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Mirya Holman, "The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy" (Temple UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Miria Holman about her book titled the Hidden Face of Local Power, Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy, published by Temple University Press in 2025. This book takes us behind the scenes in a lot of US Cities where it turns out appointed boards are a really big deal in a lot of cases, but not really a big deal in terms of kind of public facing aspects. Maybe sometimes, but a lot of the time this is a sort of behind the scenes aspect of city governance. And yet, as the book describes, we need to pay attention to them.
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D
Right?
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B
There's a lot going on here. Not all boards are made the same, sometimes on purposely not made the same and that has implications. So we have a lot to discuss here about things that might otherwise be hidden, as the title suggests. Miria, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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D
Thank you so much, Miranda. It's great to be here.
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B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What questions are you asking and how did you develop them?
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D
Yeah, absolutely. So I am a professor of Public policy at the Hobby School of Public affairs at The University of Houston. And I'm generally a scholar that tries to think a lot about democracy and whether or not it's working in the ways that we expect it to work. And one of the lenses that I engage in to ask these questions, thinking a lot about local politics in the United States, this project actually emerged out of a request from a local political leader. So I was living in New Orleans and I was working at Tulane University and I was doing some work with a city council member who actually just got elected as the mayor of New Orleans. But this was, you know, more than a decade ago. I was working with her to help think about what some gender friendly policies might be that we might want to implement in New Orleans and offering some of my expertise in that. And one of her staff members said something about appointed boards. And I said, oh yeah, that's interesting. You know, I'm an expert on local politics. I certainly knew something about appointed boards, but you know, to be honest, not all that much about what, what these boards did. And the staff member said, oh, it would be so great if we knew how many women were on boards in New Orleans. I said, oh, yeah, I mean, if you get me a list of board members, I can help you figure this out. And she said, oh, no, no, no, we don't, we don't have that list of board members. We don't know who sits on, on these boards in New Orleans. We were hoping that you could figure out who sits on these boards. So this is an elected leader who doesn't have like a full accounting of who's sitting on these appointed boards. These boards are supposed to be under the purview of the city council. The city council was approving who sat on these boards. I thought, okay, this is just, this is probably just a New Orleans problem. For listeners that might not be aware, New Orleans has sort of a broad reputation as a city where stuff doesn't function all that well. And so I started just poking around, finding information. There was a website with board information on it. One of the pieces of data that I collected was that if you wanted to apply to be on a board, the form that you downloaded at this point in time in 2015 in New Orleans was a word perfect document, which is not a form of file that is really used anymore. So, you know, like, there's a lot of evidence to point to, like, maybe these things aren't very important if there's all of these obstacles. But then I have a lot of examples in my mind about times when these boards were really important. And so I started out just with a really basic research question. I wanted to do some descriptive analysis of how many women sat on appointed boards in New Orleans or maybe even in comparative cities. And there's a little bit of that in the book. But like all of the research projects that I do, there was a broad evolution of the kinds of questions I wanted to ask once I started really getting in and collecting the data. So I started to ask, who sits on these boards? And then, then I was prompted to think about, why would a city create an appointed board at all? Right. If. If we sort of have this basic understanding that people in power are often very reluctant to give up that power, why would elected leaders sort of give away some of their power to appointed board members? And then I started to see these really interesting patterns where some boards seem to have a lot of power and a lot of resources and other boards very little power. And they did very, very little. They produced almost no policy, or they couldn't even produce policy. And so my evolution of thinking about these boards really came from trying to just engage in a basic accounting of what was happening and thinking a lot about the patterns that I was seeing across the United States, I think.
- [07:22]
B
So many projects start like this, you know, one kind of seemingly straightforward question, and then it's like, well, hang on a second.
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D
Right.
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B
And that's so often why I like talking about that at the beginning of the interview. Because the kind of end result of the book is never where, or at least very rarely where most of us start. And that kind of evolution is an important part to it. So I wonder if we can talk a little bit more about methods in terms of, once you had these much bigger questions than that first one, how did you go about answering them?
