpartisanship to embarrass partisan opponents on the city council. Here, arguments about what is appropriate in a nonpartisan context have less to do with specific policy initiatives and more to do with arguing that political opponents have violated some norm. Again, an Oshkosh City Council meeting from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies this dynamic.
In the first weeks of the shutdown, in the runup to the April 2020 election, several mayors and local officials from around the state signed a letter to state leaders urging them to suspend in-person voting and move to an all-mail election. Oshkosh’s mayor and one city council member signed the letter.
A few weeks later, several of the mayor’s conservative colleagues criticized her for violating the nonpartisan norms of city council. One council member criticized that all other mayors who signed the letter were Democrats, making this seem like a partisan initiative (like the mayor of Oshkosh, they were all nonpartisan officials who may have had informal support from Democratic parties): “Those are Democratic and those are political games being played and political things being hashed out in the media and public and that’s not what we’re about at this at this level in this body in the city of Oshkosh.”
A second council member echoed these sentiments, saying that the mayor’s actions had been inappropriately partisan:
We are not Democrat or Republican, we are elected at-large, we are not affiliated with one party or the other, and I think a letter like that put us in a light of party affiliation. None of us run as a candidate of a party and I think that we have to be careful whether it’s a council member signing something or endorsing something, or in this case, a letter that was sent to Madison. One way or the other, I think party politics has no place in local government whatsoever.
These statements show how nonpartisan political style can be weaponized not against a policy per se (there would be plenty of partisan division around COVID-19 pandemic measures to come, but this moment had no real policy stakes) but against the political style of a particular council member. To varying degrees, these council members were partisan (two had explicit ties to the Republican Party) as well as local opponents of the mayor (one would get into a protracted fight with the mayor over his seat on a local board, and one would succeed the mayor after her term). But in framing their attacks against the mayor as defending nonpartisanship and disciplining her alleged foray into partisan politics, they can mask their personal politics as something else.
The examples discussed here show how performances of nonpartisanship can be weaponized against both policies and opponents for partisan and political gain. Deferential nonpartisanship and defensive nonpartisanship (in both the prophylactic and weaponized variants) are styles of performance that use the language of nonpartisanship to acknowledge, engage, and sometimes exploit the broader partisan political environment. These are strategies for local nonpartisan officials to manage the competing demands of their nonpartisan position, their partisan commitments, and their constituents and supporters. These performances also help demonstrate why nonpartisanship as a cultural phenomenon retains purchase even as the administrative practices of local government cannot fully keep partisans and partisanship out: this drama helps local officials pursue their goals. In creating space for these performances of nonpartisanship, however, city councils also open the door to more explicit forms of partisan performance. Those partisan displays in local government are the focus of the next section.
Partisan Cover
In an era where intense polarization makes the possibility of nonpartisanship seem faint, and indeed, where many people in nonpartisan government have partisan interests, local officials depend on the public performances of nonpartisanship. These performances seek to give weight to the promise of nonpartisan local governance and, as discussed above, serve several strategic purposes for local actors. But in opening space for the performance of civic drama, local actors lose some control over precisely what politics they can perform. While the previous section describes how people attempted performances that sought to reinforce the nonpartisan style of politics, local actors sometimes use the civic drama in local government to perform unapologetically partisan politics. This “walking the boundaries” involves intentionally departing from the style of nonpartisan politics to use partisan politics—always lurking in the background—to a politician’s advantage (Alexander 2010). Here, local actors use explicit partisan styles—performing their partisan identity, using barely coded partisan rhetoric, and threatening partisan outcry—to compel action from city council members. Through these performances, regardless of their success, local actors bring partisan politics closer to the center of the drama in local government.
Most of this paper has focused on the way that nonpartisanship provides a shelter for local politics, allowing council members to keep certain issues, rhetoric, and actors out and focus on local work. However, in some cases, local actors use the opposite tactic: they force local issues—often outside the normal lines of partisan politics—into partisan styles of politics for strategic gain. Giving this partisan cover to a local issue is one way of performing partisanship in a nonpartisan environment, and it can be much harder to discipline or prevent than more explicit forms of partisan politicking. Often, these performances come from outside of the city council, beginning with members of the public who are less skilled at (or less committed to) masking their partisan interests, but once said by citizens, they can be echoed by nonpartisan politicians.
