No abstract

This article considers the democratic implications of the shift toward policy making and implementation through networks, integrating articles presented at a 2003 conference on democratic network governance. The authors argue that the effect of increased cross-sectoral and civil society involvement in governing has been to stretch liberal democratic processes to comprise greater numbers of actors involved in lateral network relationships. Although network governance has the potential to promote deliberation and to improve flexibility and responsiveness in service provision, it also raises serious issues regarding equity, accountability, and democratic legitimacy. There is a need to improve political coherence through, for example, steering or metagovernance of governance activities. Important questions for future research involve the character of actors who will take responsibility for metagovernance (e.g., politicians or public administrators) and the approaches they will use to steer governance processes.

The authors investigate the decision of municipal governments to out source the provision of public services during the 1980s and 1990s—a period of increased responsibility for municipalities. This study extends previous empirical work on outsourcing by distinguishing the type of outsourcing used (e.g., public, private, or other types of providers) and treating the out sourcing decision as a dynamic choice. Institutional characteristics and fiscal stress are found to play an important role in explaining service choices. Multinomial logistic regressions indicate that outsourcing was more common for poor cities than for wealthier ones, with the former often relying on government agencies and the latter opting for privatization. Throughout time, these choices are likely to reinforce interjurisdictional patterns of disparity in service quality and costs.

Although the Internet has been touted as a means to improve democratic governance, there has been little systematic analysis of its use. The authors analyze the diffusion of municipal Web sites that include information concerning a specific locality. The analysis is based on demographic and fiscal data from 454 California cities and two surveys of Web site adoption. The authors’ theoretical framework draws from the political economy and technology diffusion literatures. City size, government resources, concentration of social-economic elites, and voter registration levels are the most significant predictors of adoption. In contrast to previous adoption studies, the authors find that liberal political ideology and experience with advanced communication technologies do not appreciably increase the probability of adoption.