The authors introduce their book on politics in Santa Cruz, California, as a study of “one of those highly atypical or deviant cases” (p. 3). This claim is beyond dispute. The city of 58,000 is home to a state university whose 15,000 students and 500 faculty account for a disproportionate share of the town's civic activists, and contribute to a decidedly progressive turn in local politics. The case became even more deviant when a 1989 earthquake leveled most of the city's downtown and temporarily scrambled its established power relationships.

Richard Gendron and G. William Domhoff have launched an inquiry that bears some relationship to the research of physicists and astronomers who smash atoms or peer into deep space to explore the nature of matter and energy by examining them under extreme conditions rarely found on earth. The hypotheses to be tested in this case come from four perspectives on urban politics—public choice theory, Marxism, regime theory, and the “growth machine” model of city politics. The book's concise presentation of these four views is a useful contribution in itself, a handy primer introducing the main lines of contention in the field of urban politics.

Subjecting these four theories to the rigors of Santa Cruz tests their adaptability to circumstances that lie beyond the range of “normal” city politics and, according to the authors, helps to enrich those theories by introducing factors or variables that rarely emerge in the politics of Atlanta, New Haven, or “Middletown.”

Santa Cruz was not destined at birth to be a “leftmost” city. Weeks before gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, a lucky investor bought acreage on the hills and terraces overlooking the San Lorenzo River and the Pacific Ocean. The ethereal setting would become one of the town's most profitable assets, but early settlers exploited its timber, limestone, and harbor. Local ranches supplied the hides that local tanneries converted into leather. As early as the 1860s, however, Santa Cruz became a tourist destination. Visitors were drawn to its temperate climate, magnificent scenery, and beaches. The growing tourist business helped to offset a decline of industry when the redwoods and tanbark oaks gave out and a decline in cattle raising diminished the supply of hides.

Responses to the early stagnation of Santa Cruz's nascent industrial sector revealed a division among the town's boosters—its “growth coalition.” Some local business leaders wanted to attract new industry to the town. Others saw greater opportunities for profit in attracting tourists. Tourism generally prevailed, but it was a seasonal business. Among the remedies pursued to create a year-round economy was an effort to persuade the California University system to plant a campus in Santa Cruz, one specializing in business administration and public relations. Its students and faculty would provide consumers for the local economy during the slow season for tourists. Its curriculum would produce the workforce needed to attract other businesses.

Santa Cruz eventually got its university, but not the one its business leaders had envisioned. It was a collection of liberal arts colleges with no vocational programs. Its students tended to be “seekers” who had no settled career plans, and they would soon be radicalized by the Vietnam War. The character of the university and the time of its founding “led to the institutionalization of a politically liberal and activist student culture that probably would not have developed otherwise” (p. 55).

Members of the campus community joined indigenous liberals, environmentalists, and neighborhood activists to defeat a major highway proposal in 1969 that would have facilitated suburban development and linked the city's downtown to Pacific beaches. It was the first of a series of setbacks for Santa Cruz's growth coalition. By 1973, the opposing progressive coalition had begun to win local and county elections. Students in the university's Community Studies program earned academic credit through their participation in campaigns and community organizations.

The leftist regime suffered occasional setbacks, but once the progressives learned how to link the ideological objectives of their university constituency with the more immediate concerns of neighborhood activists, they were able to exercise significant control over local policy decisions. One result was an increase in local expenditures for social services; another was a delay in infrastructure projects favored by members of the city's growth coalition. Neither of these outcomes nor a subsequent increase in local taxes would have been predicted by the “political economy” perspective on urban politics, which views the city as an enterprise competing with other cities for investment capital and jobs. The successful competitors, according to this view, are the ones that avoid high taxes and redistributive policies. The Marxist, growth-machine, and regime theories fare no better in the face of the evidence.

The earthquake of 1989 gave the local growth coalition a new opportunity to revive its plans and political fortunes, and it provides the authors with a new starting point for evaluating their four models of local politics. Downtown destruction created a political emergency that placed a premium on cooperation between progressive political leaders and the local business elite, just as regime theory would lead us to expect. Electoral coalitions, according to this view, must enter alliances with economic decision makers in order to govern effectively.

Gendron and Domhoff, however, report significant inconsistencies between regime theory and their story of Santa Cruz's comeback from the quake. Progressives and development interests found common ground only after the elected officials defeated the growth coalition's primary goal of expanding the downtown area. The progressive politicians were chiefly concerned with avoiding the voters' blame for slowing the pace of reconstruction, not with winning the cooperation of the business class. The progressives' subsequent electoral victory and their continued ability to pursue progressive policies seem to undercut the regime theorists' argument that electoral coalitions lack the capacity to govern.

