The purpose of this paper is to determine which of a selected number of factors in the urban environment are important in influencing the priorities and goals mayors espouse for their cities. Mayors are often deemed influential in community politics; however, little is known about what shapes their priorities. To probe this question, four goal areas—community attractiveness, economic development, aid to the disadvantaged, and government efficiency—are selected for analysis. The results—based on data from National Opinion Research Center's Permanent Community Sample—suggest that no one political or social factor in the urban environment dominates across all four goal areas, but rather that there tends to be a different "politics" at work in each goal area.
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