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In this study, the author outlines and tests the strong party organization (SPO) theory of urban fiscal politics. The theory states that cities governed by SPOs are better able to maintain fiscal discipline because they are less responsive to prospending interest groups. This case study of Chicago finds mixed support for the SPO theory. The informal centralization provided by the political machine may have enabled Mayor Richard J. Daley to adopt fiscally conservative policies. Post-machine regimes, however, have been only modestly successful in implementing expansionary fiscal policies, contrary to the predictions of the SPO theory. Several other patterns in Chicago's recent fiscal history are somewhat more consistent with the SPO theory.

Public management is slowly being transformed by information technology. Technology today is the driver of new government processes for dealing with citizens and suppliers. But it is also reshaping important functions and processes that only those inside government may care about such as accounting, payroll, and personnel administration. Taken together, the internal and external impact of new technologies is changing the way governments manage and make decisions.1 This article examines the current state and future trends in human resource management systems (HRMS). Such systems are related to a broader "digital government" effort that seeks to apply technology to streamline government processes. The underlying architecture for digital government is the Internet and integrated administrative management systems (which are more commonly known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems). This article describes the technology and functional features of such systems and focuses specifically on the business benefits provided by the human resource management system (HRMS) components. Questions examined include: ▪ What are the challenging issues facing HRMS? ▪ What is the current state of HRMS technology? ▪ What is ERP? How is it related to HRMS? ▪ What are the major technology features of modern systems? ▪ What specific functions are encompassed by HRMS? ▪ What are the major business benefits of modern HRMS? ▪ What are some of the major risk factors in implementing HRMS solutions?

In much of the literature on local development, scholars assume a single continuum from progrowth to antigrowth. This article instead begins with the assumption that every city government is prodevelopment provided that it can have development on its own terms. A factor analysis of development policies from a large sample of cities does not support the view that city governments are either exclusively progrowth or antigrowth; no single continuum emerges. This study demonstrates that development approaches are considerably more complex, and the classifications include multifaceted strategies such as promarket (classic booster and entrepreneurial), qualitative growth, historic preservation, environmentally harmful growth, and redistributive growth (linkage and minority-equity strategies).

Numerous scholars have concluded that bureaucratic decision rules best explain urban service distributions. These studies have led to a conventional wisdom in urban politics that professionalism dominates municipal agency routines to the extent that systematic bias is therefore unlikely to occur. In this study, the authors demonstrate that the unpatterned inequality thesis has led scholars to underestimate the importance of local politics in explaining service distribution. By examining the allocation of community development block grant and capital improvement plan funds in Chicago over nearly two decades, they conclude that electoral and regime politics also exercise a decisive impact on who gets what from city government.