Government consolidations remain highly controversial, and the proposition that consolidated governments operate more efficiently than smaller government units is a contested claim. This research evaluates the outcomes of Indiana property tax consolidation reform of 2008. It documents 19.0–27.0 percent cost savings from consolidated tax administration and estimates cost elasticities. The study finds that assessment costs are highly elastic to assessor workloads, wage levels, and the percentage of agricultural land, but not the assessment quality. Although these findings may assist other fragmented local government units in evaluating vertical consolidation proposals, they may not directly generalize to other areas of government.
Municipal takeovers proceed by a state declaring that a municipality is in fiscal crisis and placing it in receivership, handing over most local processes to a state-appointed manager. This policy of aggressive state intervention calls into question two principles of local autonomy enshrined in home rule: that allowing local matters to be handled by local authority removes the need for state special legislation and that giving local governments functional autonomy allows them to solve problems without state intervention. This article presents case studies of New Jersey and Michigan to examine differences in home rule protection as well as approaches to municipal takeover.
Scholars often portray newly incorporated municipalities as white, wealthy suburbs. Yet this study reveals that 10 percent of new cities (forty-four cities) formed between 1990 and 2010 are black, Hispanic, Asian, and/or Native American majority cities. A careful examination of the data reveals not just racial differences but significant socioeconomic differences between new cities of color (CoCs) and majority white cities. By employing a probit model of statistical analysis, this research reveals that CoCs differ socioeconomically from majority white incorporating communities on variables such as median family income, average household size, and more.
The following is a review of Richard M. Bird and Enid Slack’s edited volume Is Your City Healthy? Measuring Urban Fiscal Health. The review addresses major themes in the book as well as its place within existing scholarship.
The Clean Air Act (CAA) utilizes an intergovernment partnership, relying heavily on the states for implementation. However, local governments have emerged in recent years as key players in improving local air quality. With no official role under the CAA and research typically overlooking their efforts, they are serving as "hidden" partners in the implementation process. Nevertheless, they are playing a role in improving and maintaining air quality in some local communities. Analysis of air quality monitoring sites indicates these initiatives can be successful, if the local government has the capacity to effect change across the entire area.
Bullying is a vexing social and policy problem in the United States. Education scholars consistently advocate for comprehensive antibullying policies; however, the forty-nine states that have adopted antibullying programs vary in their embrace of this approach. This article addresses the question of why this is the case. First, it provides a new measure of bullying policy comprehensiveness using item response theory. Second, it examines how social and demographic characteristics, as well as neighbor-state policies, relate to this new measure. I find that a state’s support for enumerated groups and the availability of slack financial resources are the strongest explanations for variation in antibullying measures. There is also weak evidence consistent with a backlash effect, whereby states whose neighbors have more comprehensive policies adopt less comprehensive legislation. Thus, bullying policies are driven, in part, by state responsiveness to vulnerable populations but are also constrained by the realities of finite resources.
Literature on intergovernmental partnerships suggests the importance of several factors including organizational resources, capacity, and problem severity in understanding the adoption of these partnerships. This research improves our understanding about the adoption of intergovernmental partnerships by examining tribal and nontribal governments that adopted voluntary agreements to improve the administration of justice. Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this research examines how socioeconomic conditions, problem severity, and law enforcement authority influence the adoption of partnership agreements between tribal and nontribal law enforcement. The results suggest that tribes that adopt partnerships have better socioeconomic conditions; nontribal actors have lower levels of authority and higher occurrences of violent crime. The presence of Indian gaming also increases the likelihood of adopting cooperative agreements. The results of this study provide an important insight into understanding intergovernmental cooperation in general and what drives cooperation between native and surrounding non-native communities in particular.
Governors are the most prominent political actor in state politics and a subject of continuous study by scholars. An analysis of the research produced over the past five decades reveals a pattern of topics investigated as well as trends in interest level of those topics. A brief review of some of the findings is presented as well as suggestions for additional research. Finally, a proposal to rethink how we study and evaluate governors is offered.
Municipalities are on fracking’s front lines. Unlike the extraction techniques of the past, many of today’s operations are located within a mile or two of residential areas. Yet, little scholarly attention has been paid to the factors that can precipitate municipal challenges to the state’s authority. For some, the decision to oppose the state may be related to environmental concerns, while in other communities, leaders are much more concerned about how development impacts homeowners. Recognizing this debate, this article examines local defiance in the era of fracking with a sample of Colorado, Texas, and Ohio communities.
This article examines the relationship between trust in government and support for local governmental services. It is hypothesized that trust in government will predict support for local government services, but that trust will differentially predict support across policy areas. The results demonstrate that trust predicts support for human services and infrastructure but is not related to support for emergency services. The findings of this article contribute to the broader literature on attitudes toward local governmental services and may hold potential clues for policy makers interested in understanding the factors that shape public preferences for governmental service delivery.
This article examines the interactive role between institution type and ideology at the local governmental level, demonstrating that additional degrees of autonomy allow for meaningful policy decisions locally. With increased discretion over policy expenditures, autonomy enhances the opportunity for ideological representation of constituents. The article explores the role of autonomy in county governments in Florida over a thirty-year period, questioning whether ideological dispositions of constituents are reflected in redistributive expenditures. Findings support the claim that local governments, with an augmented degree of autonomy provided via charter governance, may exhibit more flexibility in policy priorities than counties without more autonomous institutions.
The authors of this article examine a pair of organizational factors for their contributions to the levels of performance management success among a set of seventy-two U.S. local governments, all of which enjoy reputations for good performance management. The factors examined are, first, the purpose accorded to performance management in each organization and, second, the engagement of senior managers in reviewing the performance of operating units. The authors find that local governments that regard performance management to be their management philosophy perceive greater benefits on particular dimensions of performance than those regarding it to be a system or simply a means of upgrading performance measurement. Greater benefits are also reported by organizations whose executives routinely review the performance of operating units.
The research determines the status of counties’ e-government in three dimensions and the factors influencing their success, based on a combination of a county e-government survey and a content analysis of their websites. Despite the technological growth among county governments, the existing studies have little information dealing specifically with local county governments’ use of e-government technology. This research synthesizes the various existing models of e-government to develop a conceptual framework of three distinct e-government dimensions—e-information, e-transaction, and e-participation. The dimension of e-information refers to the provision of relevant and sufficient information through effective communication, thus leading to an informed citizenry; e-transaction involves efficient and effective transactions that result from an integrated citizenry; and e-participation refers to the promotion of an electronic democracy that involves a participatory citizenry. The study produces some significant findings and provides directions for future research in county e-government.
Using data on citizens’ ideological preferences and state policy outputs, this article examines the linkage between how well citizens’ preferences are reflected in state government policy decisions and their level of confidence in state elected officials. The analysis reveals that citizens report less confidence in state government as the ideological distance between themselves and state policy outputs increases and that the substantive effect rivals other common predictors of confidence in government. Notably, this relationship is stronger among respondents with higher levels of political interest and holds only for evaluations of state government and not of local or the federal government.