modeling variations in responsiveness to municipal-level ...exploring the “paradox” of local...
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Exploring the “Paradox” of Local Social Welfare Spending:
Modeling Variations in Responsiveness to Municipal-Level Ideology
Meredith A. Krause
A Thesis in the Field of Government for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts
Harvard University
May 2016
Abstract
Local government spending on social welfare activities, such as public health and
hospitals, public welfare, education subsidies, and affordable housing, often is
characterized in the scholarly literature as “paradoxical,” as it departs from the
predictions of the seminal perspective on the financial activities of local governments, the
economically based theory of public choice. The theory claims that the prospect of
resident mobility should act as a constraint on the “redistribution” of revenue from
affluent taxpayers to the needy, who consume more in public services than they pay in
taxes. According to public choice, affluent residents should leave cities and towns when
they do not benefit from the taxes they pay, specifically, when local governments use tax
funds to provide services to other, less-advantaged residents.
However, the empirics of local social welfare activity depart from the model’s
predictions in two important ways: firstly, local governments do offer social welfare
services, spending $193.1 billion in 2007, the focal year of this analysis, on public health,
welfare, and housing and community development alone, which may indicate public
support for such efforts rather than the unitary opposition posited in the public choice
view. Secondly, though public choice depicts municipalities as the sole providers of
local services, local governance is more fragmented in actuality: municipal governments,
county governments, special-purpose districts, and school districts all may provide
services in a given city or town, including social welfare programs. Due to these two
phenomena, explanations of the local social welfare role remain incomplete.
To explore the possibility that public preferences might explain the existence of
local social welfare spending and to allow for variations in the scope of local service
provision, two unique contributions to the literature, I employ both newly available
measures of city-level ideology tabulated by political scientists Chris Tausanovich and
Christopher Warshaw and data on the combined expenditures of all local governments
that serve the residents of 112 U.S. cities compiled by researchers at the Lincoln Institute
of Land Policy. In preliminary (“baseline”) linear regression models, I find that local
governments that serve more liberal residents spend more on social welfare than do more
conservative communities. However, the results of expanded regression models, which
control for a greater number of demographic covariates, are less definitive, potentially
indicating that local expenditures may be affected not only by local resident ideology but
by state and federal influences when higher levels of government provide cities and
towns with social welfare aid. The local social welfare role clearly is more complex than
the parsimonious public choice theory can explain, necessitating future research on a
larger sample of communities and theoretical perspectives that extend beyond economic
models to examine how resident preferences, variations in the scope of local governance,
and the division of responsibility between federal, state, and local governments interact to
shape local policy.
v
Table of Contents
List of Tables…………………………………………………………………………….vii
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………...……viii
I. Examining the “Paradox” of Local Government Social Welfare Spending………1
II. Public Choice and Social Welfare: A Review…………………………………….9
III. Rethinking the History of Local Social Welfare Provision……………………...23
IV. Ideology, Responsiveness, and Social Welfare………………………………….33
Conceptualizing Ideology………………………………………………..35
The Operational Ideology of Social Welfare (or “Public Preferences”
for Social Welfare)……………………………………………………….39
The Ideological Responsiveness of Local Social Welfare Spending…….42
V. Research Question and Hypothesis…...………………………………………….49
VI. Data and Methods……………………………………………………………..…51
Measuring City-Level Ideology………………………………………….51
Standardized Measures of City Area Spending: Fiscally
Standardized Cities………………………………………………………56
Methods Overview……………………………………………………….63
VII. Findings and Discussion…………………………………………………………66
Model Results……………………………………………………………69
Reexamining the Relationship of Ideology and Local Social Welfare
Spending…………………………………………………………………75
vi
Intergovernmental Relations and Constraints: Implications for the
Influence of Local Preferences on Social Welfare Spending……………76
Can Expenditures Respond to Local Preferences? Modeling Alternate
Quantities of Interest in Studies of Local Social Welfare Activity……...80
Advancing Theory on the Local Social Welfare Role: Substantive
and Methodological Implications………………………………………..85
Appendix………………………………………………………………………………....93
Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………….95
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………134
vii
List of Tables
Table 1 Descriptive statistics for key variables…………………………………64
Table 2 Models 1-2. Base models, OLS regression of social welfare
spending on ideology ……………………………………………...……70
Table 3 Models 3-6. Expanded models, OLS regression of social welfare
spending on ideology……………………………………………………74
viii
List of Figures
Fig. 1 Measures of municipal ideology………………………………………………55
1
Chapter I
Examining the “Paradox” of Local Government Social Welfare Spending
“Local governments are the primary level of democratic self-government, the
places where the ideals of citizenship meet the realities of place, the families, homes, and
neighborhood where democracy does or does not reside.”1
Local government spending on social welfare often is depicted in political science
scholarship as “paradoxical.”2 The seminal theory in the study of local public finance,
the “public choice” perspective introduced by Charles Tiebout in “A Pure Theory of
Local Expenditures” (1956) and expanded most notably by Paul Peterson in City Limits
(1981), asserts that the possibility of resident exit should function as a constraint on the
redistribution of resources by local governments, namely municipalities, to the needy,
and, thus, any expenditures on social welfare programs and services.3 Public choice
conceives of cities and towns as akin to markets: citizens choose their location of
residence based on the “bundle” of governmental services that corresponds to the “price”
they are willing to pay in taxes.4 Those who pay, benefit, and so local governments’
transfer of revenues by spending on the needy, who do not pay for the services they
receive, should prompt more advantaged residents and firms to depart, as they pay taxes
for benefits that they do not, themselves, receive.5
Though the normative assumptions that undergird public choice, particularly that
individuals have equal capacity to move and to find communities that suit their needs,
frequently have been criticized by scholars, public choice also may falter empirically:
2
while the theory endeavors to describe what local governments should do, it less
adequately explains what they actually do.6 Local governments spend non-trivial
amounts on social welfare programs and services, including education, hospitals, public
health, public welfare and housing and community development.7 For example, in 2007,
the focal year of the analysis that follows, local government spending on health,
hospitals, housing and community development and public welfare alone totaled $193.1
billion.8 Uses of these funds included public education and supportive services,
preventative health care services, operation of government-owned hospitals and payments
to private hospitals for the care of needy individuals, and affordable housing programs.9
There is substantive variation in local governments’ social welfare spending, as well,
which appears challenging to reconcile with the public choice assertion that they
experience common fiscal incentives to minimize expenditures in this area.10
Scholarly work on the local social welfare role has struggled to reconcile this
empirical evidence and the predictions of public choice: if the constraints on local
governments’ spending are as binding, and as generally applicable as Tiebout and
Peterson suggest, local social welfare expenditures should not vary, and, in fact, should
not occur at all.11
In framing the need to maximize the local tax and economic base as in
a community’s “unitary interest,” Peterson, in particular, assumes that local governments
have equivalent disinclination toward social welfare spending.12
However, if residents’
preferences for taxes and spending vary, their preferences for social welfare expenditures
might as well: some individuals and communities may have greater willingness to
support the needy than do others.13
As Gillette observes, “different individuals might
have different preferences for redistribution, just as they might have different preferences
3
for…public parks, high density-living, proximity to shopping or green space, or any of
the other items in the basket of services that localities aggregate.”14
If cities and towns
are bundles of resident tastes and preferences, those preferences should be expected to
influence what local governments do, including the extent to which they spend funds on
social welfare provision.15
The empirics of local social welfare spending may be
paradoxical, or the theory may be at least partially flawed.16
Until recently, it has been challenging to test directly the influence resident views
might have on variations in local spending, largely because little information exists
concerning those views, or on the extent to which citizens articulate their preferences
through political action.17
Some scholarship in the public choice vein even goes so far as
to suggest that local government is not a particularly politicized sphere: because local
elections often are nonpartisan, local politics have been characterized as neutral or non-
ideological, a longstanding assumption that many recent studies have questioned.18
Though local officials may not run for election based on party affiliation, this does not
preclude them from holding ideologically-based views or articulating issue positions that
might be recognized as reflecting a particular partisan or ideological orientation.19
As
noted by Berry, Oliver and Ha “have shown that voters often name party affiliation as an
important driver of vote choice even in nonpartisan elections.”20
Nonetheless, there is
limited national, generalizable data on measures of participation in local government,
including voting in local elections or contacting local officials, ways other than mobility
by which residents might communicate their views to their local governments.21
Research that has been conducted on local participation indicates that it is low.22
As a
result, researchers studying local government have opted to employ proxy measures, such
4
as demographics or voter turnout in presidential elections, to infer what residents’
political preferences might be, or to conduct case studies of single, or a few,
communities.23
This lack of data has hindered local government scholarship’s ability to present
alternative empirical evidence and to develop theoretical alternatives to the public choice
paradigm.24
For example, Trounstine observes that, due to data limitations, “very little
work at the local level analyzes responsiveness from an ideological standpoint.”25
By
utilizing newly-available data on municipal ideology compiled by political scientists
Chris Tausanovich and Christopher Warshaw, I offer one of the first direct tests of the
influence of residents’ liberal-conservative ideology on the social welfare expenditure of
the local governments that serve them. In doing so, my work moves beyond the narrow
conceptualization of local preferences depicted in public choice to examine how
variations in those views, rather than an assumed common interest, shape local spending.