The most significant political conflicts in postquake Santa Cruz occurred within the two political coalitions, not between them. In each case, the argument was between those concerned with the “use-value” of local real estate and those who exploited its “exchange-value.” Among local business interests, for example, owners of retail outlets squared off against the landlords and developers, “place entrepreneurs” who profited from rising property values. The growth-machine model anticipates just such conflicts, and it wins the qualified endorsement of Gendron and Domhoff—qualified because the growth-machine perspective would never envision an urban political elite dominated by feminists, socialists, and environmentalists.

This rich and detailed history of politics in an unusual city unaccountably overlooks an alternative understanding of the competing models of urban politics—an historical perspective. The various ways of looking at urban polities seem to be historically conditioned or embedded. At different stages in the development of Santa Cruz, different models seem more or less effective in capturing the character of local decision making. Robert Dahl's classic study of New Haven suggests that the approach holds promise.

The pluralist paradigm of Dahl's Who Governs? (1961) has a backstory. It emerges from a centuries-long “dispersal of inequalities.” In early New Haven, a patrician class stands at the apex of the local hierarchy and monopolize the town's political resources—wealth, status, and political authority. As power passes first to the Entrepreneurs and then to the Ex-Plebes, these resources are “split off” from one another until, finally, a different elite controls each of the three species of privilege. But power is not merely a matter of resources. The patricians, for example, were powerful because of the stage of urban development at which they made their entrance. New Haven was “a small town where everyone knew everyone else by appearance, name, position, origins, and social rank” (Dahl, Who Governs? p. 18). The patricians, in other words, knew the citizens who announced their votes in public under the “Stand-Up” Rule. Personal acquaintanceship was the medium of their power, and while the secret ballot may have contributed to their political downfall, the population growth that accompanied industrialization and economic expansion was probably more decisive.

The Entrepreneurs mobilized support by appeals to ideology and through political party organizations—mechanisms suited to a town that had grown beyond the bounds of personal acquaintance. A tide of European immigrants swept the entrepreneurial elite from power and elevated the Ex-Plebes to public office. Public offices, in fact, served as political currency. Having become a big city, New Haven had created a big government. Under the control of ethnic leaders, it functioned as an employment agency for immigrants handicapped by discrimination and poor education.

Dahl's history grinds to a halt after the immigrants are acculturated and the “New Men” engage in electoral competition based on policies emphasizing “shared benefits to citizens in general rather than to specific categories” (Dahl, Who Governs? p. 61). Clarence Stone and Robert Whelan have observed that Dahl's pluralist equilibrium “provided little insight into the oncoming period of social turmoil and urban disorder” (“Through a Glass Darkly: The Once and Future Study of Urban Politics,” in Richardson Dilworth, ed., The City in American Political Development, 2009, p. 99) . Another blind spot arose from the insistence that the business elite was just one among many. It ignored “the need to bridge the divide between private control of investment and popular control of public office.” The political economy and growth-machine perspectives, along with regime theory, all acknowledge that this need endows business elites and investors with disproportionate political influence. But, as Stone and Whelan observe, this too is an artifact of urban history. The city's financial dependence increases with the outward flow of jobs and income-producing residents (p. 103).

Historical circumstance may also help to account for “the social turmoil and urban disorder” that erupted after the close of Dahl's story. Several political scientists have noted the subdued character of class politics in American cities before the age of urban turmoil. Amy Bridges and Ira Katznelson offer explanations highlighting the distinctive sequence of democratization and industrialization in the United States. In Europe and Britain, they suggest, the emergence of an industrial proletariat occurred prior to, or simultaneous with, the introduction of universal male suffrage. European workers, therefore, entered the political system as proletarians—primed for class politics. In America, however, most male citizens had been incorporated into party organizations by the time of Andrew Jackson. Industrialization and the urban proletariat both came after democratization, the development of political identities, and parties based on differences other than class (Bridges, A City in the Republic: New York and the Origins of Machine Politics, 1984; Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States, 1981).

Most African Americans, however, did not experience American history as whites did. They migrated from the agricultural South to the urban, industrial North at the same time that they were engaged in a political struggle to achieve full citizenship. The profound racial divisions of urban politics may have followed from a conjunction of class and political resentments. The fusion of political and social-class concerns was right there on the signs that the demonstrators carried at Martin Luther King's March on Washington—“Jobs and Freedom.”

Black protest was not simply class warfare in a racial disguise, but the historical circumstances that shaped this protest pushed urban politics beyond the bounds of business-as-usual—much like the circumstances of Santa Cruz. Gendron and Domhoff recognize that the “institutionalization of a politically liberal and activist student culture” in Santa Cruz was a matter of historical timing and coincidence. A liberal arts university attractive to student “seekers” took shape against the background of protest against the Vietnam War and tinged the politics of a city. Unfortunately, this historical perspective does not seem to extend to the “theories of urban power” that the authors evaluate. These are treated as ahistorical constructs to be tested against evidence plucked from history, rather than as expressions of historically conditioned political regimes.