¹ See Gurr, Ted Robert and King, Desmond S., The State and the City: A State-Centered Theory of Urban Policy in Advanced Industrial Societies (Evanston, III: Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research Working Paper, No. WP-84-#. 1984)Google Scholar; and Gurr, Ted Robert and King, Desmond S., The State and the City (London: Macmillan, 1986).Google Scholar

² ‘Central cities’ refers to those areas designated as such within Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas by the Bureau of the Census. See Pettengill, Robert N. and Uppal, Jogindar S., Can Cities Survive? (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974).Google Scholar

³ Our calculation from data on grants-in-aids in US Bureau of the Census, City Government Finances, annual editionsGoogle Scholar. The limitations of these data have been sharply criticized by Thomas Anton and Robert M. Stein. They do not include some large categories of federal aid that flow through state governments to cities; nor do they take account of the distribution among cities of payments directly to individuals (OASI, federal pensions, salaries of federal employees) or to businesses (loans, contracts, procurements). A source which includes most of these categories, but omits or distorts others, is the Community Services Administration's Federal Outlays (annual, 1968–77, titled thereafter Geographic Distribution of Federal Funds). Despite many incomparabilities, however, we found that the aggregate federal funds to cities in 1980 reported in the two sources to correlate at 0.93. For our purposes, the omission of some kinds of programmes and expenditures from these sources is not a serious limitation because we are concerned with analysing inequalities in the distribution of funds among cities rather than absolute levels of funding. And since we are concerned specifically with funds provided by the national state to municipal governments, the City Government Finances data on grants-in-aid are the most appropriate of the two. See Anton, Thomas, ‘Outlays Data and the Analysis of Federal Policy’, in Glickman, Norman J., ed., The Urban Impact of Federal Policies (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Stein, Robert M., ‘The Allocation of Federal Aid Monies: The Synthesis of Demand-Side and Supply-Side Explanations’, American Political Science Review, LXXV (1981), 334–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ See Hale, G. E. and Palley, M. L.. The Politics of Federal Grants (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1981).Google Scholar

⁵ Our analysis of data for 183 cities with populations over 100,000 from City Government Finances.

⁶ See Alt, James and Chrystal, Alec, Political Economics (Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf, 1983)Google Scholar and Tufte, Edward R., Political Control of the Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

⁷ Of the seventy-four cities, thirty-nine had elected mayors, thirty-one had city manager governments, and four had commission governments. Cities with elected mayors were coded ‘l’, others ‘0’.

⁸ See Fiorina, M. and Noll, R., ‘Voters, Bureaucrats and Legislators: A Rational Choice Perspective on the Growth of Government’, Journal of Public Economics, IX (1977), 239–54Google Scholar; and Rose, R., Understanding Big Government: The Programme Approach (London: Sage, 1984).Google Scholar

⁹ Button reports interview evidence on the attitudes of federal and municipal officials during the urban riots of the 1960s and the kinds of programmatic changes they sought to alleviate urban and racial problems. Mollenkopf atrributes the shaping of US urban policy between the 1930s and 1960s to a ‘pro-growth coalition’ of national Democratic political entrepreneurs, though he says little about the role of federal administrators in the process. In Western Europe, most civil servants and scholars concerned with urban and social policy believe that the modern welfare state should take an activist role in redressing the undesirable consequences of spatially-uneven economic growth and decline (see van den Berg, et al. , passimGoogle Scholar). Our interpretation here is that such views were relatively common among senior officials responsible for federal social, housing, and urban policy during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and that they could pursue these programmatic objectives with more continuity than elected ‘political entrepreneurs’ (Button, J. W., Black Violence: Political Impact of the 1960s Riots (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Mollenkopf, John, The Contested City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and den Berg, L. Van et al. , Urban Europe: A Study of Growth and Decline (New York: Pergamon Press, 1982)).Google Scholar

¹⁰ See Gelfand, Mark, ‘How Cities Arrived on the National Agenda in the United States’, in Ashford, D. E., ed., Financing Urban Government in the Welfare State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980).Google Scholar

¹¹ Cuciti, P., City Need and the Responsiveness of Federal Grant Programs (Washington, D.C.: Report to the US House of Representative Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, Subcommittee on the City, 1978).Google Scholar

¹² See Button, , Black ViolenceGoogle Scholar, and the review of the empirical studies in Gurr, Ted Robert, ‘On the Outcomes of Violent Conflict’, in Gurr, Ted Robert, ed., Handbook of Political Conflict: Theory and Research (New York: The Free Press, 1980).Google Scholar

¹³ Washington, D.C. is an outlying case with respect to federal employment, federal aid per capita, and a number of other variables. It was excluded from the analyses reported below after preliminary analyses showed that its inclusion substantially inflated correlations. Fifteen of the remaining seventy-four cases are state capitals, which in some federal programmes are credited with grants-in-aid which are in fact passed through to other local governments. Excluding them from the analysis did not significantly alter the correlations, so they were retained in the final analysis.

¹⁴ A number of other variables were used in a larger set of analyses reported in King, Desmond S. ‘A Statist Analysis of Central Slate Penetration of Municipalities in Advanced Industrial Societies’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, 1985).Google Scholar

¹⁵ For a full list of sources used see Appendix of King, ‘A Statist Analysis’Google Scholar. The crime data are from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. We coded the data on characteristics of racial disturbances from Facts on File, Violence in the US, Vol I: 1956–67: Vol 2: 1968–71 (New York: Facts on File, 1974).Google Scholar

¹⁶ The federal grants data do not include AFDC and other transfer payments to the poor. The significant correlations between federal aid and measures of individual social and economic need reflect the fact that the government of cities with large concentrations of the poor receive more federal aid, in addition to direct transfer payments to their poor.

¹⁷ See Clark, T. N., ‘Fiscal Management of American Cities: Funds Flow Indicators’, Journal of Accounting Research, XV (1977), 54–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ See Skocpol, Theda, ‘Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal’. Politics and Society, X (1980), 155–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Orloff, A. S. and Skocpol, T., ‘Why Not Equal Protection? Explaining the Politics of Public Social Spending in Britain, 1900–1911, and the United States, 1880s–1920’, American Sociological Review, II (1984), 726–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar