How Differences in Cultural Institutions Affect City Policies: City Responses to Changes in Dog Ownership.

Political policy outcomes are frequently understood in terms of rational actor or organizational decision-making models, but these often fail to analyze institutional effects that cut across organizations. Taken-for-granted cultural institutions are frequently overlooked as causal agents of urban conflict. Analysts are instead inclined to rely on parsimonious economic or class explanations, even though clashing cultural institutions might be an important part of the story. Urban environments push diverse cultural perspectives up against each other, occasionally inciting social movements. Many contentious issues call for official municipal involvement, for example, parade/festival management, public art selection/location, or park use allocation. To operationalize institutionalized cultural attitudes in cities, this paper examines how city policies attempt to resolve conflicts caused by cultural diversity in human-canine relationships in three US cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Cities are simultaneously pressured by small social movements for more dog parks and by large international movements for stronger animal rights. Two opposing urban dog cultures - dog worship and dog fighting - involve assorted actors and garner the attention of city officials in unexpected ways. Relying on ethnographic research of dog worship in Chicago, this paper discusses one component of the larger, three-city, comparative study. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]