Joshua Sapotichne
Assistant Professor of Political Science | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
An expert on public policy, urban politics and the policy relationship between the U.S. government, state governments and local governments
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Biography
Dr. Joshua Sapotichne (PhD, University of Washington, 2009) is an Associate Professor of Political Science who teaches and researches in the areas of American public policy and urban politics.
Current research projects examine the changing policy relationship between the US national government and American cities (work for which he received the 2010 Best Dissertation Award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association), the direct and conditional impacts of state institutions and policies on the policy priorities and fiscal behavior of city governments (supporting research for which was supported in 2014 and again in 2015 by the C.S. Mott Foundation [co-PI Eric Scorsone]), and the optimal design and structure of local governments for navigating an increasingly complex American federal system. Prior research addressed the degree to which the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 disrupted policymaking across a varity of public risk sectors and the consequence of these disturbances vis-à-vis a design of coherent homeland security policy in the US.
Josh’s prior and ongoing research has resulted in a series of journal articles published in such journals as Policy Studies Journal, Urban Affairs Review, City Culture, and Society, and Urban Research and Practice. He was recently selected as a Norton Long Young Scholar (2011) and as a Stone Scholar (2010); both awards are granted by the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association for outstanding scholarship in the field of urban politics at a young age. He (along with co-authors Peter May and Ashley Jochim) received the 2012 Theodore Lowi Prize for Best Article in Policy Studies Journal for the article “Constructing Homeland Security: An Anemic Policy Regime.”
Areas of Expertise (5)
State Politics
Local Politics
Public Policy
Urban Politics
Federal Politics
Education (1)
University of Washington: Ph.D. 2009
Journal Articles (3)
Won’t you be my neighbor? An integrated model of urban policy interdependence
Urban Affairs ReviewJoshua Sapotichne, Laura A Reese, Minting Ye
2017 This article explores local fiscal policy interdependence by proposing and testing a particular spatial modeling method to examine how different expenditure domains interact with neighboring jurisdictions. The analysis examines the extent of spatial interdependence by policy domain and explores the most robust way of determining neighbors for spatial analysis. It concludes that space matters in ways that need to be taken into account in the development of models explaining local spending and that different functional domains of expenditures have different scales of spatial effects...
Stability and change in US city policymaking: evidence and a path forward
Urban Research & PracticeJoshua Sapotichne, Megan Johnson, Young-Shin Park
2013 A central issue in urban political analysis is the way in which city-governing institutions prioritize and react to changing demands for policies and services. In this article, we examine these dynamics in American city governments through the lens of two policy process frameworks: incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium. Using panel data from all 278 Michigan cities from 2005 to 2011, the empirical analysis mostly finds evidence of punctuated processes, though the degree of punctuatedness varies systematically across city governments and by issues domain. Considerable stability is a central feature of US city policymaking; but so too are rapid and extreme changes in policy priorities–particularly in domains outside the 'basic maintenance'functions of American city governments, such as community development, social welfare, and recreation and culture...
Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets. Edited by Manuel B. Aalbers. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 360p. $89.95 cloth, $34.95 paper.
Perspectives on PoliticsJoshua Sapotichne
2013 Basic premise of this work is that a suitable framework for understanding the crisis must illuminate racial and ethnic differences in access to housing and credit markets. Gary Dymski terms this framework “the urban problematic”—meaning “the historically evolving, racialized dynamics of social inequality and accumulation, which unfold in urban space”(p. 293). It is through this shared lens that Aalbers and the contributors—who represent critical social-science traditions of several fields, including human geography, urban sociology, and (political) economics—set out to answer an important question: Why did the US mortgage market drive the subprime crisis—that is, the 2007 spike in subprime loan delinquencies and foreclosures and subsequent drop in mortgage-backed securities that kickstarted the global recession? Economic theories of creditmarket malfunction suggest two possible views …
