Rachel Kim (Harvard Sociology)

"Constructing Compromise: Regional Coalition-Building, Local Developmental Politics, and BART Extensions after 1999"

Wealthier cities, especially with politically active business elites, are generally expected to build new infrastructure while poorer cities cannot. However, multi-jurisdictional infrastructure like public transportation systems physically and fiscally link cities together, requiring enduring political coordination. Within multi-jurisdictional infrastructure systems, cities compete for resources but can only receive new goods if neighboring jurisdictions agree to support them. Under what conditions can cities convert locally-based resources and coalitional power into regional support for a new infrastructure investment? Extending insights about urban developmental politics to the regional level, this study investigates how variation in cities’ local developmental politics arenas affects their representatives’ ability to build alliances with other jurisdictions, and its implications for multi-jurisdictional infrastructure investment outcomes. Empirically, the study uses interview and historical data to reconstruct the divergent political trajectories of two public transit extensions in the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.