A political scientist studied the rise of grassroots activism in local government. Philly was his case study.

In the five years he spent researching his book Mobilization Politics, Haverford College political scientist Stephen J. McGovern interviewed former Mayor Jim Kenney and other Philadelphia elected officials, political activists, campaign consultants, labor leaders, and protesters.

The book, which covers events from the 2010s through Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s victory in the 2023 election, uses Philly as a case study to examine the national rise of grassroots progressive politics over the last two decades. McGovern details how local activists employed bottom-up tactics to win major policy victories in areas like criminal justice reform, helping to decrease the jail population, and immigration, leading to Philly becoming a so-called sanctuary city.

The activists often used an inside/outside strategy, McGovern wrote, of leaning on officials they helped elect, like District Attorney Larry Krasner, and publicly pressuring more moderate ones, like Kenney.

McGovern also explores areas where progressives have fallen short of their goals, and the problems associated with a brand of politics driven by groups that tend to be more affluent and white than the city as a whole. Much of the new type of political organization has been driven by millennials born outside the city, McGovern found, leading to tensions over gentrification.

McGovern recently spoke with The Inquirer about his 2025 book, the rise of the local progressive movement, and what it all means during Parker’s administration. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

I think that’s fair, and what I want to call attention to is how significant that change is. There may be a lot of people today who assume, “Well, hasn’t that always been the case in city politics?” But no, for much of the mid- to late 20th century, city politics operated in a very different way. It was much more of a top-down phenomenon, and the shift towards more bottom-up politics has been a relatively recent one. And increasingly it’s pretty widespread throughout the United States. So as a scholar of urban politics, I was interested in trying to explain how and why that happened.

Many scholars have argued that downtown-led regimes wielded a great deal of power over urban policymaking. Regimes were led by business leaders and their allies — law firms, accounting firms, mass media relations firms, and interest groups that had an interest in promoting growth, especially pro-growth labor unions, and, of course, public officials. Basically from 1970 on, every Philadelphia mayor headed a downtown-led regime in a relatively top-down fashion, in terms of governing style. So that’s the backdrop. My book is all about how that pattern began to change around the turn of the century, and then picked up in the 2010s with a burst of social movement activity. Occupy Wall Street really started things off, but then it picked up, especially with Black Lives Matter, the immigrant rights movement, and all of that social movement protest had a catalytic effect on grassroots organizing in cities with respect to a whole host of public policy issues.

That is one of the main factors in explaining why there is this big shift. But there are also some underlying changes in the local political environment, what social movement scholars sometimes call the “political opportunity structure.” One of those changes is a decline in the organizing capacity of the downtown business community, which had been so dominant. It started to create a vacuum. Into that vacuum steps young people. Populations had been steadily declining in virtually all big American cities. They started to stabilize around 2000, and you see an influx of young people who are relatively well educated, more likely to be professional, more likely to be progressive, more likely to get involved in local politics. Some people call it the “back to the cities” movement.

In the past, a lot of young people tended to get involved in protest politics. People on the left were very wary about engaging in electoral politics. The folks who are moving into Philadelphia after 2000 increasingly are participating in more conventional politics, including electoral politics, and that’s a big change. That escalates when Bernie Sanders runs for president in 2016. One of the lessons learned for lots of people who volunteered for him is: This is something we can do at the local level.

Absolutely. So much of this is turf-oriented. The millennials and Gen Zers moving into Philadelphia tended to congregate in neighborhoods that attract a lot of white, middle-class people who were relatively well educated, and so those became significant bases of progressive politics. The challenge then becomes organizing in other neighborhoods. Some of the grassroots groups made impressive inroads. I’m thinking about campaigns for Larry Krasner, in particular, in lower-income, predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods, where a group like Reclaim Philadelphia or the 215 People’s Alliance were pretty effective. But in many cases, it was fairly difficult for a group like Reclaim Philadelphia to venture into neighborhoods beyond their comfort zones, if you will. They were mindful of some of the skepticism that residents of those neighborhoods felt towards the millennials and Gen Zers flocking into the city and contributing to gentrification. Somebody from Reclaim Philadelphia might be knocking on the door talking about the affordable housing crisis, and people answering the door might look at them and say, “You’re actually a big part of the problem here.” This tension between so-called new Philadelphians and old Philadelphians became more pronounced, and navigating those tensions becomes a real challenge.

She’s obviously fascinating. She’s a shrewd operator. In the primary election, two progressives split the vote. And being the only prominent Black candidate worked to her advantage. But since she’s been elected, she’s been very skillful about maneuvering in ways that have brought back a return of the traditional kind of urban politics — a top-down governing coalition led by a somewhat resurgent business community and pro-growth unions, the building trades unions, and a somewhat resurgent establishment-oriented Democratic Party, all of which is led by Parker. This is very reminiscent of standard politics of the mid- to late 20th century. So in some ways, Philadelphia is a bit of an aberration in that it’s moved backwards, if you will, recently. But I still see lots of evidence that bottom-up grassroots activism remains a force, and will become much more impactful in the next four years.

The 76ers’ arena, for example. She was siding with the Sixers and other downtown-oriented interests that wanted to see the arena in Center City on East Market Street, and discounting the views of community groups, most prominently Chinatown. There’s a general mode of governance style associated with Parker that’s very uncomfortable with dealing with grassroots-oriented groups. That’s just not her style. She’s much more comfortable dealing with downtown business elites and people in the building trades unions. Her whole mindset is much more comfortable with the old ways of governing cities.

Politics is cyclical. Donald Trump has had that effect of reinvigorating lots of activists. So there was a lull in progressive activism in the city for a while, but it’s on the rise again. But it takes time to regroup, especially on the activist side. Some groups last for a long time, but the norm is for groups to be quite ephemeral. New groups have to pop up, often involving activists who had been involved in the old groups. The transition costs are pretty steep. Somebody like Chris Rabb winning doesn’t surprise me at all. There will probably be more successes in the next two or three years. That said, progressive activists have lots of challenges. They’re in a holding pattern right now.

» READ MORE: Chris Rabb’s election marked a big night for Philly progressives — and a rebuke of the Democratic establishment

I’m an urban politics specialist. I wrote this book. I devoted five years of my life to it. But in the last year or two, I’ve been so fixated on what’s going on in national politics and Donald Trump and the threat that he and his administration pose to democracy. With that in mind, I just want to say that urban politics in general offers some hope for people who are increasingly demoralized. At the local government level, partisan polarization isn’t nearly as intense. We’ve got divisions between progressives and moderates, but that’s nothing like what we’re seeing in national politics. There’s real hope for city governments to address big problems and offer real solutions. There’s a path forward. One can make a case that right now, democracy in American cities is actually thriving.