- [07:51]
D
Yeah, so I started out with this really sort of what I thought was going to be a fairly straightforward task. Let me just collect information on board membership in cities. Let me see what boards exist in cities, who sits on them. Again, my research questions at the very beginning were. Were quite straightforward. You know, I. I now am not allowed. My co authors don't allow me to say anymore, oh, this is going to be an easy project, because you know that that's not the reality of this. This evolution. The other thing that I was really interested in doing was I was really interested in engaging in some archival research. This was really just for me, like, I wanted to teach myself how to do archival research. I knew that there were a couple of cities that had really interesting archives, and I was hoping to have an excuse to Spend some time in those archives. I think old documents are really interesting. And so I thought, well, maybe I'll do this, like, little bit of a history of how these boards are created using some of these archives. Again, of course, that evolved into a much bigger portion of the book where I spend a lot of time thinking about the political development of cities and the role that boards played at key junctures in how cities changed. But so I started out with this sort of basic descriptive task and then over time realized I could collect more and more data. I did some interviews. I actually sat on an appointed board for a while so I could see what the decision making processes looked like from sort of from the inside. I did a lot of participant observatory research where I watched boards engage in dialogue. It's not the thrilling activity you might expect it to be to watch, you know, like the transportation board decide where, where a bike lane is going to be located. But it was really important for me to understand how these people viewed their jobs and how they made the decisions that they made. So it's a really multi method of approach to asking these questions. And again, my questions that I began to ask were really informed by my methodological inquiry. So I often would go in thinking I was going to ask one kind of question with one piece of data. And then as I was working in the data, I would realize, like, oh, there's actually some much bigger questions that we can answer with this data.
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B
Well, I'd love to jump into one of those big questions pulling on a thread you mentioned briefly earlier, which is that as you were looking at all this information, you were coming across some boards that were doing a lot and some boards that were really not, but they were all kind of called appointed boards. So what are the sorts of factors you figured out that make a board strong or weak?
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D
Yeah, so one of the central arguments in the book is that cities create two kinds of boards. These strong boards and these weak boards. And strong boards have policymaking capacity. They often have direct resources that they control. You might think about some of the boards that control key policy that is really important, such as zoning boards or planning boards, economic development boards, boards that govern public employees. And these boards are by all measures policymaking bodies. Right. So they have real power. They often have independent power or only sort of minor oversight from elected officials. And then there's a whole other set of boards that I call weak boards that don't have those same power, that same power and capacity. And so these boards are often tasked with serving as an advisory position or an oversight position, they don't generally have the capacity to directly make policy. Or, or if they have some kind of policy arena, all of their choices are thoroughly reviewed by elected officials and can be regularly vetoed by elected officials. And I thought a lot about how these boards come to be in the book. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the evolution of policymaking in cities over time. And part of what I settled on as a way of determining what makes a board strong or weak is that I wanted to really avoid this sort of circular definition of like, well, strong boards are strong and so therefore they're strong. But instead think about the kinds of policy areas where we'd expect for cities to have incentives to integrate private individuals into the policy making process. And then another set of boards where that focus on issues where the city's incentive is to not generate policy, but instead make it look like there is active engagement from the community in some kind of deliberative function. And so you get one set of boards that handle issues like economic development, planning, infrastructure, the management of public employees, and another set of boards that handle issues like redistribution and welfare policy, making any kind of identity policy making anything where cities might be challenged to try to allocate resources from one group and give them to another.
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B
Okay, this is very interesting to understand kind of what's sorts of differences you saw. What about the motivations to end up in this place? Like why would a city want to create a strong board? And are those reasons consistent over time?
