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Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Robert L. Lineberry  and
Edmund P. Fowler
Robert L. Lineberry
Affiliation:
University of Texas
Edmund P. Fowler
Affiliation:
York University
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Extract

A decade ago, political scientists were deploring the “lost world of municipal government” and calling for systematic studies of municipal life which emphasized the political, rather than the administrative, side of urban political life. In recent years, this demand has been generously answered and urban politics is becoming one of the most richly plowed fields of political research. In terms originally introduced by David Easton, political scientists have long been concerned with inputs, but more recently they have focused their attention on other system variables, particularly the political culture and policy outputs of municipal governments.

The present paper will treat two policy outputs, taxation and expenditure levels of cities, as dependent variables. We will relate these policy choices to socio-economic characteristics of cities and to structural characteristics of their governments. Our central research concern is to examine the impact of political structures, reformed and unreformed, on policy-making in American cities.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , September 1967 , pp. 701 - 716
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1967 

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Footnotes

*

The authors are indebted to Professors Robert T. Daland, James W. Prothro, William R. Keech and James Q. Wilson for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. For assistance in statistical and methodological questions, the advice of Professor Hubert Blalock and Mr. Peter B. Harkins has been invaluable. The authors, of course, assume responsibility for all interpretation and misinterpretation.

References

1 Herson, Lawrence J. R., “The Lost World of Municipal Government,” this Review, 51 (June, 1957), 330–345 Google Scholar; Robert T. Daland, “Political Science and the Study of Urbanism,” ibid., 491–509.

2 Easton, David, “An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems,” World Politics, 9 (April, 1957), 383–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Banfield, Edward C. and Wilson, James Q., City Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and the MIT Press, 1963)Google Scholar; see also Wilson, James Q. and Banfield, Edward C., “Public-Regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior,” this Review, 58 (December, 1964), 876–887.Google Scholar

4 See, for example, Dye, Thomas R., “City-Suburban Social Distance and Public Policy,” Social Forces, 4 (1965), 100–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfinger, Raymond and Field, John Osgood, “Political Ethos and the Structure of City Government,” this Review, 60 (June, 1966), 306–326 Google Scholar; Sherbenou, Edgar L., “Class, Participation, and the Council-Manager Plan,” Public Administration Review, 21 (Summer, 1961), 131–135 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Froman, Lewis A. Jr., “An Analysis of Public Policies in Cities,” Journal of Politics, 29 (February, 1967), 94–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.)

6 East, John Porter, Council Manager Government: The Political Thought of Its Founder, Richard S. Childs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 18.Google Scholar)

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8 Banfield and Wilson, op. cit., p. 41.

9 Agger, Robert, Goldrich, Daniel, and Swanson, Bert E., The Rulers and the Ruled (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), p. 21.Google Scholar

10 Wood, Robert C., Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1959), p. 155.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 154.

12 We refer to cities characterized by commission or manager government, nonpartisan elections, and at-large constituencies as “reformed.” Our use of the term is historical and no value position on reformism's merits is intended. To refer to reformed cities as “public regarding” or “middle class” is, it seems, to assume what needs to be proved.

13 Schnore, Leo and Alford, Robert, “Forms of Government and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Suburbs,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 8 (June, 1963), 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the literature cited in Froman, op. cit.

14 Wolfinger and Field, op. cit., pp. 325–326.

15 The source for the first nine variables is The City and County Data Book (Washington: United States Bureau of the Census, 1962). For the last three variables, the source is Nolting, Orin F. and Arnold, David S. (eds.), The Municipal Yearbook 1965 (Chicago: International City Managers' Association, 1965), pp. 98 ff.Google Scholar

16 We used a random sample of 200 of the 309 American cities with populations of 50,000 or more in 1960. All information on the forms of government and forms of election are drawn from The Municipal Yearbook, 1965, op. cit.

17 Banfield and Wilson, op cit., p. 151.

18 For Minneapolis, see Morlan, Robert, “City Politics: Free Style,” National Municipal Review, 48 (November, 1949), pp. 485–490 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winnetka, Banfield and Wilson, op. cit., p. 140; Angeles, Los, Mayo, Charles G., “The 1961 Mayoralty Election in Los Angeles: The Political Party in a Nonpartisan Election,” Western Political Quarterly, 17 (1964), 325–339.Google Scholar

19 At least one other variable may produce a given institutional form in a city—the legal requirements of a state government, which vary from state to state and may even vary for different kinds of cities within the same state. We have not taken account of this variable because systematic information on comparative state requirements in this area was unavailable to us. However, Wolfinger and Field consulted several experts and eliminated cities which are not given free choice over their institutions. Nevertheless, a comparison of our figures with theirs revealed no important differences.

20 See footnote 4, supra.

21 We recognize that these are only rough indicators of city finance policies. Definitions of taxation vary from city to city arid what may be financed from taxes in one city may be financed from fees in another. Expenditures present a more complex problem because the types and amounts of state transfer payments vary from state to state according to state laws, the division of governmental labor in a state, the incomes and sizes of cities, not to mention political factors at the state level. We think it important, however, that our independent variables explain a large proportion of the variation in municipal outputs as we measured them. No doubt one could explain an even larger proportion of the variation in measures which specify different functional responsibilities of cities. At least these measures constitute a starting point, and we hope others will improve on them.