Much of the literature on local social welfare provision refers generally to the
behavior of local governments or employs the terms “local” and “municipal” government
interchangeably; however, “local governments” is a broad concept that encompasses a
multiplicity of governmental units, including both general-purpose entities, namely
municipalities and counties, that assume a variety of governmental functions, and those
that are more narrowly focused, primarily school districts and special-purpose district
governments, limited, independent governmental bodies that administer only one or two
services (e.g. transportation, fire services, or public utilities).26
Municipal governments,
the focus of much of public choice scholarship, often are depicted as sole, independent
actors responsible for local tax and service administration, yet they are not the only local
5
governments that provide services to municipal residents.27
As Frederickson and
O’Leary write: “Almost every resident of a city is also a resident of a county and of a
school district- three distinct jurisdictions, each with their own policies, elections, taxes,
statutes, and regulations.”28
Accordingly, some have criticized public choice theories for
assuming that residents only are served by general purpose or municipal governments and
for failing to incorporate the variations in governmental responsibility for service
provision that exist in fact.29
Municipal governments’ functional responsibilities
themselves are not uniform, but vary significantly across and within states: functions that
may be the responsibility of the municipality in one state or region may be tasked to
counties or special districts in another.30
In addition, much of the social welfare spending
that occurs at the local level is not provided by municipalities or even by general-purpose
governments at all, a fact that little recent work acknowledges.31
For example, most
public education is delivered not by municipal governments but by independent school
districts.32
Public health and public welfare functions, including those provided to
municipal residents, primarily are administered by county governments, not by
municipalities.33
Though municipalities assume greater responsibility than counties for
housing and community development, the majority of such spending falls to neither
municipal or county governments but to independent public housing authorities.34
Consequently, attempting to test public choice theories, which typically focus on
municipalities alone, with empirical data that shows considerable fragmentation in the
scope of local social welfare responsibility, presents substantial challenges.35
The
majority of studies that seek to do so, or to study local spending generally, tend to use
data on only one of these entities, typically municipal governments or counties, yet
6
simultaneously attempt to make broad inferences as to the behaviors of all local
governments: scholars effectively assume that the narrower terms, municipalities and
counties, are equivalent to the more expansive one, local governments, a conceptual slip
that has substantive implications, in that it assumes municipal or county functions are
more centralized in municipal or county government than they are in actuality.36
When
fragmentation is incorporated into scholarly work, it generally refers not to differences in
the scope of service provision but to the number of local governments that serve a region,
often a simple count, irrespective of function,37
or by aggregating expenditures to the
state or county level, in the expectation that doing so will account for variation in
governments’ scope of responsibilities.38
However, this limits scholars’ ability to study
individual local government units, to test directly the assumptions of public choice.39
The scholarly challenges posed by fragmentation are longstanding ones and not even the
seminal work on the spending of local government “redistribution” could overcome
them: as Lowry notes, “although Peterson formulated his theory in terms of local
government, he tested it with data on combined state and local government spending.”40
In addition to such methodological difficulties, neglecting to acknowledge or to
model this variation in functional responsibility may lead to potentially problematic
conceptualizations, namely that any municipal funds are spent, or eschewed, because the
municipal government chooses to do so rather than because another unit of government
has assumed primary responsibility for overseeing the function: some work falsely may
be attributing variation to preferences, demographics or party affiliation that correctly
“belongs,” at least in part, to functional responsibility.41
For instance, municipal
governments may spend little on public health or welfare not because their residents do
7
not support or benefit from those programs but because county government is primarily
responsible for delivering them to municipal residents. Oversights of this nature
especially may be problematic with regard to education: modeling variations in education
spending, or in social welfare analyses that include education expenditure, without
accounting for school districts may provide a less-than-substantive basis for inference.
To address this complexity, I utilize data compiled by the Lincoln Institute of
Land Policy which combines the spending of all local governments, including municipal
and county governments, school districts, and special district governments, which serve
individuals living within the municipal boundaries of each of 112 U.S. cities to create a
“fiscally standardized” expenditure amount, or FiSC, for each community.42
By using
data that accounts for the functional variation in local service provision, I can be more
confident that the relationships I find are due to the influence of ideology rather than to
bias, specifically to the failure to incorporate all the local governmental units that actually
are responsible for social welfare spending in a given municipality.43
In basic bivariate statistical analyses, I do find that local governments’ social
welfare expenditures correspond to the ideological preferences of the residents they
serve: city-level liberalism has a positive relationship with the social welfare spending of
local governments that serve those cities. However, in more complex statistical analyses,
this relationship is not present. Ideology is not statistically significant when a greater
number of covariates are incorporated into the regression models: controls for
intergovernmental factors, namely whether the municipal government directly
administers public schools and state government delegation of TANF (public welfare)
administrative functions to counties, have the most consistent relationship with local
8
social welfare expenditure. These results reflect the challenges of attempting to control
for the diverse variety of factors that might contribute to local governments’ social
welfare activities, namely variations in the extent to which states assign responsibility to
local governments and demographic characteristics that may be correlated both with
ideology and with the factors that determine intergovernmental grants that local
governments receive to spend on social welfare.44
Distinguishing between the effects of
the “pull” of local ideological preferences and the push of federal and state policy on the
amounts local governments have to spend on social welfare efforts and the shape their
policies take remains an important step for future scholarship on the local social welfare
role. Intergovernmental factors may complicate the extent to which public choice, or any
theory that focuses solely on local governments, truly explains the forces that bear on
social policy at the local level.45
9
Chapter II
Public Choice and Social Welfare: A Review
“It is at the local level where policies and programs are implemented, where the
routines build policy, and where the enduring challenges of promoting economies,
eliminating poverty, integrating immigrants, and building democracy take place.”46
For decades, public choice theory has been the predominant theoretical
framework for studying the spending of local governments, including on social welfare
provision.47
The theory, formulated by Charles Teibout (1956) in “A Pure Theory of
Public Expenditures” and applied to the scholarship of federalism by Paul Peterson in
City Limits (1981), depicts local communities as markets in which residents convey their
tax and service preferences through mobility (“voting with their feet”) rather than by
contacting local officials or other forms of political activity.48
According to Tiebout
(1956), individuals select the communities in which they live based on the amount of
taxes they are willing to pay for the services they desire to receive, and will be inclined to
leave if they pay taxes without an equivalent personal benefit.49
In the public choice
framing, this potential for resident departure acts as a constraint on local governments’
ability to redistribute resources to those in need, to provide social welfare services such
as affordable housing, health and hospital care, and public welfare assistance to the
disadvantaged.50
In 1981’s seminal City Limits, Paul Peterson extended the public choice
framework beyond the local level to the study of federalism, arguing that the federal
government, not local governments, should be responsible for social welfare provision, as
10
advantaged citizens are less likely to exit the nation than their local community if
government redistributes their tax revenue to provide social welfare assistance to the
needy.51
Following Richard Musgrave’s prior typology, Peterson classified
governmental responsibilities as belonging to three functional categories,
“developmental” policies designed to attract firms and to maximize a community’s
economic base, “allocational” or housekeeping functions such as road maintenance and
police protection, and “redistributive” social welfare efforts, so labeled because they are
thought to transfer resources from the advantaged to the poor.52
Peterson characterized
local politics as the “limited politics” of economic development, asserting that municipal
leaders’ efforts to strengthen their city’s economic position are in the community’s (and
thus all residents’) “unitary” interest and suggesting the mid-twentieth century expansion
of the federal role in social welfare provision supported his claim that it, rather than states
and local governments, is the level most suited to the redistributive function.53
However, which level of government is better assigned to oversee a given policy
domain is a normative question, and governments may not act as theory suggests they
should.54
In the years since the publication of City Limits, scholars have endeavored,
perhaps even struggled, to reconcile the existence of continued local government social
welfare expenditure with the theoretical claims of public choice.55
Contrary to the
theory’s predictions, local governments, including municipal governments, counties,
school districts, and special-purpose district governments assume a sizeable social
welfare role: education, which most studies categorize as a form of social welfare, is the
largest single category of local government expenditure.56
In 2007 alone, the year of the
analysis that follows, local governments’ collective direct expenditures, not including
11
transfers made to other local governments, included $37.2 billion on housing and
community development efforts, $48.2 billion on public welfare programs, and $107.7
billion to support health and hospital functions.57
Researchers also have documented the
presence of sizeable variation in local social welfare spending, a phenomenon that seems
challenging to reconcile with the public choice claim that local governments share an
equal disincentive to minimize their expenditures in this area.58
If local governments,
municipalities in particular, face similar incentives to attract advantaged residents, to
strengthen their tax bases, and to minimize their role in assisting the needy, why might
local government social welfare spending persist and, why does it vary?
The aforementioned examples illustrate the challenges scholars have faced in
reconciling public choice’s decades-old predictions and contemporary data that appears
not to conform to its expectations. Tiebout, in particular, depicts cities and towns as
autonomous entities solely responsible for the taxing and spending that occurs within
their boundaries.59
However, local government service provision in practice tends to be
more fragmented than his classical formulation of public choice suggests: services within
the boundaries of a given municipality may be delivered not only by municipal
governments but also by counties, special districts, and school districts, many of which
assume a sizeable social welfare role.60
A key source of this variation in local service
provision is that states differ in the powers that they grant to municipalities and
counties.61
Municipal governments’ taxing and spending powers are facilitated, either
enabled or constrained, by state law, while counties were designed to function as
administrative arms of state government, gradually, and variably, receiving autonomous
authority over time.62
In some states, municipal governments directly oversee the
12
majority of services provided within their boundaries, while in others, municipalities
share responsibilities with other local government bodies, whose boundaries may not
overlap with the municipality’s, such as counties, independent, state, or county-
administered school districts, or special-purpose districts.63
County governments are similarly varied in the services they provide and the extent
to which they have substantive responsibilities for policy and for service provision.64
In
unincorporated areas which do not “belong” to a city government, county governments
often are responsible for providing “urban-type services that only incorporated place
governments provide in many other states.”65
County government authority also differs
regionally: in Southern and Western states, counties act as comprehensive service
providers, while in the Northeast their duties are much more restricted.66
In Connecticut
and Rhode Island, for example, counties are geographic entities only, with no formal
governing responsibilities.67
In addition, municipal and county governments function as
a single unit, referred to as consolidated cities, in several large cities, including
Anchorage, Denver, Jacksonville (Florida), Louisville (Kentucky), Nashville, New York
City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.68
However, no studies appear to have examined
the extent to which consolidation affects local governments’ social welfare spending,
such as the appearance of greater “city” spending on public health and welfare in
municipalities that have merged their functions with county governments.