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D
Yeah, great question. So this is something I thought a lot about. Like why would elected officials want to give power away to it to a group of individuals and then not be able to control it? Right. It's a really classic principal agent issue. And ultimately I use these historical evaluations and these archives and these patterns over time to say there are points in time where it really makes sense for the city to one, try to hide. Elected officials want to hide when there's the potential that they're going to be making controversial decisions. Right. So if you're an elected official and you are the person that says, oh, we're going to widen Main street and half of the businesses in Main street are going to lose their, you know, their ability to be in this throwaway, those businesses are going to be mad at you. Right. Like you're going to be in trouble for making this decision. But alternatively, if a appointed board of individuals who is supposedly independent of the elected officials is making that decision, then all of a sudden the elected official has cover for making what might be a very controversial decision. And so we see this often when it comes to the evolution of infrastructure policy, of development in cities, of the. Of the building of the physical infrastructure of cities. Particularly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as cities really grew in size and population, leaders of cities had to make a variety of controversial decisions. And they would often sort of pass those controversial decisions onto boards. The second major reason that cities create these strong boards is for patronage, right? That elected officials want to reward their followers and people that they think are aligned with them politically, with power and resources. And these elected boards are a principal way that elected officials, these appointed boards are a principal way that elected officials are able to do this. And I have direct evidence from correspondents in archives where mayors are talking about how we need to put so and so on this board because he, you know, he really came through with us for us in the last election, or we really want somebody that's of like, mind to sit on this kind of board in order to make the decisions that are consistent with what we want. So strong boards are often created either through this attempt to sort of push out accountability for controversial decisions to an appointed board that is really sort of making decisions that the city council wants to make anyways, but it gives them cover. And then also as a way to spread resources to members of a community that are supportive of elected officials. Over time, this evolves, right? So one of the last big batches of strong boards that are created, if we think sort of chronologically and historically, are economic development boards that emerge in the late 1960s and early 60s to 1980s in the United States as the funding from the federal government is really rolled back and we start having local tax result revolts, all of a sudden, cities don't have a lot of resources, or they have even fewer resources than they had before. And then we see all these economic development boards created in this context. And this is an opportunity for cities to engage in the creation of these sort of classic, what Clarence Stone would call an urban political regime where public and private actors come together to pursue some kind of policy, and with private actors bringing resources and the public bringing legitimacy and the ability to create policy. And so over time, you've seen evolutions of this. You know, it's not that there are no political machines today in American politics and there's no patronage, but there's certainly less of it than there was a hundred years ago. And so the direct patronage has declined over time, but it still exists in some forms. And certainly I present a lot of evidence that the supporters of political. Elected political leaders often get appointed to two boards in cities today. All right.
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B
I mean, I can definitely see how that kind of as much as it's not something we know about, that much kind of fits into stories we are more familiar with in terms of how cities and how local politics work. Thinking about, you know, ideas of giving cover and legitimacy and that kind of thing.
- [19:05]
D
Yes.
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B
Why, though, would it be he bother to create a weak board like that part seems less clear to me.
- [19:13]
D
Yeah. So again, we want to think about the incentives of elected leaders. Right. So we think. I. I think a lot about how elected leaders want to retain power. There's a lot of emphasis in local politics in maintaining the status quo. Right. The people that are in power want to remain in power or they want their friends to be in power. And there are key points in urban political history that challenge this. Right. So we think about something like the civil rights movement as offering a direct challenge to this. We have a large group of people who had previously not had the capacity to select their local leaders, all of a sudden be granted the right to the guaranteed right to vote. So we have black voters, particularly in the American south, all of a sudden can participate in local politics. The federal government also during this time period is increasingly looking at cities and going, huh, all right, well, did you know that you. Nobody that's an elected office essentially looks like the people that are in cities. The people that are in cities don't have any voice in policy making. The war on poverty and the broader civil rights act efforts really focus attention on cities and how cities are not. The elected leadership are not reflecting what this new voting population looks like or wants. And so in many cities, what we see is civil rights leaders, black community members, members of community organizations looking at local