The source of our output measures was the County and City Data Book, op. cit.

22 See, for example, Alford, Robert and Scoble, Harry, “Political and Socio-Economic Characteristics of American Cities,” The Municipal Yearbook 1965, op. cit., pp. 82–97 Google Scholar; Sherbenou, op. cit.; Kessel, John H., “Governmental Structure and Political Environment,” this Review, 56 (September, 1962), 615–620.Google Scholar

23 Alford and Scoble, op. cit. The particularly large differences found between the populations of reformed and unreformed cities reflect the fact that New York City and several other urban giants are included in the sample.

24 Op. cit., p. 320.

25 In statistical parlance, the problem with “region” as an independent variable might be described as treating a complicated background variable as the first variable in a specific developmental sequence. But, as Blalock argues, “…one should avoid complex indicators that are related in unknown ways to a given underlying variable. Geographical region and certain background variables appear to have such undesirable properties”: Blalock, Hubert M., Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), p. 164 Google Scholar (italics in original).

26 Hawley, Amos, “Community Power and Urban Renewal Success,” American Journal of Sociology, 68 (January, 1963), 422–431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 See also the exchange between Banfield, and Wilson, and Wolfinger, and Field, in “Communications,” this Review, 60 (December, 1966), 998–1000.Google Scholar

28 Sherbenou, op. cit., pp. 133–134.

29 Op. cit., p. 139.

30 Quoted in Banfield and Wilson, op. cit., p. 154.

31 For a discussion of the concept of interest aggregation, see Almond, Gabriel, “Introduction: A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics,” in Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James S. (eds.), The Politics of Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 38–45.Google Scholar

32 Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties (New York: Science Editions, 1963), p. 378.Google Scholar

33 Sorauf, Frank J., Political Parties in the American System (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1964), pp. 165–166.Google Scholar

34 Pomper, Gerald, “Ethnic and Group Voting in Nonpartisan Municipal Elections,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 30 (Spring, 1966), p. 90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also, Freeman, J. Leiper, “Local Party Systems: Theoretical Considerations and a Case Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology, 64 (1958), 282–289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 It is possible that the difference between any two correlations may be a function of very different standard deviations of the independent variables. A quick look at Table 2, however, suggests that this is not likely to affect the relationships we find.

36 Wolfinger and Field, op. cit., p. 312, “… omit the commission cities from consideration since this form does not figure in the ethos theory.” Historically, however, commission government was the earliest of the structures advocated by the Progressives and is quite clearly a product of the reform era. While history tells us that commission cities can not legitimately be excluded from the fold of reformism, they appear to be its black sheep, characterized by low incomes, low population growth and large proportions of nonwhites. In fact, they present a marked contrast to both mayor-council and manager cities.

37 Agger et al., op. cit., pp. 4–14.

38 Beard, Charles A., American Government and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1924, 4th edition), p. 727.Google Scholar

39 Key, V. O., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 124.Google Scholar

40 Wilson and Banfield, op. cit., p. 876. Footnote 5 in the same article conveniently summarized research supporting this proposition.

41 Uyeki, Eugene S., “Patterns of Voting in a Metropolitan Area: 1938–1962,” Urban Affairs Quarterly, 1 (June, 1966), 65–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Banfield and Wilson, op. cit., p. 35.

43 Dawson, Richard E. and Robinson, James A., “The Politics of Welfare,” in Jacob, Herbert and Vines, Kenneth (eds.), Polities in the American States (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965), pp. 398–401.Google Scholar

44 Wolfinger, Raymond, “The Development and Persistence of Ethnic Voting,” this Review, 59 (December, 1965), 896–908.Google Scholar

45 Lane, Robert E., Political Life (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 236–243.Google Scholar

46 Ibid.

47 Stone, Harold, Price, Don K. and Stone, Kathryn, City Manager Government in the United States (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940), p. 238.Google Scholar

48 The standard argument for party responsibility is found in the works of Schattschneider, E. E., esp., Party Government (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942)Google Scholar and in the report of the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System (New York: Rinehart, 1950).Google Scholar

49 See Pomper, op. cit.; and Freeman, op. cit.

50 Salisbury, Robert and Black, Gordon, “Class and Party in Partisan and Nonpartisan Elections: The Case of Des Moines,” this Review, 57 (September, 1963), 584–592.Google Scholar

51 One newspaperman said of nonpartisan politics that “You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and we sell the scorecards”: Banfield and Wilson, op. cit., p. 157.

52 Williams, Oliver P. and Adrian, Charles, Four Cities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), pp. 56–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 Alford and Scoble, op. cit., p. 84.

54 In our view, the failure of the commission government to achieve the intended reforms is more plausible as an explanation of its demise than its administrative unwieldiness—the conventional explanation.

55 Williams and Adrian, op. cit., pp. 30–31.

56 Thometz, Carol E. discusses the role of the “Civic Committee” in decision-making in Dallas: see The Decision-Makers (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963).Google Scholar

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