Strategic Behaviour and Risk Aversion in Local Governance

Abstract

Under what conditions is local governance influenced by external interests? I illustrate the capacity of external lobbies' strategic behavior to affect local change on hot button issues by exploiting resource asymmetries between them. Using a case of gun policy in the Chicago suburbs, I analyse how local policymaking on guns changed. While the gun lobby's federal impact has been explored, its local influence is insufficiently considered. I find two main insights. First, the institutional landscape around firearms after 2008 impacted local policymaking that was resilient to challenge in 1981. Second, the gun lobby became more resourceful in its influencing strategies, which activated the latent potential of these institutional changes to exert a local effect. This granular study contributes insights on the gun lobby's local impact and the institutional local consequences federal changes brought. This comparative analysis theorises the NRA's strategic use of ‘precedent as resource’, locales' risk aversion when faced with better-resourced external lobbies, and how resource asymmetries become significant in unfavorable legal environments, with wider implications regarding lobby-locale policy interactions after Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022). The social-political uses of law as a strategic resource offers a study of the downstream impacts of the courts' politicization since the 2000s.