government and saying, we want a voice on these appointed boards. We see that this is a place where policy is made. We see that this is a place where decisions are made and decisions that are bad for our. Our groups. Right. So we see appointed boards throughout time operating as a tool of segregation, as a tool of racism, limiting the access of black and brown people to city services, making sure that the quality of infrastructure in their neighborhoods is lower quality. And so all of a sudden, we have this political resource in the form of votes, and black voters and cities start demanding a seat at the table. And one of the tables that they want to seat at are these appointed boards where they have witnessed time and again, the appointed board has the power to make decisions to the detriment of their Community. Well, if you're an elected leader, do you want to do this at this point in time? No. You don't want to give away the power to make these important decisions to this group that you've marginalized forever. And so one of the things that cities do during this time is that they start generating a new set of words to satisfy these demands for representation. And some of this is this bottom up demand, some of it is a top down demand with the federal government and then in some states, state governments demanding better representation on boards. The federal government, as part of the Model Cities program, says in order to get this money, you're going to need to demonstrate to us that you have some kind of community engagement and the community has a voice in these processes. So all kinds of incentives, all kinds of pressure on these cities to create opportunities for new groups of people to sit on these boards. But what cities do instead is that they create a whole nother set of institutions which are largely without any power as a. As a gesture of their response to these demands, right? So instead of putting a bunch of black community members on the planning and zoning boards, instead what they do is they create a poverty awareness Board and put those black community members on that board. But the Poverty awareness board doesn't have any power. It doesn't have any resources associated with it, or it has really small amounts of resources. And everybody on the board is basically trying to fight over those resources. And so these weak boards are created not as a way to truly increase access to deliberation and democracy, but instead as this sort of off ramp to relieve the pressure on white elected leaders in cities so that they don't actually have to make any changes. And then this continues. Over time, cities learn that this is a great way to respond to demands for change. So we see the first set of civilian oversight boards created very much in the same method, in the same model. When police violence becomes a concern, and particularly police violence against black and brown people, cities are like, okay, we'll create a civilian oversight board. We would love to do that. This is great. This will offer our residents an opportunity to make sure that the police are behaving themselves. But these boards, again, do not have true power. They don't have the capacity to really engage in oversight over the police. And they don't solve any of the central problems that caused for there to be that demand for police reform in the first place. And so this is a pattern that repeats itself, where strong boards continue to have these resources and power and the ability to directly make policy and weak boards lack all of those, but look very good in terms of community engagement and representation.
- [25:32]
B
Well explained like that, it definitely makes, unfortunately, a lot more sense and starts to get us into the limits of democracy. Part of the book subtitle. Right. Because this is already in what you're telling us, kind of very clearly creating some racial inequalities and sort of standing on top of existing ones and worsening them. But the board having these kind of strong and weak ones, it's not just racial inequality, and it's not just kind of the boards themselves that create these problems. Can you talk more about kind of the inequalities that this dual system creates for cities?
- [26:04]
D
Yeah. So if, you know, back to the very beginning research question that I had. Right. Oh, what's the share of women that sit on appointed boards? If you just look overall at boards in the United States and you say, okay, what's women's representation? It's actually quite good in particular in comparison to elected office. Right. So women are maybe between 25 and 30% of mayors of cities in the United States less than that of big cities, 30% of city council members, and they're up as pretty close to 45 to 48% of board members. You're like, okay, we're getting. We're getting to parity, Right. We're getting close to equal representation. But if you then look at women's representation on weak and strong boards, enormous disparities emerge where women are much more likely to sit on weak boards and men are much more likely to sit on strong boards. We also see this with race, where white board members are much more likely to be to hold seats on strong boards, and board members of color are much more likely to sit on weak boards. And then an even sort of accelerated pattern with women of color who are very well represented on weak boards and very underrepresented on strong boards. I then also dig into some additional pieces of data as I can. So I look specifically in New Orleans and I find, for example, that political donors are really overrepresented on boards overall, but particularly in positions of power.
- [27:52]
B
Okay, that's definitely an additional aspect we want to keep in mind. If we're then trying to determine whether or not a board, an appointed board, in whatever city we may happen to live in, if it's strong or weak, how can we figure that out? Like, what can we look at in terms of size or rules or membership to kind of make at least a guess of which side of this divide it falls on?
