Suchergebnisse

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.

This research note examines the influence of organized interests in the land-use policy-making process from the perspective of urban planners employed in city government. Perceptions of these professionals are evaluated using a series of regression models controlling for the mitigating effects of government structure, mayoral partisanship, community characteristics, and the personal attributes of the respondents participating in the research. The results suggest that the aggregate influence of organized interests is more pronounced in cities with mayors when compared with cities with council–manager government structures. Furthermore, there is some evidence that the presence of a partisan mayor can increase the aggregate influence of organized interests, as well as mitigate the amount of influence garnered by specific groups. These findings contribute to the study of urban development by offering new insight into the relationship between local politics, organized interests, and land-use policy.

Both communicative planning theory and competing values models of public administration suggest attitudinal differences should exist between planners employed by private firms and those employed by government entities to the extent the perceptions of the former group are influenced by market forces to a greater degree than the latter. To test this, nine ordinal regression models were estimated using data collected from a national survey of 1,299 American Planning Association (APA) members. Planners employed in the public sector were found to be consistently more optimistic than private sector planners about government's ability to manage political pressures and competing interests in the planning process. The results not only underscore the importance of existing planning and public administration theory but also offer a starting point to consider how sectoral differences in planners' attitudes may influence outsourcing arrangements, public–private partnerships and other forms of cross-sector collaboration.

Survey data and a series of ordinal logistic regression models are used in this study to determine if individuals employed in different economic development capacities exhibit perceptual congruence or perceptual dissonance about public-private real estate partnerships in ways that are consistent with growth machine theory. The results offer some evidence that this is the case by showing that economic development practitioners employed by local governments view the potential advantages and disadvantages of these partnerships in much the same way as hypothesized members of pro-growth coalitions, while having significantly different views than their peers employed by higher levels of government. At the same time, the perceptual congruence observed between economic development practitioners employed by local governments and representatives of socially oriented nonprofit organizations raises interesting questions about the role members of the latter group play in growth machine politics in an era where federal support for community development and affordable housing programming continues to dwindle.