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Analysts have sought for years to explain the variations in municipal expenditures across communities, with only modest success. However, recent efforts combining core propositions from the 'Leviathan' and 'municipal reform' frameworks show considerable promise. This paper contributes to this emerging literature by developing and testing a framework using more complex measures of municipal structure. It is proposed that the effect of interjurisdictional competition on city spending is conditioned by the incentives for spending created by the city's municipal structure and the limitations imposed by the community's fiscal capacity. The analysis of expenditure patterns in 263 Michigan cities provides clear support for the proposition of contingent effects of fiscal capacity. The evidence for municipal structure is more modest, but supportive of the predicted effects. It is thought that these findings confirm the value of this approach to studying this topic and offer a direction for others to follow.

This study assesses the proposition that local government structure affects municipal expenditure levels. Despite decades of research, this question remains unsettled. Early on, analyses of this topic confirmed a linkage between municipal structure and fiscal policy, but more recent works have challenged this finding. Despite the widespread view that municipal structures are increasingly complex, many scholars continue to use simple measures of structure based on the use of the mayor—council or council—manager form. This gap between structures in practice and the measures used in research designs may explain the increasing frequency of studies with null findings. This proposition is examined through an analysis of the link between the per capita expenditures of 263 Michigan cities and four approaches to classifying local government structure. Regardless of the approach used or the complexity of the measure, no evidence was found that city structure is linked to per capita spending in these cities.

Analysts are calling attention to a new era of municipal reform and to the convergence of the mayor-council and council-manager forms of government. H. George Frederickson, Gary Johnson, and Curtis Wood have proposed a new framework that explains the nature and extent of this convergence. The authors think this "adapted cities" framework is a potentially important advance in the understanding of municipal structure but note that empirical scholars have largely ignored the framework. This stems from the lack of a process for coding cities into this framework and from difficulties in operationalizing its categories. The authors contribute to this important topic by presenting a general process for coding cities on council-manager and mayor-council platforms into the adapted cities framework.

Increasingly, scholars of local governments are calling attention to a new era of municipal reform and to the convergence of the mayor-council and council-manager forms of governments. A major conclusion of this literature is that these two familiar ideal types no longer adequately describe the structure of most American cities. This article contributes to this question by examining the charters of 263 Michigan cities. We use the adapted cities framework advanced by H. George Frederickson, Gary Johnson, and Curtis Wood to examine the patterns of adaptation to Michigan's mayor-council and council-manager cities. We find that the governance structure in most Michigan cities is not accurately described by either of the ideal types. Mayor-council cities are especially likely to use charter provisions that deviate significantly from conventional depictions of the form.