- [28:16]
D
Yeah. So one of the patterns that I see over and over again is that strong boards are smaller in size and weak boards are large in size. And for all you listeners that might have had to make a decision in a large group of people anytime recently, say, even just like, where are we going to go to eat? Everybody knows that it's harder to make decisions in larger groups of people compared to smaller groups of people. I also show that strong boards are much more likely to have very close relationships with city staff. So city staff participate in their decision making, help them make decisions, provide a lot of resources to them, whereas weak boards are often kind of on their own or have very limited staff engagement. I also show that strong boards often have a positive and regular relationship with elected officials. So their boards are much more likely to be mentioned and see council meeting minutes. They're much more likely to be discussed as city councils make policy. Whereas weak boards are really only talked about in moments of crisis as a way that elected officials go like, oh, no, you can't get mad at us. You have to go look at this board. Look, we're really trying to do something about police violence because we have the civilian Oversight board, go talk to them about this. And so if you're interested in identifying which board might be strong or weak in your city, you might look at the degree to which that board ever comes up in any city council meeting or is ever discussed as a policy making body by your elected officials.
- [30:12]
B
Okay, that's definitely helpful in terms of identifying this happening then. Are there any other sort of membership patterns we should be talking about? We've got some. In terms of how much they're showing up in discussions, we've got things around race, around gender. Are there any, any other trends or patterns that you came across in looking at these strong versus weak boards historically?
- [30:35]
D
Well, you know, one of the things that's very clear is that the boards are created to cultivate particular kinds of membership. So if somebody listening is like, okay, I want to create a committee and I want this committee to really be a committee that gets things done, and I want them to be able to get things done in this particular area. What would you do? What kinds of membership requirements would you place on the members of that committee? What cities have done is create, say, an economic development committee committee that has a requirement that there are developers that sit on, on the, on the appointed board, that a real estate agent has to be represented, that a landscape artist, architect has to be represented. These are people whose jobs are fundamentally pointed towards increasing economic development in the city. So There the board is essentially loaded with members who are going to be interested in pursuing a particular kind of outcome for that board and the policy that's made. In comparison, when we look at something like the membership requirements for weak boards, these are often, often really widespread. There might be membership requirements that there's lots of different kinds of people represented on a board. So you might have a 20 person civil justice and crime control revision board, right, like one of these huge boards. And there has to be representation from four nonprofits and three people involved in the criminal justice system and the chief of police and the district attorney or an ada. And so all of these people that are interested in ultimately often very different outcomes are all required to be represented on that board. Now, we might actually say, oh, we think that deliberation might be really good in this setting, right? We might actually want lots of, lots of perspectives represented on a board. But if we're just comparing the ability of the board to make decisions and to actually pursue some kind of outcome, the strong board that has economic development people and real estate agents and landscape architects on it will be able to better make decisions more quickly and with less fuss and less conflict than the very large board that has representation from lots of different groups and with lots of different perspectives. And so consequently, strong boards, the core requirements of who sits on them, so set those boards up to, to make policy. And weak boards, the requirements of who sits on them are set up to not maybe engage in deliberation, but certainly not make decisions.
- [33:46]
B
When we're talking, though, about making decisions and making policy, obviously just because a group sort of says, hey, we've agreed on this piece of paper, like that doesn't necessarily mean the piece of paper will be influential or like actually do anything.
- [33:58]
D
Right?
- [33:59]
B
So, so in what kinds of circumstances do we see boards not just make an agreement about something, but actually influence policy? And do we see this happening in more in different kinds of policy as compared to others or any other sorts of trends like that?
- [34:15]
D
Yeah, so in many places there are some set of boards that by all accounts fully make the policy decisions. So this often happens with economic development policy where the economic development appointed board is in charge of some kind of economic development corporation. I mean, you know, like, this is all based on the very weird public finances of cities in the United States. But in essence, it means that the economic development board has its own resources that it controls. It often directly collects sales tax or some share of taxes from some set of people in the city and can make nearly independent decisions about how to, how to allocate those resources. For example, offering tax incentives to a business to move to a particular place. Whereas weak boards very rarely ever have that independent financial authority that we see strum. Strong boards have similarly something like a housing board, you know, like a board interested in advancing affordable housing would have to liaise over and over again with staff who are in charge of the actual implementation. So they might give advisory preferences to the staff. But advisory is advisory, right? The staff doesn't have to directly pay attention to what the board recommends. In comparison with a strong board, often the staff is directly involved in the creation of policy by the board and thus has an incentive to pursue that policy once the board makes decisions. So we see things like housing policy be made over and over again towards the preferences of developers and people with resources and property owners, and not in towards the preferences of people that want more affordable housing. Because the zoning and land use board is staffed with people that want one kind of policy and they're able to implement that policy. And the affordable housing board is staffed with a different set of people and they're not able to implement that policy. So even within one policy area, the affordable housing redistribution side of it has less power power than the developer economic development side of things.
