Strengthening Local Government Leadership and Performance: Reexamining and Updating the Winter Commission Goals

The Winter Commission report of 1993 stressed cities with the mayor‐council form of government and emphasized removing barriers to executive authority in large cities. In order to assess and update the report, it is important to recognize that a majority of cities with populations over 100,000 use the council‐manager form, in which restrictions on the executive and fragmented authority are unlikely to be present because of the constitutional principles on which the form is based. There has been progress toward improved leadership in both forms of government and substantial management change, including the incorporation of reinventing government and e‐government practices, and large counties are more likely to have an elected or appointed executive. An emerging issue not considered by the commission but in line with its purpose is the increasing challenge of governing expanding metropolitan and megapolitan regions.     

What Have We Learned about the Performance of Council‐Manager Government? A Review and Synthesis of the Research

The 100th anniversary of the International City/County Management Association provides an excellent point to review and assess research on the performance of the council‐manager form of government. The development of the council‐manager form arguably has been the most important innovation in American local government over the last century, yet its impact on the performance of municipal governments is not well understood. This article reviews and assesses the empirical evidence for 10 propositions that council‐manager governments perform better than mayor‐council governments. This evidence indicates that although progress has been made on demonstrating differences in representation and functionality, the proposition that council‐manager governments are better managed than mayor‐council governments has yet to be seriously engaged in this literature. Filling this critical gap requires progress in two areas: the development of theory to explain why council‐manager governments are better‐managed organizations and the production of evidence assessing the major propositions of this theory.     

Ethics by Design: The Impact of Form of Government on Municipal Corruption

While trust in government at all levels is at an all‐time low, actual corruption at the municipal level has been declining. One factor often credited with this decline is the introduction of the council‐manager form of government. One of the key reasons the council‐manager form was created in the early 1900s was to act as an antidote to the corruption prevalent in the big‐city machine politics of the era. Despite this, no one has tested whether the council‐manager form has in fact influenced the decline in corruption rates. This article uses a rare events logit model to analyze corruption convictions in municipalities between 1990 and 2010 to determine which factors, including form of government, affect the probability that a corrupt act will occur. The findings indicate that municipalities with the council‐manager form are 57 percent less likely to have corruption convictions than municipalities with the mayor‐council form.     

Can Managerial Turnover Be a Good Thing? The Impact of City Manager Change on Local Fiscal Outcomes

A long line of private sector research outlines the positive and negative impacts of employee and managerial turnover on organizations. However, public administration scholars often treat turnover as a phenomenon to be avoided and focus more on the antecedents of managerial turnover than on its consequences for public organizations. Within the context of local government, the impact of city manager turnover on organizational outcomes is unclear. This article identifies how city manager turnover influenced local fiscal outcomes during the Great Recession. Analysis of 165 council‐manager municipalities in California, more than one‐third of which experienced turnover during the height of the recession, allows for empirical examination of the impact of turnover during the test period of 2008–11 on local fiscal outcomes in 2011 and 2012, specifically the degree and incidence of budget deficit spending. The results demonstrate that managerial turnover may lead to better fiscal outcomes, conditional on how long the new manager has held the position. This suggests that while cities that hired new managers during the recession did better than those that did not, the earlier in the recession a manager was hired, the better.     

Institutional Differences and Local Government Performance: Evidence from Property Tax Assessment Quality

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between institutional differences embedded in local governance structures and government performance in the specific context of property assessment. In order to provide deeper insight into why certain governance structures perform better than others, we focus on the impact of nested levels of institutions—constitutional-level and substantive-level rules of governance—beyond the conventional perspective of the form of government. Based on panel data of cities and towns in New York State between 1993 and 2010, our analysis indicates that, among other institutional arrangements, municipalities employing the council–manager form with appointed assessors are most likely to achieve higher levels of assessment quality (uniformity) of the residential property. This indicates that having politically independent (more career-oriented), low-powered appointed governance structures rather than politically risk-averse (more voter-oriented), high-powered elected counterparts are more likely to be effective at reducing risk in tax equity issues, thus providing better financial performance.     

Understanding Shared Roles in Policy and Administration: An Empirical Study of Council‐Manager Relations

Recent literature in public administration emphasizes enhanced collaboration between elected and administrative officials. The complementarity view is presented as an alternative to the traditional politics–administration dichotomy. At the center of this new perspective lies the concept of shared roles between elected officials and public administrators with respect to policy making and administration. This article expands the emerging literature on role sharing by proposing and testing new variables to understand what enhances the policy‐making role of city managers and the administrative role of elected officials. Employing data collected from a nationwide survey of city managers and utilizing structural equation modeling methodology, this research finds that the council’s expectations and the city manager’s role conception significantly influence the city manager’s involvement in policy making, while the context of policy making, the city manager’s support, and the council’s access to resources affect elected officials’ involvement in administration. This article aims to make a cumulative contribution to the literature on role sharing.     

