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Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2014
Extract
A decade ago, political scientists were deploring the “lost world of municipal government” and calling for systematic studies of municipal life which emphasized the political, rather than the administrative, side of urban political life. In recent years, this demand has been generously answered and urban politics is becoming one of the most richly plowed fields of political research. In terms originally introduced by David Easton, political scientists have long been concerned with inputs, but more recently they have focused their attention on other system variables, particularly the political culture and policy outputs of municipal governments.
The present paper will treat two policy outputs, taxation and expenditure levels of cities, as dependent variables. We will relate these policy choices to socio-economic characteristics of cities and to structural characteristics of their governments. Our central research concern is to examine the impact of political structures, reformed and unreformed, on policy-making in American cities.
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- Copyright © American Political Science Association 1967
Footnotes
The authors are indebted to Professors Robert T. Daland, James W. Prothro, William R. Keech and James Q. Wilson for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. For assistance in statistical and methodological questions, the advice of Professor Hubert Blalock and Mr. Peter B. Harkins has been invaluable. The authors, of course, assume responsibility for all interpretation and misinterpretation.
References
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20 See footnote 4, supra.
21 We recognize that these are only rough indicators of city finance policies. Definitions of taxation vary from city to city arid what may be financed from taxes in one city may be financed from fees in another. Expenditures present a more complex problem because the types and amounts of state transfer payments vary from state to state according to state laws, the division of governmental labor in a state, the incomes and sizes of cities, not to mention political factors at the state level. We think it important, however, that our independent variables explain a large proportion of the variation in municipal outputs as we measured them. No doubt one could explain an even larger proportion of the variation in measures which specify different functional responsibilities of cities. At least these measures constitute a starting point, and we hope others will improve on them.
The source of our output measures was the County and City Data Book, op. cit.
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24 Op. cit., p. 320.
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30 Quoted in Banfield and Wilson, op. cit., p. 154.
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35 It is possible that the difference between any two correlations may be a function of very different standard deviations of the independent variables. A quick look at Table 2, however, suggests that this is not likely to affect the relationships we find.
36 Wolfinger and Field, op. cit., p. 312, “… omit the commission cities from consideration since this form does not figure in the ethos theory.” Historically, however, commission government was the earliest of the structures advocated by the Progressives and is quite clearly a product of the reform era. While history tells us that commission cities can not legitimately be excluded from the fold of reformism, they appear to be its black sheep, characterized by low incomes, low population growth and large proportions of nonwhites. In fact, they present a marked contrast to both mayor-council and manager cities.
37 Agger et al., op. cit., pp. 4–14.
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46 Ibid.
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54 In our view, the failure of the commission government to achieve the intended reforms is more plausible as an explanation of its demise than its administrative unwieldiness—the conventional explanation.
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56 Thometz, Carol E. discusses the role of the “Civic Committee” in decision-making in Dallas: see The Decision-Makers (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963).Google Scholar
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