Suchergebnisse

Although a frequently discussed reform, campaigns to merge a major municipality and county to form a unified government fail to win voter approval eighty per cent of the time. One cause for the low success rate may be that little systematic analysis of consolidated governments has been done. In CityûCounty Consolidation, Suzanne Leland and Kurt Thurmaier compare nine cityûcounty consolidationsùincorporating data from 10 years before and after each consolidationùto similar cities and counties that did not consolidate. Their groundbreaking study offers valuable insight into whether consolidation meets those promises made to voters to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of these governments. The book will appeal to those with an interest in urban affairs, economic development, local government management, general public administration, and scholars of policy, political science, sociology, and geography.

This study uses data from a national survey of economic developers working in local government to explore gender differences in the perceived importance of public services in the business recruitment process. The results of a series of ordinal logistic regression models suggest women are more likely than men to believe public service quality and availability are important concerns for companies considering their region. These findings are consistent with the body of work examining gender gaps in the perceptions of both policymakers and the general public that may have important implications for local governments interested in promoting economic growth.

An institution that has shown great promise in addressing the revitalization of declining central cities is Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). These private governments provide supplemental municipal services such as sanitation, security, and marketing to independent businesses in underserved commercial areas. By 1999, 44 U.S. states had legislation that enables and dictates the formation process and structure of BIDs. The surprising element of this legislation is the wide variation in approval needed to form a BID over a proposed geographical area. Some states require as little as 20 percent approval of proposed members and others as much as 75 percent approval to allow formation of a BID. This variation in state statutes likely influences the use of BIDs. Results highlight that relatively easier state enabled collective action positively impacts the creation of BIDs, the limited effects of tax expenditure limitations on the formation of BIDs and the positive impacts that new development has on the number of BIDs per state.

While governments increasingly turn to third-party providers to deliver public services and government responsibilities are increasingly shifted from the federal to the state and local levels, both contracting and the division of powers under federalism blur lines of accountability. Because recent experiments on blame shifting find mixed results and citizens have different expectations of federal, state, and local government, we ask the following: How does blame attribution in third-party governance compare across levels of government? To address this question, we employ a timely survey experiment to examine who is responsible for a prisoner's death in the case of interstate prisoner transport, which is one of the few services that is provided across all levels of government and by government contractors. The results show that contracting reduces the level of blame attributed to the government and that blame for contract failures varies by the level of government. Across levels of government, we find the local government sees the largest reduction in blame by contracting out. Findings have implications for accountability in contracting arrangements in public safety contexts.