New Blog Post: “What Makes a Good Mayor? Tehran and New York City face a choice between ideology and pragmatism”
August 12, 2021
By: Kian Tajbakhsh, Professor of Urban Planning and Urban Studies at Columbia
Senior Advisor to the Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development Fellow, Committee on Global Thought
Tajbakhsh discusses municipal elections in New York City and Tehran and compares the mayoral elections in NYC and the recently nominated mayor in Tehran. He examines the disparate responsibilities of the mayors in both cities. Simultaneously, he assesses common campaign themes in both elections based on ideological vs. technocratic (pragmatic/managerial) agendas. In Tehran, there is a shift towards ideological Islamism, while in NYC, there is a central focus on pragmatism.