When progressives took power: the limited economic effects of municipal reform in US cities

How did the adoption of reform-style government affect socioeconomic inequality in US cities during the Progressive Era? The conventional wisdom describes the reforms of this time as having a large impact on inequality, benefiting elites and white business owners at the expense of less well-off city residents. However, more recent political science work on this period offers reasons to expect more nuanced redistributive effects. We study the impact of reform leveraging deanonymized census records, newly digitized municipal budgets and reform introduction dates across 455 US cities during 1900–1940. Using a doubly-robust difference-in-differences design, we document the impact of Progressive municipal government on the relative socioeconomic well-being of black, immigrant and working-class residents compared to whites, natives and business elites. We find that inequality increased only modestly in reformed cities, with no significant differences in public spending. The results challenge the dominant narrative that progressive reforms significantly widened socioeconomic inequality.