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| Austin Apartment Locator Services : Austin Apartments |  | Contents | |
| Law and Government |
| Austin is administered by a city council of seven members,
each of them elected by the entire city, and by an elected mayor.
Council and mayoral elections are non-partisan, with a runoff
in case there is no 50% majority winner. Austin remains an anomaly
among large Texas cities in that the council is not elected
by districts, and there has been a strong effort to change the
election system to one of single districts. |
| The main political actors within Austin city politics are
interest groups such as the pro-environmental Save Our Springs
Alliance, the Austin Police Association, Austin Toll Party and
the Austin Business Council. |
| The political controversy that dominated the 1990s was the
conflict between environmentalists, strong in the city center,
and advocates of urban growth, who tend to live in the outlying
areas. The city council has in the past tried to mitigate the
controversy by advocating smart growth, but growth and environmental
protection are still the main hot-button issues in city politics.
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| Austin is well known as a center for liberal politics in a
generally conservative state, leading some conservatives to
deride the city as the "People's Republic of Austin."
Austin's suburbs, especially to the west and north, and several
satellite municipalities, however, tend towards political conservativism.
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| As a result of the major party realignment that began in the
1970's, central Austin became a stronghold of the Democratic
Party while the suburbs tend to vote Republican. One consequence
of this is that the central city has been gerrymandered by the
Republican-controlled state legislature into several U.S. Congressional
districts to dilute its influence vis a vis the suburbs. To
a limited degree the division between Democratic and Republican
precincts coincides with the aforementioned divisions between
supporters of environmental regulations and supporters of unfettered
urban growth.
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| Overall, the city leans to the Democrats; in the 2004 presidential
election,John Kerry defeated George W Bush by a wide margin
in Austin. Of Austin's six state legislative districts, three
are strongly Democratic, one is strongly Republican, and two
are swing districts (one presently held by a Republican and
the other by a Democrat). However, two of its three congressional
districts are presently held by Republicans; this is largely
due to the 2003 redistricting, which left Austin with no congressional
seat of its own.
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| The combination of economic conservatism with political liberalism
has also made Austin an active area for the Libertarian Party.
Although the Libertarians remain a third party, the party is
very active in the Austin area, and two past Libertarian presidential
candidates, Ron Paul and Michael Badnarik have come from the
vicinity of Austin.
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