A debate over a proposed ordinance on chicken-keeping and other animal regulations in Waukesha is a prime example of how partisan values can be layered on top of nonpartisan issues and performed in local government. The initial connection between the chicken-keeping ordinance and classic partisan values came from members of the public who spoke at the council meeting on the topic. Most framed their opposition to the chicken ordinance in conservative terms. One man rooted his concerns in respect for property and privacy, saying, “If there are complaints, we can deal with them with our neighbors. I just feel like this is a gross overreach.” Another woman said that the policy contradicted the community’s commitment to freedom: “I have chosen to live in Waukesha because of the freedom to have animals.”
One speaker went so far as to argue that the proposed policy violated the Fourth Amendment.
[This proposal] says that the city has the right to inspect the premises at any time, that is against the Fourth Amendment. I can’t believe that any alderman or alderwoman would vote to destroy the Fourth Amendment in the city of Waukesha. As my wife said, any drug dealer or murderer or rapist can’t have some policeman walk into the house without a judge saying you need a warrant… But moreover, it is about America. I have been to a lot of “Stan” countries, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, let me tell you this is the rules they love. They love to be able to walk into someone’s property with no reason other than a neighbor had a complaint and said you have to come in here and talk to them. That’s ridiculous. We live in America.
These statements notably invoke classic conservative rhetoric—freedom, government overreach, the Fourth Amendment, and private property—on an issue where their relevance is not obvious. There are many ways to talk about the values and interests embedded in the question of chicken-keeping, but the speakers here chose to import conservative, partisan language onto the local issue. Several aspects of this partisan cover merit further comment.
First, while it started from members of the public, this language was echoed by council members themselves. While pushing for amendments to reform the proposal, one council member repeated one of the speakers’ claims, saying: “I do think it is intrusive and overreaching as is mentioned in public comment.” A second council member, a longtime conservative in local politics, drew on the invocation of the Fourth Amendment, reading the text of the amendment before demanding more due process in chicken inspections. These instances show how once partisan rhetoric or claims have been bound to a particular local issue, it enables others to continue this performance of partisanship in nonpartisan government.
Second, although I have focused so far on the use of conservative-coded values in the chicken-keeping debate, this attempt to layer partisan values onto nonpartisan issues is far from ideologically consistent. In this debate, local actors also tried to frame chicken-keeping in terms of diversity and sustainability. One speaker argued that the policy was discriminatory, claiming that it would disproportionately impact Latinx people in the community. Another said that protecting chicken-keeping was about ensuring access to sustainable, healthy, natural food. Neither of these claims, however, was echoed by council members or had much influence on the broader debate, likely because Waukesha is a conservative city and one of the only liberals on the city council was the chief architect of the chicken policy. Importing partisan politics into local issues can happen in muddled, sometimes contradictory ways, and those analyzing it should examine which approaches stick and which fall away.
Finally, there is considerable strategic importance to this kind of performance: local actors perform partisanship to increase their power (or decrease the power of their opponents) in local (or even state and federal) politics. While it is unclear exactly how much of this is at play in the chicken-keeping debate—one public speaker would use this issue to launch an unsuccessful campaign for council—a moment from a different Waukesha meeting a few weeks serves as another example. During a local debate about city council attendance policies, a conservative council member tried to insert a colleague’s partisan race for the state legislature in the debate. “I just wanted to ask [the] Alderman a question. As long as COVID lasts, if it goes for another year, is he saying he will not attend an in-person meeting. And if so, if he wins his Assembly race, will he be attending meetings in the Capitol, or is he just not…” Here, the insertion of partisan politics into a local, nonpartisan debate is specifically about gaining power. By exploiting the partisan campaign of an opponent, the council member tries both to win his preferred local policy (no remote participation at city council meetings) and to undermine his opponent’s campaign for partisan office.
Partisan cover is a performance of a partisan style of politics that brings partisan values, rhetoric, and stakes into local nonpartisan politics (more or less explicitly). It is a way of attaching partisanship to a local issue in the hope that it helps secure a policy or political victory. The civic drama highlighted in these examples centers around how far partisan styles can push into nonpartisan politics before being sanctioned. Because “partisan values” is ill-defined, this kind of partisan performance in local politics may be much harder to proscribe. The more obvious and consistent partisan values on local issues become, the more difficult it is for councils to bar partisan performances. The final example above is the exception that proves the rule. It is only in this moment, when a member brings up an active partisan election, that council leadership tells them such a discussion is inappropriate in local government.