Due to these distinctions, one cannot assume that a given unit of local government,
municipality, county, or special district, has equivalent ability to raise revenue or is
responsible for similar functions across or even within states, including in social welfare:
social welfare functions that are directly administered by the state government in one
13
state may be delegated by states to counties in another.69
For example, public welfare
functions are administered by counties in 13 states, by workforce development boards in
7 other states and by state governments in the remaining 30 states.70
Responsibility for
public education is particularly varied: schools may be administered by the municipal
government, the county government, independent school districts, or states, and district
boundaries may or may not overlap with municipal boundaries.71
While municipal
governments do operate public schools in 12 states, they do not do so alone: the extent to
which they do differs by city or town, and in no state is the municipal government solely
responsible for public schooling.72
The dominant arrangement for providing public
education in the United States is actually through independent school districts, separate
from any other governmental unit: 30 states provide public education solely through
independent districts, an arrangement that, per the U.S. Census Bureau, is “practically
universal in the West.”73
In contrast, in 4 states, Alaska, Hawaii, Maryland, and North
Carolina, there are no independent school districts, but only those that are administered
by other levels of government, principally states or counties.74
Though special districts
assume a significant role in the administration of public housing, 8 states, Arizona,
Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Wyoming, contain
no fully independent housing districts.75
Responsibility for public health provision is
similarly varied: Salinsky finds that 60% of local public health departments serve county
areas and 18% serve “cities, towns, or townships.”76
Hajnal and Trounstine, the authors of one of the few studies to acknowledge the
existence of functional variation in local governance, report that many cities may not be
responsible for many types of spending, and that studies that focus only on municipal
14
governments eliminate the third of local government spending that falls to special
districts, 29 percent of which is spent on social welfare functions.77
For example, in a
2006 data set summarizing the municipal expenditures of the nation’s 35 largest cities,
the U.S. Census Bureau reports no education spending for 22 municipalities, including
Los Angeles and Houston, the second and fourth largest U.S. cities, respectively, and no
public welfare for nearly half (16 cities).78
A cursory reading of this data would lead
those unfamiliar with variations in the landscape of local governance to conclude
erroneously that municipal residents are not receiving such services, when they are in
fact: the municipal government just is not responsible for providing them.
Local social welfare responsibility clearly is not limited to municipalities alone
but delegated to a multiplicity of local governments, including cities, towns, counties, and
special districts, and a full analysis must consider the actions of all of these entities.79
Failing to account for these variations has implications not only for the soundness of
researchers’ empirical methods, but for the conclusions they draw. Neglecting to do so
partly may explain the inconclusive findings of previous work.80
As Tausanovich and
Warshaw assert, moving beyond controlling for the population and the “size” of the
economy to substantively incorporate variations in the scope of municipal responsibility
might be an important step for future scholarship.81
Local fragmentation also complicates the notion that residents choose only one
governmental service provider when they locate in a particular municipality: in actuality,
by choosing to reside in a particular city or town, they implicitly select not only a single
municipal government but an additional package of county, school district, and special
district tax and service combinations.82
Individuals cannot simply “unbundle” the
15
variations in tax and service administration that come with residing in a particular city or
town: for example, to choose to have their water provided either by the municipal
government or a public utility, or public education administered by the city or an
independent school district.83
In addition, local governments are no longer restricted to the property tax as their
sole source of revenue, as the Tiebout model suggests, but also may rely on income or
sales taxes, fees and charges, and grants from state and federal government to fund
service provision.84
The percentage of revenues local governments, including
municipalities, derive from property taxes has declined substantially since the 1960s, as
well.85
Benton writes that the share of revenue municipal, county, school district, and
special district governments received from the property taxes was “cut in half” between
1962 and 2002.86
This shift in local governments’ revenue base, from reliance on the
property tax to a much more diversified combination of property, sales, and income taxes,
fees, user charges, and intergovernmental grants, complicates the public choice notion of
a simple equation of property tax payments for personal services and its accordant
assumption that municipal governments must finance the services they provide solely
from taxes on housing.87
In commenting on the contemporary diversity of municipal
financing, Pagano asserts that “the property tax city…is no longer the model for cities
today.”88
Consequently, public choice, a decades-old theory, simply may not explain the
behavior of present-day local governments very well.89
Some scholars also have argued that the economically-based public choice theory,
with its restrictive assumptions of residents’ “perfect information” on local tax and
service packages and their unconstrained, equally-attained mobility, simply is too
16
narrowly-focused to explain the multiple factors that bear on local governments.90
Though few dispute that local officials are responsible for the fiscal health of their
governments, as Weir notes, maximizing the tax base may not be their only concern, nor
do all municipalities have equal capacity to do so.91
Some research also indicates that
local residents may not be as unilaterally supportive of economic development efforts as
public choice theorists, particularly Peterson, claim: for example, Sharp finds evidence of
citizen resistance to business development subsidies, framed as “corporate welfare” by
opponents, for failing to produce substantive community benefits.92
As a result, many
authors suggest that the framing of local governance as limited entities pursuing singular
economic development efforts and apolitical functions such as road maintenance is, in
itself, limited.93
Moving beyond the local level, Pagano asserts that relationships with higher
levels of government, including the legal constraints placed on municipalities by states,
citizens’ demands and preferences, and even differences in political culture shape
municipal leaders’ tax and spending decisions.94
Similarly, Davidson notes that the
activities of local governments are clearly less separable from, and more intertwined
with, the federal government than Peterson claims, and that relationships between local
and federal actors, including in the implementation of social welfare programs, result in
the expansion of the “range of policy choices available at the local level to include more
issues of national importance.”95
At the heart of Peterson’s application of public choice
to federalism is the implication that policy areas, including social welfare, are only local
or national, yet such neat divisions may not reflect contemporary local governance
accurately.96
Both the interconnectedness of federal, state and local government activity
17
and the fragmentation of local governing responsibilities clearly complicate efforts to
employ public choice as the narrative thread for the local social welfare “story.”
A considerable amount of the research on local public finance, including in social
welfare policy, has focused on the influence of municipal governments’ structural
aspects, such as whether they operate under a mayor-and-council or a council/manager
system, whether city councils are elected by district or “at large” elections, and whether
cities have direct democracy provisions, finding contradictory relationships and often
none at all.97
Part of the explanation for this ambiguity also may lie in the fragmentation
of social welfare service provision: if education is operated by an independent school
district, public welfare administered by county government, or affordable housing
provision offered by an independent housing authority, the channel through which
municipal government participation or institutions might influence this spending is less
clear than the notion of a direct line connecting structure and expenditure might
suggest.98
Given that multiple local government bodies, including school districts,
special district governments, and counties, provide social welfare functions to residents
of a given municipality, municipal government spending is not the only target of citizen
preference communication: because individuals living within the boundaries of a
municipality do not articulate their views to, nor receive services from, municipal
governments alone, municipal leaders cannot be expected to respond if their jurisdiction
is not responsible for the relevant policy area.99
For example, residents’ preferences for
spending on public schooling will be heard by the school district if the municipal
government does not oversee education. Similarly, if the county government, not the
municipal government, is responsible for providing public health services to residents of
18
the municipality, the county government will be the recipient jurisdiction for resident
preference communication.
In spite of their inconclusive findings, studies that examine municipal structures
nonetheless represent substantive efforts to reintroduce political variables into studies of
local government spending. Due in part to the dominance of public choice theory,
including its equation of local communities with economic markets and portrayal of local
government as an “apolitical” domain characterized by nonpartisan elections, as well as
the unavailability of data on measures of local participation, relatively little is known
about the influence of residents’ political views on local policy, including on spending.100
This lack of data may help to maintain the theoretical primacy of the public choice
perspective, inasmuch as it is difficult to challenge the perception of local government as
apolitical if there is little available data on local politics or preferences.101
To address the lack of generalizable data on local politics, including on residents’
political preferences, ideology, or partisanship, researchers have tended to conduct case
studies of a single policy domain or a limited number of communities, or to model
relationships quantitatively utilizing proxy measures, typically demographics, partisan
turnout in presidential elections or national party affiliation.102
However, employing
proxy measures may be problematic in several ways. First, ideology and party affiliation
may not be equivalent terms, particularly when measuring relationships over time, given
mid-20th
century changes in the composition of the Democratic and Republican
electorates, particularly the movement of the Republican Party to the ideological right.103
Tausanovich and Warshaw also claim that the party vote share in any single presidential
19
election may be the result of short term forces rather than an enduring measure of
citizens’ views.104
The use of demographics such as race, median income, or the percentage of the
population living in poverty to proxy for resident preferences also poses challenges,
particularly inferential ones. In addition to being indirect measures of people’s views, the
predicted influence of demographic factors may differ depending on whether the
researcher characterizes them as direct measures or as preference proxies, rendering them
difficult to interpret. For example, studies that employ the percentage of residents who
are racial minorities as a proxy for liberal preferences typically hypothesize a positive
relationship with social welfare expenditure based on previous research that suggests
members of minority groups are more likely to vote Democratic and to support such
efforts.105
Other researchers conclude the percentage of racial minorities in cities and
negative views of minorities, specifically racial bias and the belief that minorities may
disproportionately benefit from social welfare, may diminish public support for public
welfare assistance, and reduce the amount of spending, including local spending, on such
functions.106
The percentage of minority residents, therefore, leads to contradictory
expectations when utilized directly, to model a community’s demographic composition,
and when employed as a proxy measure of preferences.