- [36:54]
B
And so if we sum up everything you've told us about kind of what has happened with city boards historically and kind of where we're at now, like these boards, whether they're strong or weak, the fact that there are both strong and weak ones, going to the subtitle of the book, like, does this whole system improve democracy in cities?
- [37:15]
D
I don't think so. I think that it gives what I call a veneer of democracy. So I am a child of a carpenter. A veneer is that press board. You buy a bookcase from Ikea and it looks like wood on the outside, but it's actually not wood inside. It's made out of wood chips pressed together. And it's not going to really survive that second move, right? It might. You might be able to build it, but it's not going to really hold together once you start to shake it. And I argue that these boards provide this veneer of democracy. So from the outside, it looks like we have democracy. We have representative groups of people sitting on boards. This is great. Okay. There's women involved in decision making. Amazing. Okay. We're really. We see deliberation, you know, these big groups of people, people trying to come together to make decisions. And we have policy making, but the challenge is that we have policy making without deliberation. Among strong boards and deliberation without policy making among the weak boards. We have representation of racial minorities, women, lower class individuals on weak boards and we have representation of those people in power on strong boards. But we very rarely get crossover there. And so this just reaffirms to people that sit on weak boards that they aren't getting access to power. So when I've interviewed people or done surveys with board members, you know, people that sit on weak boards are like, this is a giant waste of my time. What am I doing here? And then strong board members like, yeah, this is great. I'm able to make all these decisions for the city. But, but those, those groups of people are not representative of the, of the broader population. So it's just the outward appearance of democracy. But once you open it up, it just falls apart like an IKEA bookcase.
- [39:19]
B
If that takes us then through kind of where we were and where we're at now, how could all this be improved going forward with city boards?
- [39:29]
D
Yeah, so I, you know, I will say when I talk to leaders in cities, they are actually interested in improving this. Right. A lot of cities want to do better at this there. And part of the challenge always with political institutions is that they're self reinforcing, right. Unless we change something, they'll just going to kind of keep doing what they have been doing and repeating the same patterns over and over again. So one argument that I make in, in the book is that cities could think really clearly about the structural arrangement of boards, right? So if all of your strong boards have these really clear membership requirements and they have these small boards with staff assigned to them, we should apply the exact same rules about institutional arrangements to weak boards. So if this, you know, if your planning and zoning committee has seven people on it and has a full time staff member associated with it, your Welfare and Child services committee should have the exact same resources and organization. I mean, you know, that's, that's one potential, potential outcome. I also tell anybody that asks they should try to get appointed to a board, but it should be a strong board, right? So they have the potential to, to make a lot of really important decisions. If you get onto the right board and you start making decisions that are in ways that might interrupt the status.
- [41:01]
B
Quo, what does your future look like? If that's what hopefully the future of boards is going to look like? Are you continuing to work on boards? Are you working on something else next? What is on your desk at the minute?
- [41:14]
D
So great. I'm just starting right now a big project on conflict in Local politics with a co author, Tyler Simcoe. And we started thinking first about school boards, which are elected bodies in the United States. We have this giant database of all of these YouTube videos, more than 100,000 YouTube videos of school board meetings. And we've been thinking about how conflict emerges in these school board meetings. Right. So we think about something like book bans or anti critical race theory efforts or conflict over school fundings, conflict over gender issues. So we're really interested in when does conflict emerge, why does it emerge? And now we're expanding out that inquiry in a variety of ways, thinking about the ways that conflict happens in local communities and, and what the political responses are to that conflict.
- [42:16]
B
Well, that certainly sounds like you're going to continue to be grappling with some big problems. So best of luck to you and your co author at the project.
- [42:24]
D
Thank you very much.
- [42:25]
B
While you are doing that, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Hidden Face of Local Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy, published by Temple University Press in 2025. Miria, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [42:40]
D
I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time.