Bottom-Up or Top-Down Local Service Delivery? Assessing the Impacts of Special Districts as Community Governance Model

Abstract

This article assesses the impacts of bottom-up local governing institutions relative to top-down bureaucracies in local service delivery. Community services districts (CSDs) in California, a class of special districts that provides various neighborhood-level services, are examined to answer this question. An innovative characteristic of this institutional form is that it is residents who create them through a grass-root collective action to achieve a bottom-up governance structure, after opting out from a county service system. With changes in residential property values as performance metrics, the quantitative analysis utilizes district formation events and features a hedonic difference-in-difference regression. The results show that the creation of CSDs produces more significant impacts on property values than county authorities do. Yet, the effects are heterogeneous across the communities when the analysis is further drilled down to each district. The exploratory qualitative case study then uses interview data with district managers and document analysis to unveil what administrative factors explain the success and failure trajectory of bottom-up institution management. The case study identifies such factors as critical codeterminants, including managerial and board leadership, clarity of a problem statement, public support, and intergovernmental coordination with county and state agencies.

Sustainable Community-Based Tourism Development Model in Malang, Indonesia: A Participatory Action Research

“…Top-down approaches, according to evidence, provide statistically considerably worse results in terms of achieving local community goals and final satisfaction [2][3][4]. Second, retaining scholarly arguments solely in the scholarly domain while excluding citizens from the process is increasingly seen as inappropriate [5], because the public may assist in putting scientific theories into practice.…”

Are special districts strategic complements or strategic substitutes?

“…In this sense, special districts provide new spending or additional functional areas absent from the general‐purpose government landscape. An (2021) illustrates this dynamic by examining community service districts (CSDs) in unincorporated areas of California 4 . CSDs act as a stopgap between limited service provision by county governments and full incorporation as a municipality.…”

Income sorting by specialized services: Service differentiation by overlapping governments

“…Their findings based on 527 districts in Huston metropolitan area imply that appropriate water provision depends on the affluence of the community. An (2021) finds sales price of single‐family homes higher within community service districts in California than outside. However, Park and Shi (2021) conclude that specialized services are increasingly utilized as local private goods and do not necessarily represent the wealth of a community.…”