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Despite the potential of open government, earlier research has found that local governments vary significantly in their embrace of transparency. In this article, we explore the variability question through the innovative application of an alternative set of transparency indicators. We find that cities are more likely to make information about finance and budgeting and general administration accessible to the public, less likely to place information related to human resources online. We use the literature to derive a model to test five types of promising explanations for a city's propensity for transparency. Our analysis suggests that community demand and a city's organizational networks play an important role in fostering transparency, regardless of city size. Important differences do exist between large and small cities: Transparency in larger cities is spurred by political competition; in smaller cities, governmental resources and administrative professionalism influence transparency.

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Economic development, in its most general sense, is a process through which a community's material and social well-being is increased. For American cities, the interaction of federalism and capitalism makes the pursuit of economic development a competitive process. This study assesses the nature and extent of interjurisdictional competition for economic development by surveying 84 public- and private-sector actors in 31 Southeastern cities. The findings indicate that the competition ethos is pervasive, with cities establishing aggressive economic development programs to compete with larger, economically diverse jurisdictions.

States interact with each other in ways that have consequences for the American federal system. The focus of this article is interstate cooperation-multistate efforts to pursue shared agendas or solve common problems. Three mechanisms are examined: interstate compacts, multistate legal actions, and uniform state laws. The data show that during the 1990s, states engaged in all of these behaviors but at differing rates. Furthermore, the explanations for interstate cooperation vary. Government capability proved to be an important explanation but in opposite ways: more capable states join multistate legal actions, and less capable states adopt uniform state laws. The implications for the federal system are considerable: effective interstate cooperation may offer an alternative to federal legislation. For state officials, the implications are equally significant: interstate cooperation spawns administrative networks that fall outside traditional structures.I thank Erica Carter, H. Lee Smith, and Gregory Plagens for their assistance in the collection of the data used in this research.Of the four independent variables, policy liberalism and partisanship are positively correlated with each other, as are policy liberalism and government capability, but neither correlation exceeds r 5 0.41.

Existing research on policy diffusion focuses almost exclusively on "successes" where many jurisdictions adopted the policy or policies under examination. Some have speculated that this "pro-innovation bias" compromises scholars' ability to draw valid inferences about the factors that influence the diffusion process. We argue that the study of interstate compacts in the United States provides an analytic opportunity to assess whether these concerns are warranted because it allows us to examine an entire universe of cases with unusually wide variability in their adoption patterns. Based on a pooled event history analysis of the interstate compacts that are open to all fifty states, we conclude that the tendency to limit diffusion research to widely adopted policies affects the results of previous studies. Specifically, it appears to lead scholars to systematically overestimate the impact of geographic diffusion pressures and policy attributes, and to underestimate the importance of professional associations and the opportunity to learn from previous adoptions. In sum, the longstanding concerns about a pro-innovation bias in diffusion research seem to be warranted.

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