Other proxies can be similarly challenging to predict and to interpret: while low
income individuals may be more likely to vote Democratic and to support social welfare
expenditure, seemingly leading to greater spending, a larger percentage of poor residents
may result in a given local government having less available revenue to fund public
services.107
Conversely, higher income individuals may contribute to a more robust tax
20
base, as Peterson claims, but, if their interests are viewed through a public choice lens,
affluent residents should not be expected to support their local governments’ use of funds
to pay for social welfare, given that they would not benefit from such efforts, a fact that
few studies seem to acknowledge in utilizing income as a proxy indicator.108
Some
studies also indicate that more educated individuals have greater demands for public
services, including education, despite its inclusion as “social welfare” in most studies,
while others suggest that more educated individuals are less likely to support social
welfare spending overall.109
Children and older Americans also may have greater need
for Medicaid or other public health services or for public welfare, presumably leading to
greater expenditures, yet some previous research has concluded that older Americans are
less supportive of some forms of social welfare effort, including education spending.110
Consequently, modeling demographics directly or as proxies to infer residents’ views
leads to contradictory, or opposite, predictions in many cases. Although employing proxy
measures is a pragmatic and reasonable accommodation to data limitations, doing so
complicates inference in non-trivial ways.
Recent work has attempted to address these limitations, and to challenge the framing
of local government as a non-ideological or neutral domain.111
A few researchers have
employed surveys of residents’ self-reported liberal-conservative orientation to
investigate the relationship between ideological-self-identification and local spending on
liberal policy areas, including social welfare, finding positive relationships.112
In
addition, Chris Tausanovich of UCLA and MIT’s Christopher Warshaw have developed
municipal-level ideological “scores” for every city and town with a population of 20,000
or greater, and which are used in the analysis that follows. In constructing these
21
measures and testing them in subsequent research, Tausanovich and Warshaw find
evidence both of variation in municipal ideology and of a positive relationship between
liberal ideology and policy, concluding that more liberal municipalities do have more
liberal policies and higher per-capita total expenditures. In reporting on the significance
of their findings, they assert that “despite the supposition in the literature that municipal
politics are non-ideological, we find that the policies across a range of areas correspond
with the liberal-conservative positions of their citizens.”113
Though public choice is based on the notion that local residents do have distinct
preferences, such preferences are narrowly construed in the theory’s original formulation,
as a simple calculus of taxes paid for personal benefits, and broadened only slightly by
Peterson to include economic development interests.114
However, if local government is
a more ideological domain than previously has been thought, residents may have
preferences that extend beyond a seemingly-universal approval of low taxes and
economic growth, and such preferences may explain the persistence of local social
welfare expenditures in the face of theoretical predictions that argue for their absence.115
For example, while public choice theorists depict social welfare in negative terms, as a
drain on local resources, some individuals may view services such as the provision of
affordable housing, public health, and hospital care, more positively, in terms of the
benefits they provide to low income residents, such as improving their health and their
quality of life, and thus their ability to contribute to a more stable and productive
community.116
Less benignly, local residents may favor assistance to the poor to make
their own communities more visually appealing, supporting expenditures such as
homeless shelters so that they do not have to witness individuals sleeping on the
22
streets.117
Some scholars also suggest that some programs often characterized as social
welfare assistance, such as education and job training, can be perceived as economically
beneficial, enhancing a locality’s skilled workforce or its stock of “human capital,” a
view that complicates the framing of such efforts as only detracting from a locality’s
economic base.118
As Gillette asserts, public choice “predicts that local redistribution at
best constitutes a pure wealth transfer and at worst induces exit by net subsidizers and
attracts more individuals who require subsidy. It would turn the theory on its head to
provide to propose that local redistribution instead produces positive economic returns.
Nevertheless, the literature of local economic growth suggests just such a possibility.”119
In framing economic efficiency as local governments’ dominant, even singular,
imperative, public choice theorists simply overlook the possibility that residents and
policymakers may be influenced by other concerns or values, including altruism and the
promotion of social equity.120
Members of the public may have multiple reasons to
support local social welfare efforts, rather than to uniformly oppose them. If residents’
interests are less singular than public choice suggests, the theory’s assumption of an
equivalent public disinclination toward local social welfare spending may not hold.
Local governments may spend funds on social welfare provision, not in violation of
residents’ preferences, but, at least in part, because of them.121
23
Chapter III
Rethinking the History of Local Social Welfare Provision
From the Colonial period onward, governments- at first local governments-
played a crucial role in relief. The amelioration of poverty and dependence, in
this story, required increased attention by public authorities, first by state, then by
national governments.122
Much recent political science research frames the devolution of responsibility for
the administration of Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the nation’s primary
public welfare program, as a departure both from the history of American social welfare
provision, including the role of local governments, and from the public choice
expectation that the federal government should administer most redistributive
functions.123
Historical and political institutionalist scholarship offers a different
perspective, documenting that the local role in American social welfare provision has
deep roots, actually preceding the federal role.124
Accordingly, some have critiqued the
public choice perspective as “ahistorical” for its insufficient grasp of American social
welfare history.125
Work that frames social welfare spending by local governments as
paradoxical fails to acknowledge that cities, towns, and counties may be engaging in such
spending because they have a history of doing so: devolution may be less a departure
than the continuation of a longstanding local responsibility.126
Scholars of the American welfare state, including both political scientists and
historians, have traced the role of local communities in administering social welfare to
the 18th
century, if not earlier, suggesting that the New Deal programs that often are cited
24
as the commencement of American social welfare provision were not, in themselves
novel, but simply introduced the federal government into an area of service provision
traditionally dominated by local governments and private charitable organizations.127
Pimpare documents that local governments developed the earliest welfare programs,
including “work relief,” health care, and widows’ benefits, the foundation for the welfare
programs Aid to Families with Dependent Children and its successor, TANF, and that
state and federal governments later followed local action.128
Cities and towns assumed
early roles in the provision of public assistance, or relief, though counties also shared this
task.129
Public choice and other scholarly accounts that trace the origins of American
social welfare provision to the adoption of New Deal federal programs, framing them as
the natural providers of social welfare services, typically overlook the fact that federal
responsibility may be the departure from the historical trend and, accordingly, that local
governments’ role may be less “illogical” than it might seem on face.130
Far from being separable policy domains, federal, state, and local social welfare
policies often were “layered,” with state policies building on local initiatives; for
example, during the New Deal, the federal government delegated the administration of
some programs, namely unemployment insurance and Aid to Dependent Children, to the
states while keeping others such as Social Security within its direct control.131
Some
states further devolved responsibility for welfare, and later, health programs, to county
governments.132
Weir asserts that, rather than the manifestation of a “New Deal order,
the United States appears as a layered polity in which federal initiatives were overlaid on
state political systems that operated with different administrative capacities and political
25
logics.”133
American social welfare policy never has been as neatly divided among
vertical tiers of government as much contemporary work suggests.134
In addition to local provision itself, ideological and cultural views of the poor,
often traced to the stigma of “welfare” in recent scholarship, have a substantial history:
Craw observes that “under pre-New Deal American social welfare policy, local
governments went to great lengths to minimize their responsibilities in caring for the
poor, particularly those poor who were not native to the community,” while others
suggest that the stereotype of the poor as trying to avoid work and exploit government
largesse dates back even further, to the 19th
century local poorhouses, which aimed to
“aid the destitute without fostering dependence and idleness” and to the city settlement
houses of the same period, which endeavored to regulate the moral conduct of their
beneficiaries and which often excluded racial minorities from receiving services.135
Weir
writes that the aforementioned delegation of New Deal program responsibility reflected
this division, as states were tasked with administering programs targeted to
“undeserving” citizens, such as the unemployed, disabled, and non-working adults with
children, while universal programs serving the elderly remained under federal control.136
The moralizing elements and racial bias that frequently have been described as
characteristic of contemporary welfare policy are less a departure than recent political
science scholarship intimates: far from being introduced by devolution, the influence of
cultural constructions, racial biases, and classification of assistance claimants as
deserving or undeserving seem characteristic of American social welfare history.137
New Deal and subsequent Great Society social welfare efforts did mark a key
development in the American welfare state: the expansion of funding from the federal
26
government to state and local governments, including for social welfare.138
Federal
grants for public welfare programs, housing, and education expanded, particularly in the
1960s and 1970s, and cities often were direct recipients, including of aid specifically
targeted to address urban challenges.139
If local governments, including but not only
cities, were not necessarily assuming new types of responsibility, they were receiving
substantial new intergovernmental assistance in order to continue and even expand those
duties.140
As a result, the public choice assertion that local governments can be expected
to fund their functions, including social welfare spending, entirely from their own
revenues may not be a reasonable one in recent decades.141
Some scholars even go so far
as to claim that the expansion of the federal and state social welfare efforts has rendered
it implausible to consider local social welfare provision as completely independent from
other levels of government.142
Nonetheless, as Volden observes, the precise nature of
this relationship has fluctuated over time, reflecting the interdependence between federal,
state, and local governments characteristic of a federal system.143
Direct federal aid to cities, including for some social programs, began to decline in
the early 1980s, while some state governments required local governments to assume
greater responsibility for the administration and, in some cases, funding for many federal
and state social welfare programs, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children,
education aid for disadvantaged and disabled students, and housing assistance.144
In an
effort to curtail federal spending and to devolve greater responsibility for social welfare
to states and local governments, the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations
dramatically reduced funding for many federal grant programs, including the Community
Development Block Grant, the Social Services Block Grant, and job training assistance,
27
at the same time that expenditures for other programs, namely public welfare and
Medicaid, grew, due to an increase in the number of eligible individuals, in the case of
