What ‘Emergency’ Does: Democratic Decline and the Politics of Inevitability in Michigan, 1980-2018

Mo Torres, Harvard University

What does the discourse of “financial emergency” accomplish in the realm of politics? This paper considers the case of the U.S. Rust Belt, where former manufacturing giants like Detroit, Flint, and other race-class subjugated cities today stand largely in ruin. For three decades, the state of Michigan’s primary form of aid to post-industrial cities has come in the form of the complete cancelation of local democracy. Michigan’s “emergency financial management” (EFM) laws replace the elected mayors and city council members of any city deemed to be in a state of fiscal crisis with a governor-appointed “emergency financial manager” who assumes total control over local operations. Using archival data and original interviews, I trace how emergency politics work in practice. How do policy elites advocate for emergency powers? What are their aims in doing so? And what are they able to achieve politically? I find that the story policy elites tell in public is drastically different from what is understood in private. Publicly, policy elites frame emergency governance as an undesirable but inevitable policy with no political aims aside from providing managerial assistance to struggling cities. The empirical evidence reveals a different story. Emergency financial management is a policy tool enacted with the explicit goal of privatizing municipal services. I argue that emergency politics operate as a sort of “politics without policies," an obfuscation of the policymaking process to implement explicit political aims (in this case, austerity measures) without subjecting those aims to democratic debate. When politicians cannot promote controversial policies (such as austerity, downsizing, and privatization) through democratic channels, emergency rule becomes a useful, though anti-democratic, tool that lawmakers - Republican and Democrat alike - use to achieve their aims.

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 Presented in Session 88. From the Top: Elites and Fiscal Policy Making