The Failure of Redistributive Policy in the Progressive Era Urban Polltics

Although the Progressive reform movement in the United States during the early 20th century swept the whole nation, the concrete reform measures taken at various tiers of government were not the same. Depending on the regions and the government types, different social and political needs were paid attention to by different types of reformers. On the other hand, with respect to the levels of governments, different tiers of government addressed different types of social and political issues, and the nature of the reforms driven by those governments were also different. Differentiating the policy responses of various levels of government to social demands, this paper aims at explaining why redistributive policies could hardly be formulated and implemented at the local level of government during the Progressive era. This research question is based on the very premise that the reasons of absence, or failure, of redistributive policies at the municipal level should be different from those at the federal level. With this premise in mind, one of the main arguments of this paper is that the urban business-reform coalition, forged during this Progressive period on the basis of shared interest in efficiency, systematically edged out the redistributive type of policies, such as welfare policy, which were to entail, by nature, new tax imposition on upper- and middle-income groups, massive top-down resource transfer, and the possibility of political mismanagement and corruption. The business-reform coalition invented various institutional schemes such as commission and /or manager governments to protect their interests, eluding the demands of redistributive nature from the mass.