ABSTRACT
Students of urban politics are engrossed in an intense ideological debate about urban political economies. Stephen L. Elkin proposes that city political institutions need to be rearranged to achieve both equality and efficiency in the urban political economy. Elkin’s discussion of the various types of urban political economies presents shortcomings as well. In The State and the City, Ted Robert Gurr and Desmond S. King offer the examination of the interaction between public and private decisions as the appropriate perspective for understanding urban politics. According to Elkin, the structural factors that define the division of labor between state and market create urban political economies that revolve around three axes. These are an alliance between public officials and the local business sector, focused on promoting economic growth in the city, efforts by local politicians to organize and maintain electoral coalitions, and efforts by bureaucrats to gain autonomy in shaping politics that guide their sphere of activity.
