The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy by Mirya R. Holman

In cities and towns across the United States, many basic responsibilities of municipal government—overseeing land use and zoning, managing infrastructure, enforcing nondiscrimination ordinances—are handled not by elected officials or city departments but, instead, by appointed boards. Despite the potential importance of these bodies in determining policy outcomes, they largely operate under the radar of both academics and the public, a situation that Mirya Holman endeavors to change with this significant new book. Holman has gathered the most comprehensive information on municipal boards to date, combining an archival effort to map the history of boards in three cities (New Orleans, Louisiana; Los Angeles, California; and Richmond, Virginia) with a compilation of all available data on these entities in the one hundred most populous U.S. cities and every city in California, supplemented by additional evidence ranging from interviews of board members to survey experiments. Drawing on this impressive collection of research, Holman contends in the book that boards exist to protect the interests of business and wealthy, white residents. More specifically, according to her theory, municipalities establish two different types of boards depending on the policy area: strong boards endowed with genuine policy authority to govern issues of concern to these privileged actors, such as planning and economic development, and weak boards that exercise only an advisory role to address the status of marginalized communities, serving to defuse grassroots agitation for poverty reduction and civil rights protections.