Abstract

Beginning in the late 1800s, dramatic population growth, immigration, economic instability, inequality, and industrialization created new policy demands that pushed local governments in the United States to expand their capacity. Appointed boards and commissions were an important tool for managing the complex challenges of cities during this transformative period but these are not well documented or analyzed. We introduce a new dataset of appointed boards and commissions across four major cities: Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Denver, CO; and Los Angeles, CA from the late 1800s to the 1940s. Supplementing these data with measures of local political regimes and organizational life, we demonstrate the utility of our new dataset through two applications: comparing the prevalence of boards (particularly civil service boards) under Progressive versus other urban regimes, and the relationship between local civic organizing and the presence of cultural boards.