Reassessing the Link Between City Structure and Fiscal Policy

Abstract

This study assesses the proposition that local government structure affects municipal expenditure levels. Despite decades of research, this question remains unsettled. Early on, analyses of this topic confirmed a linkage between municipal structure and fiscal policy, but more recent works have challenged this finding. Despite the widespread view that municipal structures are increasingly complex, many scholars continue to use simple measures of structure based on the use of the mayor-council or council-manager form. This gap between structures in practice and the measures used in research designs may explain the increasing frequency of studies with null findings. This proposition is examined through an analysis of the link between the per capita expenditures of 263 Michigan cities and four approaches to classifying local government structure. Regardless of the approach used or the complexity of the measure, no evidence was found that city structure is linked to per capita spending in these cities.

The Costs and Benefits of Volunteering Programs in the Public Sector: A Longitudinal Study of Municipal Governments

“…Local government institutions are known in urban affairs literature to affect various aspects of local policymaking (e.g., Carr & Karuppusamy, 2010;Feiock, Jeong, & Kim, 2003;Frederickson & Johnson, 2001;Karuppusamy & Carr, 2012;Svara, 2005). Hence, a set of indicator variables controls for variation in municipal political institutions.…”

A Century of Municipal Reform in the United States

“…They expand Frederickson's five-category framework to include a sixth classification. Recent examples related to the application of the adapted cities framework to specific research questions include Wood and Fan (2008) who looked at citizen satisfaction and Carr and Karuppusamy (2010) who applied the framework to exploring the effect of institutions on expenditures in Michigan municipalities.…”

Understanding CEO Role Perception and Time Usage: Are New Municipal Typologies Useful?

“…One possible reason for so few studies may come from the lack of an explicit process for coding cities into the framework and the difficulty in operationalizing the five categories (Carr & Karuppusamy, 2008). Only four studies (outside of the original Frederickson et al articles) actually use the framework to perform empirical analysis (Wood, 2002;Wood & Fan, 2008;Carr & Karuppusamy, 2010;Eskridge & French, 2011). Wood (2002) finds voter turnout is dependent on form of government, with political cities having the highest voter turnout and administrative cities the lowest and direct election of mayors, separation of political powers between the mayor and council, full-time status and expanded executive authority of the mayor the likely contributors to higher voter turnout.…”

“…1;2014 services in the top rating than are those in adapted cities. Carr and Karuppusamy (2010) use the adapted cities framework to evaluate the relationship between type of city and expenditure levels; they find no linkage between structure and per capita expenditures. They also note that most adaptations had taken place in mayor-council cities with much fewer occurring within council-manager cities-42% of council-manager cities remained as pure administrative cities (Carr & Karuppusamy, 2009).…”