With the aim of helping move research from rhetoric to empirical reality, this article reports results of a national survey of city managers on attitudes towards and actions taken to implement principles of reinventing government. A large majority of managers support key principles of reinvention. A smaller proportion of managers has taken actions to recommend adoption of reinvention programs in their budget proposals to council. Managers' action‐taking is influenced by certain characteristics of city managers, their communities, and their governments, including managers' attitudes and experiences, slack resources, and region.
This paper presents an empirical examination of the mechanisms by which cities attempt to increase citizen participation in municipal government. The incidence of four types of citizen mechanisms, open government, information gathering, neighborhood environment, and coproduction, is assessed in US cities of population greater than 100,000. Patterns of citizen participation are probed and an overall ranking of cities in terms of the participative environment they foster is developed. The existence of a participative environment is found to be associated with city efforts to attract or retain middle class residents. The theoretical meaning of this relation is explored.
The authors place reinventing government (REGO) efforts in the context of mayor-council municipalities. After briefly reviewing the emerging body of local government research on reinventing government, they address two principal research questions: First, what are the correlates and extent of REGO actions by managers, mayors, and city councils? Second, what is the nature of REGO interactions among managers, mayors, and councils? Employing two International City Management Association data sets, the authors conclude that although managers may be the prime movers of REGO in U.S. municipalities, they can only accomplish what their community, governmental, and political environments permit.
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