the former, and growing medical costs, in the latter: while local governments funding
sources declined, their responsibilities did not.145
The decline in federal aid in the 1980s arrived on the heels of the “property tax
revolt,” of the 1970s, when citizens began to protest rising taxes in the face of growing
inflation.146
Some scholars suggest that the combination of inflation and tax increases led
working and middle-class Americans to begin to turn away from their support for some
aspects of the New Deal welfare state.147
Michelmore reports that many did not view
themselves as benefitting from any “welfare programs,” but, rather, as victims “of the
tax-and-spend liberal state.”148
Americans generally seemed to perceive only the
“burdens” of the expanded welfare state, not the benefits that they themselves received,
such as G.I. Bill aid to veterans, Social Security benefits that gave elderly Americans
access to a secure retirement, and Federal Housing Administration loans that enabled
many working and middle class Americans to become homeowners.149
Morgan attributes
this unawareness to the distinct construction of tax and spending policies in the post-New
Deal era, writing that “the American tax and transfers system that emerged by mid-
century combined a relatively visible, and potentially unpopular, tax system with a
modestly sized and oft obscured welfare state.”150
Little in this state of affairs seems to
have changed in recent years: Mettler and Koch find that many individuals, particularly
those who receive benefits delivered through the tax code, fail to identify themselves as
the recipients of any governmental assistance.151
28
Some scholars of the tax revolt also have concluded that Americans’ desire to limit
their tax burdens was not necessarily accompanied by a clear understanding of the impact
such actions would have on public services they supported, such as health care and
education: referring to California’s Proposition 13, which limited property tax rate
increases in that state, Michelmore writes that “polls found that most Americans believed
that tax limitation measures modeled on the California plan would not result in any
substantial cuts to social services.”152
It may be that restrictions on property taxes and
opposition to social welfare programs are less connected in Americans’ minds than is
generally believed.153
While Americans want to pay fewer taxes, it is unclear that they
expect fewer services for the taxes they do pay, and may even believe that tax cuts and
continued spending on their favored programs can coexist.154
Contrary to the
expectations of public choice, residents actually may want more services than they are
willing to pay for in taxes.155
Popular expectations notwithstanding, the decline in federal aid and the property tax
revolt had substantive consequences, diminishing the revenue base of cities, in particular
those with high levels of poverty, which had to address pressing social needs with much
less assistance to aid their efforts throughout the 1980s and 1990s.156 As a result of this
combination of macroeconomic forces, decreasing aid, and citizen tax opposition, yet
seemingly no decline in need for public services, states and localities began to reduce
their spending in some areas of social welfare, including public hospital funding and,
most notably their own-funded public assistance to the needy, or General Assistance.157
Public welfare recipients now receive little cash assistance of any form, whether through
General Assistance or TANF funds.158
Thus, by the time the Aid to Families with
29
Dependent Children program was converted to TANF in 1996 and 1997, local
communities were struggling to meet responsibilities delegated from federal and state
governments with decreased levels of funding from prior years.159
Variation in the degree of delegation from states to local governments, including for
welfare provision, also was firmly in place by the 1980s and 1990s, despite some
scholars’ claims that it began with TANF. 160
Kim and Fording and Sharp document that,
under AFDC, fifteen states had devolved some degree of administrative responsibility to
local governments, principally counties.161
Therefore, as Hacker suggests, welfare state
policies remain durable, with policy adaptation or “conversion” more likely than
substantive change.162
Policy areas, once entrenched, may become an expected part of
government’s scope of responsibility and modifications in program structure may be
more likely than elimination of functions altogether: local social welfare may exist
because it persists, because it represents a continuation of, rather than a radical departure
from, local governments’ historic role.163
TANF’s adoption did include one extremely
substantive policy change in ending the entitlement to cash assistance: however, this, and
not the devolution of its administration, was the aspect of the program that deviated from
the trend.164
This alternative interpretation of devolution’s life cycle might be little more than an
intriguing historical footnote but for its substantive implications for empirical
investigations of local social welfare policy: understanding which level of government,
local or state, may be expected to assume responsibility for social welfare functions in a
given state, and which form of local government, municipal, county, school district, or
special-purpose district, is the likely target of state-to-local devolution is critical to
30
determining the most plausible unit to analyze in any given area of social welfare
policy.165
For example, devolved public health and welfare functions, two of the more
decentralized areas of social welfare, often fall to county governments, as arms of state
government, rather than to municipalities.166
Though those in need of public welfare aid
historically have lived in cities, it is counties, not cities, that have assumed the primary
local governmental role in public welfare program implementation: cities were given “no
formal role” in the administration of TANF, the primary source of public welfare funding
after the decline in state and local general assistance.167
Devolution, literally the transfer of governmental functions from one level of
government to another, can come in two forms: “first order,” the transfer of functions
from federal to state government, or “second order,” from state to local governments.168
The degree of second order devolution varies by state: for example, in the TANF
program, the most-studied area of recent social welfare devolution, 13 states have
devolved direct administrative authority for TANF, as opposed to simply the delegation
of tasks or developing guidelines for policy implementation, to county governments, with
counties in more urban states being most likely to be charged with this responsibility.169
Seven additional states delegate some responsibility to local boards that administer state
workforce development initiatives, as well.170
Devolution has substantive impacts not only on local governments’ scope of
responsibility, but on the funding they receive to fulfill those responsibilities: as noted
earlier, the expanded federal role in funding social welfare efforts has meant that, in
many policy areas, such as public welfare, health, and hospital provision, much of the
funding that local governments presently spend on social welfare actually is provided to
31
them by a higher level of government.171
Gais, Dadayan, and Bae report that in 2007, the
year of the empirical analysis that follows, “most of the dollars spent by state and local
governments on social welfare functions came from revenues raised by the federal
government, which typically passed the money down to state and local public agencies
through intergovernmental grants, such as Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families (TANF) or the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). Of total
social welfare spending in 2007, 62.8 percent ($235.8 billion) came from federal sources.
State and local governments funded the remaining 37.2 percent ($129.5 billion) out of
their own revenue sources.”172
The local tax base is no longer the only source from
which local governments can draw to fund their social welfare activities, as public choice
claims, and local governments that appear to spend more simply may be delegated
funding that is a state responsibility elsewhere.173
The primary recipients of state aid in
recent years have been school districts, which receive more than half (55%) of their
revenue from state and federal government.174
The depiction of local, state, and federal
funding as separable may be a perceptual error, a narrow reading of the historical record,
rather than an accurate portrayal of the ways in which local governments support the
services they deliver, particularly in the social welfare arena.175
In addition to continued devolution, the ending decades of the twentieth century
also were characterized by changes in the extent of local government fragmentation.
Perhaps most significant has been the increase in the number of special-purpose districts,
independent local governmental bodies that assume a limited number of government
functions and whose boundaries often cross, rather than ending at, municipalities’.176
Special district governments have expanded both in number, increasing at a greater rate
32
than general purpose governments, and in the scope of services they provide: from 1992
to 2007 alone, the number of special districts increased by 13%, most often in more urban
states.177
As of 2007, there were nearly as many special districts (37,381) as there were
general purpose local governments (39,044), including municipalities, counties, and
towns, in the United States.178
According to McCabe, special districts increasingly have
come “to offer the kinds of services that cities once provided” through their municipal
governments, including social welfare services such as hospital care, public health, and
housing and community development.179 Public housing authorities date back even
longer, to 1937.180
This fragmentation of local social welfare provision among
municipalities, counties, school districts, and special districts for scholars challenges the
notion that simply focusing on one entity, such as the municipal or county government,
can explain the whole of the local social welfare role.181
33
Chapter IV
Ideology, Responsiveness, and Social Welfare
The United States is characterized by a mosaic of philosophical and ideological
orientations toward the appropriate role for government as service provider and
these views set parameters for the operations and revenue-raising capabilities of
all levels of governments.182
Part of the rationale for the social policy devolution of the 1980s and 1990s was
the claim that it might bring government “closer to the people,” thereby increasing policy
responsiveness to public preferences and, accordingly, implying the existence of some
local preference divergence on social welfare issues.183
Proponents of devolution also
asserted that local policymakers’ greater knowledge of their communities would enable
programs to address local needs more adequately.184
Some scholars even suggest that
devolution can promote democratic processes, inasmuch as it offers the potential for
previously-centralized policies to be managed, and influenced, locally.185
Other
proponents assert that devolution provides an opportunity for historically marginalized
groups to influence policy: “devolution, usually favored by conservatives, can be used to
promote liberal policies in the states if lower- and middle-class groups have more power
there.”186
The history of state and local social welfare provision indicates that such
assertions might be optimistic. Enhancing responsiveness to public preferences may not
be a unilateral good, in that it can provide an opening for local biases or prejudices about
the recipients of social welfare assistance, not only local needs, to influence local
34
governments’ commitment to those policies and the success of such efforts in aiding the
poor.187
For example, scholars of state-level welfare policy, informed by the public
choice perspective, suggest that state governments may try to lower the benefits they
provide to public assistance recipients based on the belief that more generous benefits
could attract “undesirable” low-income residents.188
While the existence of such welfare-
oriented migration has received variable empirical support, Kim and Fording observe that
“the fear of welfare migration can still impact policy decisions” even in the absence of
evidence that it occurs.189
At the local level, public choice theorists assert that cities and
towns should spend little on social welfare because doing so would encourage the in-
migration of less “desirable” residents from a tax perspective, as well as the departure of
the affluent.190
Normative views concerning the work efforts and morals of poor
residents and racial prejudice toward minorities, not economic concerns alone, also may
lead local residents to disapprove of local government spending on behalf of
disadvantaged individuals who already reside in the community. Thus, while variation in
social welfare spending across states may be evidence that policymakers have “tailored”
their spending according to local needs, it also may reflect local biases.191
The contention
that being “closer to the people” is an unqualified good, and, accordingly, that the
responsiveness-enhancing potential of devolution only can result in superior outcomes for
local residents may be more an ideal than a reality.
