Urban Democracy: The Case of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa

How do cities become more democratic? Scholarship about urban democracy presents distinct approaches to the city and its democratic potential. While some view local government as harboring greater democratic opportunities than the state, others identify local obstacles that inhibit democratization. In addition, recent scholarship finds interest in translocal ties between global cities, and views the city as a potential site for democratization that can up-scale and "out-scale" (beyond national borders) to other locales. The proposed paper begins with a review of the issues of autonomy, democracy, and civic participation in local government in relation to historical and contemporary cases of urban democratization and then moves on to explore a type of politics that attempts and sometimes succeeds to democratize the city. The case study of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa 2008 municipal elections and their aftermath is analyzed through the conceptual prism of transformative populism to argue that the employment of an implicit or explicit version of urban populism—such that defines and engages with a notion of the city's "ordinary people"—can serve to further urban democracy. Four mutually reinforcing levels of transformation that are pursued in the name of the many residents of the city are identified: transformation of discourse, participation, rules of the game, and policy. The findings of this study suggest that democratically transforming discourse faces less resistance from local elites than transforming participation, rules of the game, and policy. Research implications of how transformative populism can be further explored in other arenas, from local to national and transnational contexts, are discussed.