A Brief Review of Jessica Trounstine’s Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities

March 10, 2020

Jessica Trounstine’s 2018 book Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities contributes to the public policy literature by exploring how segregation has affected local policy outcomes in the United States.

The central thesis in Segregation by Design is that segregation within, between, and outside American cities is “not simply the result of individual choices about where to live” (4), but rather the result of careful policy design by local policymakers. Trounstine returns to this argument throughout the book by providing overwhelming evidence of local policies which demonstrate that segregation is not only occurring, as evident by zoning laws and variation in public good provision, but that this segregation is intentional, and racist. This argument rests on the premises that “local governments control the location of negative and positive externalities (such as pollution-producing factories or public parks)… the functions that local governments provide are allocated” (141). In contrast with the federal or state-level contexts, Trounstine notes that “while it is difficult to deny particular house-holds access to sewer lines or a local public park, it is much easier to deny particular neighborhoods” (98), resulting in great differences across city boundaries or within neighbourhoods in a city.

Trounstine (16) provides a second, sub-thesis within their work: “segregated places are politically polarized places”. Polarization, in this context, can be partially explained by examining the effects of segregation on political preference: “residents who live in defended neighborhoods (segregated neighbourhoods, favouring a white majority)… are more likely to identify as Republicans and more likely to vote for Republican presidential candidates” (204). This, in turn, encourages local policymakers to make policies that these groups favour, further exacerbating polarization. This feedback cycle contributes to less collective investment in segregated communities, compared with all white or diverse communities. Trounstine (215) normatively opposes this outcome:

It is clear is that if we do nothing about this design, politics will continue to polarize, and inequality in wealth, education, safety, and well-being will continue to worsen. Much is at stake.

Trounstine notes that the research project began with an exploration of public goods allocation and “the relationship between land use control and inequality” (i.). Trounstine uses waterways (158; 206), “roads, policing, parks, sewers” as the main dependent variables throughout the book as a means by which to measure examine the “delivery of public goods to politically powerful constituents” within ‘white protected communities’. This work is related to Mancur Olson research on public goods, “the basic and most elementary goods or services provided by the government” (Olson 1965, 14). Evidently, measuring public good provisions is an appropriate approach to understanding tangible policy outcomes at the local level.

Trounstine utilizes a mixed-methods policy research design, drawing “on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation” (i). This mixed-methods approach is convincing, as the qualitative historical references provide the context necessary for thorough quantitative modelling.

Although Trounstine argues that the “roots of [segregation] are classic models of individual choice” (27), the book would benefit from greater exploration of individual-level, rational choice accounts of policymaking. Trounstine dismisses “theories reliant on individual choices [as] subject to instability in the absence of collective enforcement mechanisms” (28), however this modelling is accounted for in some of the rational choice policy literature. Schneider & Ingram argue that “public policy almost always attempts to get people to do things that they might not otherwise do” (1990, 513) as there are policy tools which do not require collective enforcement mechanisms to arrive at outcomes, such as incentive tools (Ibid., 515-516) or capacity tools (Ibid., 517-518).

Trounstine’s Segregation by Design is excellent public policy research. If policy scholars are to adopt Lasswell’s conception of the policy profession as the pursuit of “knowledge that will heal the sick and improve the position of the socially deprived in every category” (1970, 14), then Trounstine’s book is an especially valuable contribution.

Works Cited

Lasswell, Harold. “The Emerging Conception of the Policy Sciences.” Policy Sciences 1, 1970: 3-14.

Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press, 1965.

Schneider, Anne, and Helen Ingram. “Behavioral Assumptions of Policy Tools.” Journal of Politics 52.2, 1990: 510-529.

Trounstine, Jessica. Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.