L Local Politics Markie McBrayer University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA Definitions Allocational policies: policies that have little or no effect on the locality’ s economy. At-large elections: in the local context, at-large elections involve the whole city electing a councilmember, who then represents that city. Council-manager systems: The city manager (an appointed position) maintains much of the budgetary and administrative powers that were originally with the mayor in mayor-council sys- tems, meaning that the mayor has less institutional strength than if he or she were in a mayor-council system. In council-manager systems, the mayor is sometimes selected from among the councilmembers. Developmental policies: policies that promote local economic growth. District elections: in the local context, only a geographic portion of the city (known as a district or ward) elects a councilmember that represents the district or ward. Mayor-council systems: in such systems, mayors are typically vested with more adminis- trative and budgetary power and are elected sep- arately than the council. Multilevel regression and poststratification: an empirical strategy that involves aggregating pub- lic opinion polls, then modeling survey responses as a function of both individual-level characteris- tics and geography. Then, in the poststratification stage, the estimates are weighted by the propor- tion of those fitting the individual and geographic characteristics in the locality. Pluralism: political competition among groups that results in compromised policies. Redistributive policies: policies that favor rel- atively disadvantaged groups at the expense of more advantaged groups and, ultimately, of the city’ s economic development. Reform institutions: changes brought about to political institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to remove what was perceived to be the deleterious effects of political machines. Reform institutions include at-large elections (as opposed to district-based elections), council-manager (as opposed to mayor-council) systems, and nonpartisan elec- tions (as opposed to partisan elections). Regime theory: In this theory, power is thought to be distributed across different groups and actors in a city, with the local government maintaining some power and private industry retaining some as well. Thus, it is only when the market and state form coalitions that policies are created and implemented. # Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A. Farazmand (ed.), Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_1431-1