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Until recently, policy evaluation has mostly meant assessing whether government programs raise reading levels, decrease teen pregnancy rates, improve air quality levels, lower drunk-driving rates, or achieve any of the other goals that government programs are ostensibly created to do. Whether or not such programs also have consequences with respect to future demands for government action and whether government programs can heighten—or dampen—citizen involvement in civic activities are questions that are typically overlooked. This book applies such questions to local government. Emp

Employing policy feedback theory to a series of local government programs, Elaine B. Sharp shows that these programs do have consequences with respect to citizens' political participation. With this clear-eyed analysis, Sharp finds that local governments' social program activities actually dampen participation of the have-nots, while cities' development programs reinforce the political involvement of already-privileged business interests.

ObjectiveThis article's aim is to test the impact of black political and bureaucratic representation on the rate at which blacks are arrested for order maintenance violations in U.S. cities.MethodsUsing data from the Law Enforcement Management and Administration Survey, the Census Bureau, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, for all U.S. cities over 100,000 population, the article first documents the continuing influence of black elected officials in promoting black representation on police forces. After establishing the appropriateness of order maintenance policing as a follow‐up focus, the article then tests hypotheses that link variation in the rate of black order maintenance arrests to black political and bureaucratic representation, contingent upon form of government.ResultsBlack political representation does constrain black order maintenance arrests, while black representation on the police force does not.ConclusionEven with a more racially representative police force in place, black political representation is what matters in constraining controversial patterns of police practice.

This paper sets forth the hypothesis that the more that a city's economy reflects the creative class and cultural tourism elements that characterize "new economy"-style postindustrial cities, the more that the police will emphasize heightened order maintenance. Such a thesis is evident in case studies on innovations in urban social control and on cities aspiring to global city status. But the thesis needs empirical test across a large sample of cities that vary on "new economy" status, with alternative explanations for variation in order maintenance policing simultaneously taken into account. This paper provides that test for cities above 100,000 in population, controlling for variables representing the racial threat thesis, governing institutions, community policing, and policing demands and constraints. The results provide robust support for the postindustrial policing hypothesis.

One thing our books and mutual reviews show that we very much agree on is the challenge in the study of local politics of adapting data collected for other purposes to the testing of theories of interest. We also clearly agree that local government does matter—that is, that what it does affects the shape and character of local civic engagement. But it is not clear that we see the relevance of policy feedback theory for local government in the same way. Specifically, while J. Eric Oliver's review reveals an appreciation of the ways in which local government action may yield resource effects, the interpretive effects that are arguably the more innovative component of policy feedback theory may be underappreciated. It is likely that this difference links to a deeper, underlying difference in views on what it means for local government to matter.

In this creative and important book, Eric Oliver and his coauthors offer a comprehensive analysis of a largely overlooked phenomenon, electoral behavior in smaller communities, here defined as jurisdictions with populations under 100,000. In the broadest sense, the central theme of the book is that elections are different in these small jurisdictions from what theories and empirical analyses of national, state, and big-city elections have made familiar. More specifically, they argue that a triumvirate of jurisdictional characteristics—1) population size, 2) scope (i.e., the extent to which institutional arrangements provide government officials with powers on a broad array of matters), and 3) bias (i.e., the extent to which government distributes resources in something other than an evenhanded fashion)—are crucial factors shaping the behavior of voters and candidates and, hence, are the essential character of elections. In separate chapters analyzing who votes, who runs for office, what shapes incumbent advantage, and what shapes voter choice, the authors explore hypotheses developed in their overview chapter about how size, scope, and bias impact each of these aspects of local elections.