35
Conceptualizing Ideology
In the political science literature at large, ideology most commonly is conceptualized
as identification on a singular left-right, liberal-conservative continuum, which, some
scholars suggest, is a “reasonably” good predictor of individuals’ political views and
behavior.192
This assertion is based on findings indicating that individuals’ issue
positions tend to correspond or to “move together,” that is, if one has liberal views on one
issue, he or she is likely to be liberal on others.193
Others claim that this uni-dimensional,
“liberal-conservative,” framing reflects only that an individual is liberal or conservative
on both economic and social issues.194
However, individuals might be conservative
(liberal) on economic issues and liberal (conservative) on social issues, which single-
dimension indices may not measure as well. These multi-dimensional conceptions of
ideology are centered on the notion that ideology consists of both an economic
dimension, which consists of preferences for taxing and spending, including “assistance
to the poor,” and a social dimension, which concerns individuals’ views on moral and
values issues.195
A concept similar to economic ideology is Stimson’s “policy mood,” typically
defined as a measure of public preferences on “scope of government issues,” such as
whether government should be “doing” or spending more or less on a particular policy
activity.196
More formally, the “policy mood” construct measures both the underlying
structure of and changes in the public’s policy preferences concerning the size of the
federal government, including its role in managing the economy and redistributing
wealth. Policy mood, like ideology in general, is conceptualized as aligning on a liberal-
36
conservative dimension, with preferences for a more active government corresponding to
a liberal position, and support for less governmental intervention characterized as
conservative.197
Many studies investigating the role of ideology in political life do so by asking survey
respondents to place themselves on the uni-dimensional spectrum, to identify themselves
as varying degrees of conservative or liberal: such self-placement often is described as
“symbolic ideology,” in that it documents only the symbolic meaning individuals attach
to the labels liberal and conservative, without reference to specific policy domains.198
In
contrast, others seek to measure “operational ideology,” which views ideology less as a
matter of self-identification, but as based on the specific attitudes and issue positions that
individuals hold.199
Some scholars claim that individuals struggle to connect ideological
“labels” to their substantive views on issues and that operational ideology is a more
accurate gauge of people’s issue preferences.200
Other researchers suggest that
individuals’ “symbolic” self-identification, the ideological “labels” they assign
themselves, may not align with their operational ideology, or views on specific issues, not
because of a failure to connect the two but because their views on policy may be more
practical than their symbolic placements indicate, giving rise to the proposition that
Americans, in general, tend to be simultaneously symbolically “ideologically
conservative” and operationally, or “pragmatically,” liberal.201
Research has produced
varying explanations of whether demographic factors such as gender, age race, income,
or education level influence one’s ideology. For example, much recent work on the
“demographic-ideology relationship” focuses on the influence of income, namely
whether the operational ideology of high, middle, and low-income individuals differs,
37
generally concluding that, while differences do exist, they are relatively small or
“modest.”202
Until recently, relatively little scholarship has explored how ideology functions at
the local level.203
Some research that focuses on the local dimensions of national
ideology indicates that individuals use local context as the basis for their positions on
national issues, such as the state of the economy, and that individuals formulate their
issue positions, their operational ideology, through interactions with those living around
them.204
Others have focused on ideology not as an individual construct but as a
dimension of America’s “political geography,” how ideology varies systematically at the
level of states and counties.205
Some authors conclude that, short-term variations
notwithstanding, the nation’s political geography is relatively stable.206
For example,
Glaeser and Ward find that the ideological “affiliation” of counties has remained
“reasonably consistent” in recent decades.207 Perhaps, in some fashion, at the local level,
preferences are reinforcing, particularly if political processes reinforce them: if liberal or
conservative candidates typically govern a city or town, that tendency may become the
community’s “default” political identity.208
At the local level, liberalism may beget
liberalism, and conservative identification may be similarly self-perpetuating. Residing
in the same community also may lead residents and local officials to share political
preferences. For example, cities may be known as bastions of the Democratic or
Republican Party, despite the existence of non-partisan local elections frequently noted in
studies of local government.209
However, Glaeser and Ward, like other scholars of the relationship between ideology
and policy, conflate liberal-conservative ideology and Democratic-Republican party
38
affiliation, a potentially problematic assertion given that, as Shapiro documents, the
relationship between party and ideology has changed over time: nationally, Democratic
Party affiliates are more consistently liberal than they were in the mid-twentieth century
when more conservative Southern states, and individuals residing in those states,
affiliated Democratic.210
Similarly, contemporary Republicans tend to be conservative
and less liberal or even moderate, at the national level than they once were.211
Work that
attempts to equate party and ideology, particularly longitudinal work, therefore risks
making problematic inferences.212
In addition, a body of recent work on the ideological and partisan dimensions of local
life challenges the notion that American political geography truly is stable.213
In The Big
Sort, perhaps the most well-known publication in this vein of scholarship, Bill Bishop
claims that American communities are becoming more ideologically homogenous,
asserting that individuals increasingly have chosen to reside among “co-partisans,” those
who share their political views.214
However, if individuals are residing in more
ideologically sorted communities, it may not be because they are choosing their residence
based on political preferences but on factors that are correlated with those views, such as
a desire for a more dense residential environment or to live among diverse neighbors,
which in turn produces the appearance of ideologically-based sorting at the local level.215
Recent scholarship in the field of political geography finds that when individuals do
move, the desire to live among neighbors who share their politics, while not
inconsequential, is subordinate to a number of other factors: the decision to move is more
often influenced by employment and family concerns, while safety and residential
affordability more typically determine specific neighborhood choice.216
While
39
individuals may be living in more politically divergent localities, a still-debated
phenomenon, the extent to which political or factors are creating it is unclear.217
In
addition: the majority of scholarship on the politics of residential sorting examines party
affiliation or federal election returns at the county or Congressional district level, not
local political activities, such as mayoral elections, attendance at public meetings, or
involvement in community organizations: if political or ideologically based sorting does
exist, its effects on local politics and policy are unknown at present.218
The Operational Ideology of Social Welfare (or “Public Preferences for Social Welfare”)
Studies of the history of American social welfare provision have found that the
issue long has had a normative tenor.219
Similar to research on ideology in general,
scholarship on public attitudes toward social welfare, most often situated within the body
of scholarship on Americans’ “scope of government” views, has examined whether
Americans’ ideological views “move together” and if their social welfare preferences are
stable over time.220
Shaw writes that polling data appear to support the notion that
Americans are operational liberals in their overall social welfare policy views, writing
that “solid majorities of Americans routinely report their willingness to support increased
federal spending on a variety of redistributive programs.”221
Ellis and Faricy also note
that “social programs…are quite popular with the American electorate” and that “when
faced with the basic question of whether government” should spend more on such
programs “…substantial majorities say government should spend and do more.”222
Shaw
and Wlezien conclude that public preferences for spending on various forms of social
welfare generally do tend to “move together,” rather than independently by policy.223
40
Nonetheless, research that explores the details, not only the general contours, of
Americans’ views on social welfare does reveal differences. For instance, one of the
most common findings in survey research on public attitudes toward social welfare is that
individuals are more likely to support “assistance to the poor,” then they are to support
“welfare,” which appears to produce particularly negative images in the public mind.224
Recent data also provides evidence that Americans’ overall support for social welfare
spending continues to have a few exceptions- or perhaps only one, aid to African-
Americans and to programs thought predominantly to serve them.225
A 2010 study based
on results from the 2008 General Social Survey found that while Americans were
supportive of social welfare efforts overall, spending in three areas received less public
approval: less than half of respondents supported increasing federal welfare spending,
assistance to large cities, and efforts targeted toward improving the circumstances of
African-Americans.226
Racial bias against African-Americans may diminish support for
assistance to them as individuals, to the places where they may disproportionately reside,
and to programs thought, albeit erroneously, largely to serve them.227
Studies based on
the notion that the percent of community residents who are racial minorities can reliably
proxy for liberal preferences seem to overlook the analytical complexity this trend
poses.228
Increases in the percentage of minority residents in a city or town may lead to
less spending on social welfare programs if racial biases influence spending, save,
perhaps, in communities in which racial minorities are the majority of the population.229
Recent research also indicates a partisan division on support for social welfare
spending.230
Surveys conducted in 2007, prior to the recent recession, and in 2013
document partisan divides of 59% and 35%, respectively, between Democrats’ and
41
Republicans’ support for redistributive policies, including “the government’s
responsibility to care for the poor” in general, whether the government should guarantee
all citizens a place to sleep and food to eat, and whether government should assist more
needy individuals even if doing so would increase the national debt.231
The 2013 poll
also found that “Republicans are about twice as likely as Democrats to support cuts in
federal funding for programs that help low income people.”232
Some work indicates that
the source of this divergence can be traced to changes in Republican support, suggesting
that while Democrats’ attitudes have remained stable over time, Republicans have
become more ideologically conservative on social welfare issues in recent decades.233
While the relationship between party and social welfare support appears to be consistent
for Democrats, the relationship between Republican Party identification and conservative
views, is more complex historically.234
Research finds evidence of an ideological divide in addition to a partisan one,
indicating that those who identify themselves as conservative are less likely to support
redistribution to low income individuals.235
This ideological divide, unlike the partisan
one, does not appear to be recent. Margalit writes that studies of long-term public opinion
trends reveal “marked and persistent differences” across ideological lines concerning
social welfare policy, with voters who identify as being on the ideological left being more
supportive of expanding social welfare efforts than are those on the right.236
Consequently, it seems critical to distinguish between ideology and party affiliation,
particularly for scholars who conduct historical analyses of the relationship between
preferences and social welfare provision: while Democratic identification may serve as a
42
more reliable proxy for liberal views on social welfare, Republican affiliation may not