Contemporary Challenges in Local Government: Evolving Roles and Responsibilities,Structures, and Processes

Editor's Note: The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2014. This article is the first of several that will appear during the next year about the council‐manager plan to commemorate ICMA's 100th anniversary. Three contemporary leadership challenges face local governments today. The first encourages department heads to more actively work the intersection between political and administrative arenas. The second promotes collaborative work, synchronizing city and county boundaries with problems that have no jurisdictional homes. The third argues that citizen engagement is no longer optional—it is imperative—and that connecting engagement initiatives to traditional political values and governing processes is an important mark of successful community building. These three leadership challenges stem from a widening gap between the arenas of politics and administration—that is, between what is politically acceptable in public policy making and what is administratively sustainable. The gap is fueled by conflicting trends experienced locally and common internationally. Failure to bridge this gap between political acceptability and administrative sustainability results in decreasing legitimacy for governing institutions and increasing challenges.     

Turnover among City Managers: The Role of Political and Economic Change

Executive turnover can have profound effects on city policies, programs, and commitments such as contracting or issuing debt. This article identifies how political changes, reflected in the composition of the city council, and economic changes in the community influence city manager turnover. Analysis of manager turnover patterns in 143 large U.S. cities with council-manager governments from 1987 to 1999 allows us to distinguish "push" and "pull" factors that can induce city managers to leave their jobs. The empirical analysis demonstrates that political conflict and economic development can influence the likelihood that a city manager will exit a community, but these effects can be complex. In particular, the influence of community economic development on turnover includes a temporal dimension not revealed in previous research. We conclude by discussing the findings' implications for career patterns in city management.     

“E” the People: Do U.S. Municipal Government Web Sites Support Public Involvement?

To what extent do local government Web sites support practical, meaningful public involvement? Fifteen years after the adoption and diffusion of the World Wide Web, the answer to this question remains cloudy and controversial. The promise—and peril—of Web‐based public involvement, known as e‐democracy, has been widely debated. Much of the debate has focused on theoretical abstractions or extrapolations of current political or technological trends. Empirical studies have been limited to reports on pilot projects, case studies, or special population surveys. This paper contributes to our empirical understanding of the question. It reports results of a recent comprehensive survey of official government Web sites in the principal cities of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. In particular, it examines whether and how U.S. city government Web sites facilitate users’ involvement in local public issues.     

The Roles of Local Government Managers in Theory and Practice: A Centennial Perspective

The standard narrative to explain the evolution of roles filled by city managers suggests that managers originally served as administrative technicians who carried out the policy directives of city councils, but, over time, they became more involved in policy advice and community leadership. This article documents enduring involvement in policy and the recent expansion of community leadership, analyzing definitions of the manager's roles offered by practitioners and scholars since the beginning of the city manager profession 100 years ago. In addition, measurements of the manager's role performance at various points in time are examined, along with trends in the preparation of managers and the context in which they work. Ignoring the evidence that the policy role is integral to professional management can lead to unfounded questions about the legitimacy of city and county managers and impairs our understanding of the council‐manager form of government and political–administrative relations.     

What Influences City Council Adoption and Support for Reinventing Government? Environmental or Institutional Factors?

What influences the degree to which city councils support reinventing government (REGO)? Controlling for environmental factors that are likely to shape council policy adoption as well as the tenure of the chief administrator, the findings of this study underscore that the type of representation system is most consistently related to opposition to REGO. In addition, the economic health of the city and the tenure of the chief administrator are positively associated with council support. Overall, institutional factors affect council policy adoption more than either environmental factors or an administrator's seniority, at least in this policy area.     

Do Political Similarities Facilitate Interlocal Collaboration?

This research examines the extent to which political similarities—that is, homophily between political actors at the local level—affect patterns of interorganizational collaboration in an emergency response situation. While the field of emergency management has focused on implementation‐oriented arrangements among key stakeholders, few studies have systemically investigated the creation and development of interorganizational collaborations led by political actors, especially following catastrophic events. The analysis reveals that a dyadic tie with political homophily boosts local responders’ ties with other agencies during emergencies. Findings indicate that political solidarity, formulated by chief elected officials of municipalities and council members, can broaden the scope of interorganizational collaboration by mitigating institutional collective action problems at the local level. This research presents a critical recommendation for emergency managers that interlocal collaboration for timely response to a disaster is attributable to political similarities that facilitate frequent interlocal interactions through formal and/or informal agreements.     

When top‐down meets bottom‐up: Local adoption of social policy reform in China

Authoritarian local leaders face two driving forces in social policymaking: top‐down pressure from the regime and bottom‐up motivations derived from local conditions. Existing studies recognize the importance of both forces, but remain unclear as to how they interact and which of them is more influential in driving local policy adoption. Focusing on two health insurance integration policies in China, we find that when the policy entails substantial class or distributive conflicts and bureaucratic friction, top‐down pressure for compliance is a dominant driver for local policy adoption; when the policy does not entail such conflicts or bureaucratic infighting, bottom‐up motivations based on local economic geography together with top‐down pressure drive local adoption. We find support for this argument from an analysis of an original city‐level data set in China from 2004 to 2016. This study has implications for social policy reform, decentralization, and government responsiveness in authoritarian countries with multilevel governance.     

