Political Divisions in Large Cities: The Socio-Spatial Basis of Legislative Behavior in Chicago and Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary cities are frequently characterized as divided by race and socioeconomic status, yet the political effects of segregation and stratification are rarely fully explored. Urban politics scholars have disagreed on whether urban politics is essentially consensual, conflicts are issue-based and transitory, or social and economic divides generate enduring political cleavages. We contribute to this debate with an analysis of elite conflict as manifested in recorded city council votes in two large, heterogeneous North American cities, Chicago and Toronto, over a multidecade period. The analysis employs a new technique for analyzing the dimensionality of roll-call votes. We find evidence of durable coordination among ward councilors in both cities; however, the substance of conflict differs. Correlating the dimensions of voting behavior with ward characteristics indicates that Chicago’s aldermen divide on racial lines, whereas Toronto’s councilors primarily divide on the place characteristics of wards and secondarily on socioeconomic status.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".