always have reflected deeply conservative beliefs.237
The Ideological Responsiveness of Local Social Welfare Spending
The majority of the research on the responsiveness of policy to Americans’
preferences focuses on national politics: as the public is more likely to participate in
national than in local politics, some suggest that it at the federal level that responsiveness
best can be expected.238
Studies largely do indicate aggregate responsiveness from
policymakers at the national level, though less so on specific policy domains.239
With
regard to social welfare specifically, researchers also find evidence of federal policy
responsiveness, concluding that the preferences of voters (as opposed to citizens at large)
influence governments’ welfare policy decisions, and that as the public becomes more
liberal on social welfare policy and spending, the federal government undertakes more
“redistributive” activity.240
However, given that low-income individuals tend to
participate less in politics than do the affluent, policy may not be responding to their
interests in particular, potentially a key issue on welfare policy, as low-income citizens’
preferences have been found in some work to diverge from the public’s at large.241
While scholarly inquiry concerning the relationship between national ideology
and policy, including in social welfare, has a decades-long history, work on the
relationship between local ideology and policy is relatively recent, due in part to a lack of
generalizable data on preferences and political activity across communities and to the
tendency of scholarship on local government to depict it as an non-ideological or non-
partisan domain.242
Until the last decade, much of the limited research on the relationship
43
between ideology and social welfare policy at the local level focused on the second order
devolution of TANF from state governments to counties.243
While most of this work
focuses not on variations in spending but on the extent to which devolution allows for
stricter policy design elements, including “sanctioning” non-compliant TANF clients, it
does indicate that devolution to local governments allows for notions regarding the
deservingness of clients and racial biases against TANF recipients to influence the extent
to which devolved policies address community needs.244
In addition to limiting researchers’ ability to examine how ideologically
responsive local officials might be, the lack of local-level data on resident ideology also
has made it difficult for scholars to disentangle the contributions of race, income, and
political/ideological orientation.245
Several recent studies have documented relationships
between proxy measures of resident preferences, including demographics and
(Democratic) party affiliation, and local spending, including on social welfare: Choi, Bae,
Kwon, and Feiock conclude that the Democratic presidential and gubernatorial vote
share, measured at the county level, is associated with higher levels of county
government spending, including on social welfare efforts; similarly, Hajnal and
Trounstine document that county-level Democratic Presidential vote share and
Democratic control of state governments are associated with considerably greater social
welfare spending at the municipal level.246
Craw also finds evidence of a positive
relationship between the percentage of county residents who are racial minorities and
spending on housing, health, and public welfare and concludes that municipalities with
larger percentages of black and Latino residents are more likely to seek
intergovernmental grants for social welfare provision.247
However, the use of proxy
44
measures of resident preferences, a common accommodation to data limitations,
effectively collapses or combines demographic and political identities, rendering it
challenging to assess the competing policy influences of each.248
As Hajnal and
Trounstine assert, “because most local analyses of responsiveness do not account for
respondent ideology or partisanship, it is difficult to know the degree to which
demographic divisions are actually driven by other identities.”249
In work that seeks to
address these limitations, Hajnal and Trounstine document that black and white residents
differ in their specific policy preferences, a divide that has significant implications for the
perceived responsiveness of local governments to residents’ interests.250
They conclude
that black residents tend to prefer that local government invest resources in social welfare
programs, including public welfare, health, and housing, while white residents tend to
favor spending on development projects.251
As a result, when local governments “shift
resources” to spend more on social welfare, black residents appear to become more
supportive of their city or local government than whites, and (they) also perceive
government as more responsive to their interests.252
In another effort to move beyond proxy measures, in 2006, Christine Palus
(formerly Kelleher) conducted the first in a recent line of studies using local level
measures of ideology.253
In her 2006 work, and a subsequent (2010) study, Palus finds
evidence of a relationship between self-reported ideology and policy at the local level,
concluding that more liberal communities spend more on characteristically liberal policy
domains, including social welfare, as she anticipates.254
However, the policy areas she
examines are not limited to social welfare alone, but include issues she frames as being
more likely to receive support from liberal residents, including “culture, the arts, and
45
recreation,” environmental programs, and transportation.255
Though her research
provides a substantial contribution to local social policy scholarship, it, and studies that
have followed, is limited in two important ways. First, though she attempts to connect
ideology to specific policy areas, Palus’ data measures citizens’ self-reported symbolic
ideology and is not based on residents’ actual issue positions, or their operational
ideology.256 Secondly, though she characterizes her work as measuring responsiveness,
Palus does not describe how policymakers might be responding, suggesting only that,
“somehow,” citizen preferences “are being transmitted to elected officials.”257
The
limited availability of data on local participatory processes continues to be an obstacle to
moving beyond evidence of a relationship between resident ideology and local
governments’ spending to a more thorough examination of the mechanisms by which
responsiveness occurs.258
In addition, as previously noted, scholars frequently employ the term “local
governments” in conceptually imprecise ways, often using terms such as “localities” to
interchangeably reference municipalities, counties, and local governments in general.259
In doing so, researchers fail to acknowledge the ways in which local officials differ in
their responsive capacity: for example, municipal officials may have lesser influence over
education policy, and certainly no immediate responsibility for spending, if public
schooling is administered by independent school districts and not by the municipal
government itself. Studies that therefore attempt to link municipal attributes, including
the structural characteristics of governments and turnout in mayoral or council elections,
and social welfare may assume control over spending where little exists, or where
municipal leaders’ influence may not be direct.260
The channels through which
46
preferences “affect” spending may be imprecisely, perhaps even incorrectly, specified in
studies of local government social welfare provision if researchers do not verify whether
the governmental units they study actually are responsible for the policies and spending
they (scholars) attribute to them. For example, if municipal leaders do not directly
control expenditures in a particular policy area, their responsiveness to resident
preferences may be indirect: municipal officials may act principally as conveyers of
preferences to the relevant policymakers, such as county officials, school board members,
and special district leadership, effectively advocating or lobbying for their constituents
when they are unable to oversee spending themselves.261
As so little of the research on the local social welfare role fails to acknowledge
the fragmentation of local governance, including the ways in which general purpose
governments’ responsibilities may be limited, research that specifically focuses on
special district governments, is, perhaps, the body of work most relevant to explore local
governments’ differential capacity or inclination to respond to public preferences. Special
districts often have been criticized for “undemocratic” governance structures and
processes that seemingly insulate them from public accountability, such as limiting
voting eligibility to property owners within the district’s service area, the appointment,
rather than public election, of some boards’ members, and little public visibility in their
actions.262
Bauroth depicts districts as “the only form of local government in the United
States in which representative democracy is optional.”263
Turnout in special district
elections tends to be even lower than in municipal elections, as these elections tend to be
held throughout the year, not coincident with other local government elections, and
residents may not be aware of those that occur.264
While local residents may be at least
47
broadly familiar with their municipal governments, they may be less cognizant of the
presence of special districts in their community or of how policy responsibilities may be
divided between special districts and general purpose governments.265
Such
fragmentation in local governmental responsibilities may pose a substantive
informational barrier to residents’ ability to identify those responsible for providing
particular services and to hold policymakers accountable.266
Some critics also charge that
political participation can become “balkanized” when responsibility for service provision
is divided among more than one governmental entity: in cases where municipal
governments do not directly administer most social welfare services, but share more
responsibilities with county governments, school districts, and special districts, residents
may only participate or engage with policymakers when the policy area is relevant, or
particularly salient, to their interests.267
However, it is not clear how applicable the research on special districts, which
tends not to distinguish districts by type or, when narrowed, to focus on public utility
districts, which provide more seemingly apolitical “allocational,” services, is to districts
that administer social welfare functions, namely housing and community development,
the third most common type of special district, and health and hospitals.268
It is not
immediately evident that the neutral politics of water, which seem to align more with the
types of “ideologically neutral” functions emphasized in much of local government
scholarship, are analogous to the more ideological realm of social welfare policy.269
In
addition, while the leadership of some districts that administer social welfare functions,
such as hospital districts may be elected, in others, such as public housing authorities,
board members may be appointed: Bauroth finds that 47% of hospital districts, 44.5% of
48
public health districts, and 20% of districts responsible for public welfare functions have
at least one publically-elected official, yet only 5% of housing and community
development districts do.270
Consequently, the criticisms of special district elections
found in the literature on special districts in general may not be directly germane to
districts operating in the social welfare arena.271
Lewis and Hamilton also note that, at
present, there is no valid means for measuring the authority of special districts in
economic or social policy,” a non-trivial limitation in examining their role.272
Surprisingly little also is known about the policy outcomes special districts achieve,
specifically whether the decisions of special district policymakers are less responsive to
public preferences, in fact, as critics have asserted they are.273
Scutelnicu writes that
“empirical evidence of the responsiveness of special-purpose governments is almost non-
existent.”274
More information clearly is necessary to advance both empirical inquiry and
theoretical explanations of the factors that might contribute to variations in the functional
allocation of responsibility for providing public services and how the fragmentation of
local government service provision might affect social welfare spending, including the
challenges to political participation and ideological communication that such
fragmentation might pose.275
Future inquiries concerning the impact of fragmentation on
social welfare responsiveness might disaggregate the spending data by type of local
government; for example, to examine whether social welfare services are more or less
responsive to public preferences when more local governments are responsible for its
provision, or, as critics suggest, if social welfare efforts are less responsive when more
spending is administered by special districts.