Conclusion
Contemporary local politics are caught between two political styles, both entrenched in urban institutions. Nonpartisanship, written into the procedures for local elections and governance in most cities across the country, brings with it certain expectations for how local leaders should talk, behave, and interpret the issues before them. Partisan politics, with its strong grip on the private commitments of many local leaders and on an increasingly polarized public, comes with its own style, rhetoric, and shared assumptions. Required to debate and deliberate on local issues in public, local leaders strategically deploy both styles, moving between partisan and nonpartisan politics and, most crucially, pushing and policing the boundaries between the two. This paper has articulated three strategic performances that embody the conflict between partisan and nonpartisan politics—deferential nonpartisanship, defensive nonpartisanship, and partisan cover. The successful use of these strategic performances is critical to how local actors influence policies, discipline their colleagues, and maintain power.
These strategic performances are part of what this paper defines as a civic drama: the recurring conflict between two political styles that becomes a critical feature of how local actors perform politics in a particular institution. The concept of a civic drama adds to our understanding of scene styles and the public performance of politics in three important ways. First, while previous scholarship has illustrated how scene styles may change and evolve across actors, moments, and institutions, the concept of a civic drama helps capture how repeating conflict between styles can define an institution, affecting every actor and every action. Second, the idea of drama sharpens the focus on the interplay between a primary cast—in this case, city council members—and several different audiences. All actors approach civic life with particular styles that they perform in large or small ways, but this drama between nonpartisan and partisan politics is quite literally staged, playing out between local leaders on a dais in front of an audience in the room and watching at home. The recognition that this is a performance for the public is crucial to understanding how local leaders strategically engage in partisan and nonpartisan politics. Finally, the concept of the civic drama emphasizes the fact that these performances always have another act. There is no resolution to the conflict between partisan and nonpartisan politics, no settled understanding for how local actors should navigate this tension. Rather, this conflict is something that people can return to again and again to produce drama, discipline one another, and pursue their goals.
This concept of a civic drama need not be limited to the study of nonpartisan local politics. There are likely many other institutions that have this conflict between different political styles at their center. There may be institutions defined by a conflict between a professionalized style and a lay style, between styles associated with particular locales or segments of a community, or any number of other competing approaches to civic life. Future research could adapt and explore the concept of civic drama and the strategic performances outlined in this paper in additional contexts.
The study presented in this paper is necessarily limited. This paper has focused on several small cities in Wisconsin over the course of a little more than a year. There are aspects of this setting that may be unique. Wisconsin has a particularly strong history of and institutional commitment to nonpartisanship. Given their distance from the political spotlight and fierce partisan divisions, small cities are likely especially susceptible to the dynamics discussed here. And this period—encompassing the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a wave of Black Lives Matter protests, and the 2020 elections—may see unusually intense partisan politicking in local bodies. However, the central tension between nonpartisan local politics and partisan polarization is not limited to this case. Most cities in the U.S. have nonpartisan local governments, and regardless of their partisan environment, they necessarily lie adjacent to and struggle with a larger political context. Issues, actors, and specific strategies may differ at different times and places, and future research could examine how these dynamics vary across contexts. Moreover, this study exclusively analyzed the public performance of politics during official, formal meetings. Further research may pursue observations in more intimate moments of the political process (e.g., internal meetings, constituent calls, organizational strategy sessions) to see how this public performance shapes and is shaped by those private interactions. Additionally, further research might consider conducting interviews with local officials and political participants to examine their own understanding of partisan and nonpartisan politics and the self-awareness and intentionality of this civic drama.
This current time period demands a lot of local politics. Local institutions must make decisions on any number of critical issues— from infrastructure investment to law enforcement policies, neighborhood zoning rules, and public health measures—that divide their communities. And, in an era when state and national politics have grown more vitriolic and stagnant, many look to local politics for relief from polarization. This paper details the difficult situation in which local leaders are placed as they seek to navigate the expectations of both nonpartisan and partisan politics. The civic drama outlined here helps to explain how and why conflict persists in local political life—how local politics simultaneously may reinforce and undermine the partisan polarization that shapes so much of American life.
Notes
- Proceedings of the Wisconsin State Legislature, Special Session 1912. ⮭
- Emil Seidel. 1912. “Defense of Milwaukee Socialism.” In the Emil Seidel Papers at UW-Milwaukee. ⮭
- This data was collected in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin Center for Communication and Civic Renewal. ⮭
- An ethnic minority from Southeast Asia, many Hmong people moved to small cities and rural communities in Wisconsin after the Vietnam War. In several cities across Wisconsin, they are now the largest community of color. Political instability and conflict had stopped the deportation of any people to Laos or Vietnam for decades, but the Trump administration had proposed lifting that policy. ⮭
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Mustafa Emirbayer, Michele Lamont, Myra Marx Ferree, Pamela Oliver, Chaeyoon Lim, and Sadie Dempsey for providing feedback on drafts of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in 2024.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.
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