Regime theory starts with the proposition that governing capacity is not easily captured through the electoral process. Governing capacity is created and maintained by bringing together coalition partners with appropriate resources, nongovernmental as well as governmental. If a governing coalition is to be viable, it must be able to mobilize resources commensurate with its main policy agenda. The author uses this reasoning as the foundation/or comparing regimes by the nature and difficulty of the government tasks they undertake and the level and kind of resources required for these tasks. Political leadership, he argues, is a creative exercise of political choice, involving the ability to craft arrangements through which resources can be mobilized, thus enabling a community to accomplish difficult and nonroutine goals.

In 1993, a team of political scientists launched an 11-city study of school reform, centering on the concept of civic capacity. In the field of urban education, the 11-city study found places ranging from those with low levels of civic capacity in which diffuse and scattered concerns never became focused and synergistic to those with relatively high levels of civic capacity in which key actors came together in concerted action. Community leaders develop civic capacity to respond to major community-wide problems with a high potential for controversy. An ever-present potential for conflict means that a spirit of cooperation can quickly erode, and civic capacity differs from micro versions of social capital. To be lasting, civic capacity needs an institutional foundation for interaction among elites and a "grassroots" base through which ordinary citizens are engaged.

In their continued considerations of political inequality, urban scholars are especially concerned with less visible influences surrounding community decision making, and have employed such concepts as potential power, nondecision making, and anticipated reactions. However, these concepts leave some patterns of influence unexplained. There is also a dimension of power in which durable features of the socioeconomic system confer advantages and disadvantages on groups in ways that predispose public officials to favor some interests at the expense of others. Public officials make their decisions in a context in which strategically important resources are hierarchically arranged. Because this system of stratification leaves public officials situationally dependent on upper-strata interests, it is a factor in all that they do. Consequently, system features lower the opportunity costs of exerting influence for some groups and raise them for others. Thus socioeconomic inequalities put various strata on different political footings.

The study of urban regimes is an evolving activity and not a tightly defined form of analysis. With ongoing research new questions and issues arise, and old ones stand in need of refinement. Recent articles by David Imbroscio (1998, 2003) and Jonathan Davies (2002Davies ( , 2003 raise important questions about the future direction of research. As I read their work, I see much to be praised, but also some positions that are debatable. In this essay I concentrate on the latter. Celebrating points of agreement is a pleasant activity, but John Stuart Mill teaches us that the exchange of conflicting views is more conducive to enlarged understanding.Three questions help clarify differences. The first concerns the nature and scope of the economic imperative. The second is about the level of analysis for which the concept of an urban regime is appropriate. Third, how should we think about urban regimes-what exactly are they and what line of inquiry flows from this conception?

In recent years, Atlanta appears unable to move from diffuse problem recognition to the framing of a broad program of action, despite major problems associated with a high level of poverty. With its exceptionally fragmented structure of local government, a tradition of business wariness of a strong governmental sector, and continued reliance on personal and informal collaboration, the city has failed to put together a plan to address the city's social-investment needs. Atlanta's once-vaunted biracial coalition shows signs of a declining ability to adapt to emergent issues and frame purposes accordingly. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.