5 Questions with Timothy Weaver

By Indiana Nash 

ALBANY, N.Y. (Oct. 20, 2025) — Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory in the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor came as a surprise to many, but to Associate Professor Timothy Weaver, it highlighted a political landscape that has been shifting for decades.  

He tracks that change in his latest book, Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City. It examines the city’s political development since the 1970s through the lens of three political orders: conservatism, neoliberalism and egalitarianism. Weaver delves into how New York City politics have been shaped by these conflicting orders and refutes the assumption that the city is homogeneously liberal. 

Published by Temple University Press earlier this year, it follows his book Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). A London native, Weaver teaches political science at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and is the director of the Semester in Washington program. 

We recently caught up with him about how he became interested in political science, his new book and the upcoming election. 

What drew you to this field?  

I grew up in quite a political household. I grew up reading the newspaper, watching the news and Prime Minister’s Question Time and with my parents lamenting the state that Thatcher had left Britain. I was born in the 1980s and had 17 years of the Conservative Party. My father was in education, and my mother was a social worker. Our daily conversations were political, and I grew up being really interested in trying to understand the political world and trying to think about how we might be able to do things better and to fix things that were failing.  

How did you land on the three political orders that you frame the book around?  

Coming into this book, I came to the view that neoliberalism can explain quite a lot but one of the reasons why it caused such dispute and in some cases disdain, is because it’s often used to explain everything that people, especially on the left, don’t like about what’s happening at a given time.  

I wanted to explain what neoliberalism could explain as a concept and where it could be shown to exist in the real world, but also to examine the non-neoliberal forces that have been at work in the last 30 or 40 years in New York City. I felt that there was definitely a neoliberal story to be told, which was all about the way the fiscal crisis of 1975 reset politics on a new path. Clearly, you had austerity measures to cut the city's budget; you had the privatization of various city functions; you had the introduction of fees at CUNY. They were framed in neoliberal terms; in terms of promoting markets and competition, and stripping back wasteful governance. That seemed to be an area where neoliberalism really did work and could be persuasive. 

And then the question was, “Well, how to deal with some of this other stuff that really matters, like stop and frisk and the broken windows policing of the Giuliani administration, but also before the Giuliani administration?” For instance, in the 1950s and '60s, there was a switch from trying to deal with the problems of heroin addiction and crime associated with it through rehabilitation and therapeutic approaches. These problems were viewed as a reflection of deep problems in society. People argued that solutions were to be found in treating addiction and crime as symptoms of structural forces like inequality, racism and deindustrialization, which also needed to be tackled. 

That liberal view gave way to a much, much more punitive perspective. One way of trying to characterize this shift is as “conservatism” because it's about trying to create a sense of order. It's about thinking about society as being composed of individuals and families that need to take self-responsibility. It argues that liberal approaches to drugs and crime actually made things worse, that they are the cause of the urban crisis.  

Conservatism, as a concept, helped to capture a whole range of positions on crime, including those adopted by people who supported egalitarian racial positions. That is to say that many who thought that all Blacks and whites and anybody else were equal but that people needed to take personal responsibility and if they violated social norms, they should be punished severely.  

Then, alongside neoliberalism and conservatism, you've also got egalitarianism. New York is a working-class city. It has the biggest and strongest labor unions in the country. I wanted to get into all that, and to think about alternative forms of leftist and egalitarian politics, which are trying to push back against incarceration and, coming out of Occupy Wall Street, thinking about economic inequality and trying to do different things about housing. Of the three orders, egalitarianism is the weakest, but we can see with Mamdani that maybe it has a real opportunity. 

What did your research process involve?  

I did some interviewing, but I primarily drew on secondary accounts and newspaper sources to offer more of a reinterpretation of the past. The book is less of an empirical contribution and more of an interpretive one.  

I also wanted to produce a book that could be used for undergrads and one of the ways that I actually worked on the book was to teach a course on New York City. That's the best way to learn something and what I found was that a lot of the students who were super interested in and were from the city, just didn’t know about the history of the city.  

They knew all the places that I mentioned, but they just didn’t have an understanding of how things came to be the way that they were. I tried to write the book in such a way that it told a series of stories that are digestible so that people would not be trapped in the world of theory and interpretation but would use the historical record as a way of trying to make a theoretical argument.  

Why is there an inclination to see New York City as a homogeneous place where everyone is liberal leaning? 

I think that it’s natural for human beings to try and simplify things. We think about red states and blue states, and it doesn't take more than five minutes to actually work out that that's not accurate. That’s a gross and misleading simplification. In all “red” states, there are plenty of splashes of blue and many examples of support for egalitarian policies. 

I asked my students at the beginning of the semester, “Do you think that New York’s a liberal city?” Everyone raises their hands. I say, “Let's test that proposition.” It doesn’t take long to think about the recent mayors of New York who weren’t Democrats: Giuliani, Bloomberg, and let’s think about the Democratic mayors (Koch, Dinkins, de Blasio). The only one that you could really say was liberal was de Blasio, and Dinkins at a stretch, and so the liberal mayors are the exception, not the rule. 

Although New York City almost always votes for the Democratic candidate in national elections and for people for the Senate, and indeed the House, as we know, the Democratic party and Democratic presidencies are themselves coalitions that include neoliberal and conservative and egalitarian strands.  

How do you see a lot of the research you did for the book playing out in the mayoral election? 

What I think that the Mamdani candidacy reveals is the fact that all of these administrations have failed to address the fundamental challenge of enabling working-class New Yorkers to live with a decent standard of living in an expensive city that has a huge working class. And that contradiction hasn't been resolved, and I would say it's been aggravated by many of the housing policies advanced by people like DeBlasio and especially by Bloomberg, even as they claim to be using tools like inclusionary zoning to create more affordable housing.  

I would also say that the fact that so many of the people in the Democratic Party establishment are refusing to endorse Mamdani is a big reflection of the fact that the Democratic Party itself is not a left party. It contains people who are left within it, but it is not a labor party. It's not egalitarian through and through. Cuomo is a reflection of the fissures within the Democratic party, and Mamdani too. They both show that the Democratic party itself contains these multiple political orders.