Virtually all of America’s poorest cities have been led politically by Democrats for many years, even decades. In 2010, for example, not even one of the ten poorest large cities in the U.S. had elected a Republican mayor since the 1980s. In fact, 8 of the 10 cities had been led exclusively by Democrats for more than half a century.
The common thread running through each of these economically decrepit cities is a phenomenon that Harvard scholars Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer famously dubbed “The Curley Effect,” after its prototype, James Michael Curley, who served four non-consecutive terms as mayor of Boston between 1914 and 1950. This phenomenon, Glaeser and Shleifer explain, is the strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Forbes magazine puts it this way: “A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.”
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