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Governmental Structure and Political Environment: A Statistical Note about American Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

John H. Kessel
John H. Kessel
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

The commission plan and the city manager plan-new forms of city government launched during the early years of this century—were both devised in response to local circumstances, but were soon being heralded as improvements over the then universal mayor-council system. Enthusiasts for both of these new governmental structures claimed many advantages for them. The hopes for the city manager plan seem to have been somewhat better founded, but the passage of time has shown that both plans had limitations which the reformers did not foresee.

Almost all of the early discussion about the relative merits of the three plans neglected the role of political environment. Proponents of the different systems deduced their arguments from “the principles” on which the plans were based. A three-year study of the actual operation of manager government in the late 1930s called attention to the importance of varying local conditions. “The tremendous variety of local political conditions and administrative habits apparent in the fifty cities covered by this survey,” the authors concluded, “makes it impossible to [give general answers to] many questions about the city manager plan.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , September 1962 , pp. 615 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1962

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References

1 Stone, Harold A., Price, Don K., and Stone, Kathryn H., City Manager Government in the United States (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940), p. 258Google Scholar.

2 Sayre, Wallace S., “The General Manager Idea for Large Cities,” Public Administration Review, 1954, pp. 253–258Google Scholar; and Inter-University Summer Seminar on Political Behavior, “Research in Political Behavior,” this Review, Vol. 46 (December 1952), pp. 1003–1032Google Scholar.

3 These data, and those on the percentage of the labor force in a given occupational category, were not available for 1960 at the time this study was made. Therefore we are dealing with a different, and smaller, group of cities. The reader will also note some minor differences in the number of medium-size cities between Figures 1 and 2 and between Figures 3 and 4. These are caused by variations in the availability of data.

4 Nelson, Howard J., “A Service Classification of American Cities,” Economic Geography, Vol. 31 (July, 1955), pp. 180–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This classification was similar to the “functional classification” of the Municipal Year Book except that the latter is based on arbitrary cutting points. The functional classification did not permit identification of any correspondence between economic organization and governmental form.

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