Does Spatial Variation in Heterogeneity Matter? Assessing the Adoption Patterns of Business Improvement Districts

Because they supplement the municipal provision of local public goods, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) provide an opportunity to examine the space, scope, and determinants of the provision of local public goods. A BID is formed when a group of merchants or commercial property owners in a neighborhood vote in favor of package of self‐assessments and local public goods to be funded with those assessments. These districts solve a collective action problem in the provision of public goods because once a majority has voted in favor, participation is compulsory for all merchants or commercial property owners in the neighborhood. I use a unique dataset on adoption patterns of BIDs in California to test two main claims suggested by the theoretical literature: first, that businesses respond to individual heterogeneity that determines the quality of local public goods, and second, that the type of heterogeneity—overall or spatial—matters. In contrast to the literature on residents, this study finds at best a weak correlation between a city's adoption of a BID and heterogeneity. In addition, despite the theoretical preference for spatial over overall heterogeneity, BIDs are not more likely to be adopted by spatially heterogeneous cities.     

A preliminary assessment of the new home seller capital gains law

Abstract

In August 1997, the capital gains law was changed to enable most sellers to move down in price without incurring a tax liability. The previous law was critiqued as detrimental to cities by promoting out‐migration to higher‐priced homes; it was asserted that the requirement that sellers buy a home equal to or greater than the value of the one they sold to defer tax liability obstructed movement down in price. This study asked whether movement down in price increased in four Ohio cities after the law was changed and whether movement out of the central cities decreased and movement in from the suburbs increased.

Statistically significant change in movement down was found in only one city. Movement up in price and outward dominated all four areas. The study produced no direct evidence of the factors that influenced seller‐buyer move decisions. The process of life‐course change—younger households moving up to larger, more expensive homes and older households moving down to smaller, less expensive properties—was probably the driving force.     

City government structure: are some institutions undersupplied?

City councilors have a vested interest in maintaining the local government structure that got them elected. This resistance to change may result in non-optimal supplies of particular local political institutions as cities and metropolitan areas experience changes in population and diversity. Using unique data from the State of Florida, we show that there is an undersupply of cities offering larger council sizes. Our evidence also suggests that there is no undersupply of cities with the mayor-council versus the council-manager form of government or cities with at-large versus district election methods.     

The enabling role of institutional entrepreneurs in the adoption of IPSAS within a transitional economy: The case of Estonia

In the light of neoinstitutional theory and by adopting case study research methodology, this article explains the adoption of International Public Sector Accounting Standards for modernizing public sector accounting in Estonia. This article reveals that the smooth—yet gradual—adoption of International Public Sector Accounting Standards‐compliant accounting systems was enabled by the involvement of powerful actors (i.e., institutional entrepreneurs) with foreign and/or business backgrounds. In addition, the change in public sector accounting in Estonia was facilitated by the developments in its international positioning, characterized by the transition from a Soviet communist to a market economy and subsequent European Union membership and by the absence of past accounting practices, which could potentially hinder the change.     

Did Ontario's Zero Tolerance & Graduated Licensing Law reduce youth drunk driving?

On April 1, 1994, Ontario, Canada, instituted a new graduated driver license (GDL) system that effectively set the legal blood alcohol content (BAC) threshold at zero for the first few years of a youth's driving eligibility. I use data from the 1983–2001 Ontario Student Drug Use Surveys (OSDUS) to examine whether the Zero Tolerance (ZT) policy reduced self‐reported drinking and alcohol‐involved driving among youth. I find that rates of drunk driving reported by 16‐ to 17‐year‐olds—who faced new, lower legal limits after adoption of the ZT policy—were about 5 percentage points lower after the law was implemented. Visual inspection of the data, however, shows that the estimated reduction is an artifact of a pre‐existing trend: Drunk driving rates in this age group were falling steadily throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Estimates that account for this pre‐existing trend or that consider shorter windows around the 1994 implementation date return effects on alcohol‐involved driving that are either small and statistically insignificant or large and implausibly signed (positive). These null findings are robust to using the associated change in outcomes for slightly younger (14–15) or slightly older (19–20) youths as controls in a difference‐in‐differences framework. I similarly find no robust effect on drinking participation. This suggests that Ontario's age‐targeted drunk driving law—despite being harsher than similar policies in the United States—was not responsible for reductions in Canadian youth road fatalities over the past two decades. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Developing and Testing a Theoretical Framework for Computer‐Mediated Transparency of Local Governments

This article contributes to the emerging literature on transparency by developing and empirically testing a theoretical framework that explains the determinants of local government Web site transparency. It aims to answer the following central question: What institutional factors determine the different dimensions of government transparency? The framework distinguishes three dimensions of transparency—decision making transparency, policy information transparency, and policy outcome transparency—and hypothesizes three explanations for each: organizational capacity, political influence, and group influence on government. Results indicate that each dimension of transparency is associated with different factors. Decision‐making transparency is associated with political influence; when left‐wing parties are strong in the local council, local government tends to be more transparent. Policy information transparency is associated with media attention and external group pressure, and policy outcome transparency is associated with both external group pressure and the organizational capacity. The authors discuss the implications for policy and administration.