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The reduction of citizen alienation has stood as a goal for the decentralization of public services among researchers & policymakers. It has been hypothesized that decentralization can bring government closer to the public being served, & therefore improve public attitudes toward government. No existing research completely tests this hypothesis. Several national surveys do provide sufficient data to examine the relationships between various types of citizen activity linked with decentralization & the 2 dimensions of political alienation; powerlessness/efficacy & distrust/trust. Sidney Verba & Norman Nie analyzed responses to a national survey conducted in 1967 in PARTICIPATION IN AMERICA: POLITICAL DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL EQUALITY (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1972). They characterized all R's according to their degree of participation. The sense of political efficacy/powerlessness was examined with a 4-question index, & the results showed that the sense of efficacy was higher for all types of participants who did more than vote. A review of these national surveys shows that decentralized activity, whether taking the form of citizen participation, citizen awareness of decentralized facilities, or service improvements, is consistently associated with people's sense of efficacy, but not their sense of trust. Decentralization may affect alienation in terms of reducing sense of powerlessness, but it has no impact on people's trust in government. Decentralization of public services may be one of the steps taken to reduce citizen alienation toward government, but not alienation by itself. 2 Tables. Modified HA.

This paper addresses a traditional problem in the cumulation of scientific knowledge: the need to aggregate evidence from previous studies. Typically, the existence of many individual studies on a given topic makes such a step highly desirable, yet the procedures for "reviewing the literature" have not been developed in a methodologically rigorous manner. In particular, reviewers make many subjective judgments to distinguish those studies that are to be reviewed from those to be discarded because of poor quality; the resulting review may contain unknown biases. This paper demonstrates one way of making the effects of any discarding explicit by: (a) developing operational criteria for quality, (b) applying the criteria to 140 case studies on technological innovations in local services, and (c) indicating the differences between higher and lower quality cases. The results showed that the discarding of lower quality cases would have affected the universe of cases (higher quality cases focused more on hardware innovations, public works and transportation services, efforts supported by federal funds, larger sized efforts in terms of dollar support, and efforts with client participation), but not the overall outcomes of the innovative experience (no relationship was found between quality and service improvement or incorporation).

This article identifies the methodological characteristics of high-qualuy case studies, when case studies are used as a research tool. The findings are based on an analysis of 53 case studies of organizational innovation, which identified the characteristics leading to high global ratings of the cases. The findings suggest that investigators doing case study research in the future should delineate five components of their studies: problem definition, research design, data collection, data analysis, and report presentation. Second, an important consideration is whether the research is aimed at contributing to knowledge about practice or about theory, as different characteristics appear related to these outcomes. Finally, among all the characteristics, the definition of the innovation process being studied, in clear operational terms, appears to be related to high-quality case studies, regardless of their purpose.

New York's City Office of Neighborhood Government was created in 1971 to coordinate renewed efforts at decentralizing municipal operations. To improve service delivery, new powers & responsibilities were given to district level officials in 8 city agencies: police, sanitation, drug prevention, parks, health, housing rehabilitation, social services, & transportation. The agencies in each district were coordinated by a service cabinet of district officials & a neighborhood manager appointed by the Office of Neighborhood Government (ONG). The vertical decentralization was an attempt to make an overly centralized bureaucracy responsive to neighborhoods. Decision making was examined in budgeting, personnel, priority-setting, information gathering, & interagency communication. 4 types of decisions were possible: made with little communication to superiors; tentative & subject to change by superiors; recommendations presented to superiors who made the decision; & a referral of all decisions to superiors. Decentralization brought little change in decision-making categories, except for interagency communication. The central agency had extended little formal authority. To effect change, more power should be given to local agencies & citizen participation used in the first stage of decentralization. Modified HA.