49
Chapter V
Research Question and Hypothesis
Scholars investigating the political factors thought to influence local government
social welfare activity frequently have foregrounded municipalities’ structural attributes,
including the occurrence of partisan elections, ward or district based city council systems,
and direct democracy provisions, rather than the political characteristics of residents,
such as their party affiliation or ideology, with inconclusive results.276
The “need
hypothesis,” the suggestion that the presence of more needy residents should prompt
greater local social welfare spending, also has met with “mixed support.”277
Consequently, the factors that explain local governments’ social welfare activity remain
less than clear.
Due to the limited available data on local participation and preferences,
researchers frequently have utilized demographics and party affiliation to proxy for local
residents’ views, suggesting that racial/ethnic minorities and those who are registered
Democrats or vote Democrat in presidential elections are more liberal and, therefore,
more likely to support social welfare expenditures at the local level.278
In the analysis
that follows, I examine whether the relationship between liberalism and greater local
social welfare spending proxied in previous work holds when modeled using direct
measures of municipal resident ideology, controlling for the impact of demographic
covariates that previous researchers have utilized to proxy for citizen preferences. I
50
expect that it will, consistent with recent studies that have found a relationship between
self-identified liberal resident ideology and greater local government expenditures on
liberal policy areas.279
Because increases in ideology equate to more conservative
identification in the data I employ, the hypothesized relationship actually is negative: as
cities become more conservative, their governments will spend less on social welfare.280
More formally, my hypothesis is as follows: as municipal residents become more liberal,
the local governments that serve them will spend more on social welfare (specifically, on
the combined total of public health, hospitals, public welfare, housing and community
development, and education expenditure).
This analysis is the first to employ direct measures of local residents’ operational
ideology and to account for variations in the scope of local governments’ service
responsibilities in modeling municipal-area expenditures, two developments that, it is
hoped, will further understanding of the influence of public preferences on the activities
of local governments.281
51
Chapter VI
Data and Methods
Data employed in this project comes from three sources: measures of municipal-
level ideology compiled by political scientists Chris Tausanovich of the University of
California, Los Angeles, and Christopher Warshaw of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology; data on the spending of local governments in 112 U.S. cities tabulated by
researchers at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy based on U.S. Census of State and
Local Governments data; and demographic data from the U.S. Census and the American
Community Survey.
Measuring City-Level Ideology
In 2013, Professors Tausanovich and Warshaw developed composite measures of
ideology, or ideology “scores,” which measure the average “policy conservatism” of
residents in every American town or city with a population of 20,000 or greater.282
I
refer to these in text interchangeably, as ideology “measures,” “scores,” or “indices.”
Tausanovich and Warshaw created these municipal-level measures by aggregating the
individual-level responses of residents to seven public opinion polls, ranging in time from
the 2000 Annenberg National Election Survey to the 2011 Cooperative Congressional
Election Survey, resulting in a composite score or value for each city, aligned on a —1 to
1 continuum, with positive values indicating more conservative ideology.283
Aggregating
52
individual poll responses reduces the “noise” in the data, the idiosyncratic or random
factors that may affect individual survey responses.284
Poll questions address both national and local-level policy issues, and include
both social and economic policy dimensions: the scores may be viewed as akin to uni-
dimensional measures of operational ideology.285
These measures are an improvement
upon the liberal-conservative self-placement, or symbolic ideology, assessed in previous
studies of local social welfare policy.286
Though the policy topics examined in poll
questions include social welfare issues, questions are not restricted to social welfare
policies alone. Consequently, the indices are best perceived as municipal-level measures
of aggregate ideology, akin to measures of “policy mood,” rather than precise indicators
of municipal residents’ social welfare policy preferences.287
The primary distinction
between mood and the Tausanovich and Warshaw measures is that the former is a
relative construct that assesses whether government should be doing “more or less than it
is,” while, per the authors, the latter constitute an “absolute” measure of policy
preferences.288
As the included polls span years, the values best might be considered a
measure of ideology over the past decade rather than longitudinal measures, in that there
is only one total score, not one value in each year.
Each municipality’s score includes combined questions that identify residents’
ideological preferences on both municipal and federal policy issues, rather than separate
indicators for each policy dimension: in short, the ideology indices are aggregate
measures of local and national preferences on both social and economic topics.
Tausanovich and Warshaw assert that they do not find any evidence that respondents’
local and national preferences diverge, suggesting that respondents who report liberal or
53
conservative views on federal policy tend to do so with regard to local policy and that
“people who are municipal liberals and federal conservatives are very rare,” at least, as
they note, on the policy issues in their data set.289
Nonetheless, as Tausanovich and
Warshaw themselves concede, they did not include survey questions about zoning or land
use policies, which are particularly salient at the local level and which can be used as a
way to exclude low income residents from towns and neighborhoods.290
In addition,
individuals’ views regarding zoning might be an important mediator of their overall
support for social welfare in that general support for city-level policy may not equate to
the approval of particular uses of social welfare spending, such homeless shelters or
substance abuse treatment centers, being zoned in their neighborhoods.291
However,
Wolman writes that very little political science research explores the topic of land use
policy at all, a seemingly crucial gap in scholarship on local governance.292
Tausanovich and Warshaw also report that their indices more precisely measure
ideology in large cities, as opposed to smaller cities or towns, rendering them particularly
suitable for the analysis that follows, which is based on data from 112 cities.293
Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that cities, and their political contexts, may not be
representative of the universe of American municipalities.294
Though this can be
considered an analytical limitation, analyses of the Tiebout model, which implicitly
privileges small, homogenous communities as more able to “contain” common
preferences, also have been criticized for failing to incorporate the unique dimensions of
city contexts, for suggesting that communities of all sizes are contextually equal in the
constraints and opportunities they face and for assuming that individuals’ lived
experiences are similar in cities and (small) towns.295
The ideological scores for
54
particular cities conform to what one might expect based on “common knowledge” of a
city’s political culture: San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Seattle are the nation’s most
liberal cities, while Mesa (Arizona), Oklahoma City, and Virginia Beach are its most
conservative.296
San Francisco receives the maximum possible liberalism “score,” —1.
The cities included in this analysis tend to be on the liberal side of the ideological
spectrum, consistent with scholarly claims that cities may be more liberal than smaller
towns.297
Nevertheless, the cities included in this analysis are not ideologically invariant:
San Francisco, at —1, is as ideologically liberal as it is possible to be using Tausanovich
and Warshaw’s index. Mesa, the most conservative city, at .41, is not at as extremely
conservative as it is possible to be, though it still is conservative.298
Therefore, it is not
clear that large cities should be expected to “adopt more liberal policies irrespective of
preferences,” as Tausanovich and Warshaw write- unless one assumes that size should
make city policymakers less responsive, to the point where they ignore residents’
views.299
While cities’ ideological orientations might be less diverse than municipalities’
at large, they still do vary and so one might expect their social welfare spending to vary,
as well.300
55
Fig. 1. Chris Tausanovich and Christopher Warshaw. Measures of municipal ideology.
2014. Figure 1 (“Mean policy conservatism of large cities”) in “Representation in
Municipal Government,” American Political Science Review, 609.
56
Standardized Measures of City-Area Spending: Fiscally Standardized Cities
Previous analyses of the local social welfare role have neglected to account for
variation in the scope of functional responsibility across general-purpose local
governments, specifically that any given unit of municipal government, either municipal
or county, may assume different responsibilities across states or even within a state.301
In focusing on general purpose governments, research on social welfare spending also
typically excludes independent public school districts and special district governments
that provide social welfare functions, such as hospital districts and public housing
authorities.302
As a result, studies that seek to make inferences based on the spending of
only one type of general-purpose local government may be biased, in that a municipality
or county may not be assuming a given function, or spending little on it, not because of
the decisions of that government itself, or the preferences of its constituents, but because
another unit, or even level, of government, assumes the role.303
In a substantive contribution to scholarship on public finance, researchers
affiliated with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy have incorporated these variations in
the scope of local governments’ functional responsibilities into a database of Fiscally
Standardized Cities, or FiSCs, estimates of the revenues and expenditures of all local
governments that serve each of 112 U.S. cities, which serve as the sample for this
analysis. Describing the FiSCs and the procedure used to create them, Langley writes
that “FiSCs allow for comparisons of local government finances across the nation’s
largest cities by accounting for differences in the structure of local government. The
construction of FiSCs involves adding together revenues for the city (municipal)
57
government plus an appropriate share from overlying counties, school districts, and
special districts. The allocations are based on a city’s share of county population, the
percentage of students in each school district that live in the central city, and the city’s
share of the estimated population served by each special district. FiSCs provide a full
picture of revenues raised from city residents and business and spending on their behalf,
whether done by the city government or a separate overlying government.”304
All cities
included in the FiSC database have either 2007 population of 200,000 residents or greater
or 1980 populations over 150,000, the earliest year in the FiSC database.305
Data in the
analysis that follows is from the year 2007, as detailed below. The FiSC data set includes
all of the largest 35 American cities with the exception of Honolulu and “covers” all
regions of the country, though less urbanized regions, namely the Mountain West and
Plains regions, and New England, where cities are smaller, are relatively
underrepresented.306
A complete list of the cities in included in this analysis can be found
in the appendix.
It is important to note here that the FiSCs and the Tausanovich and Warshaw
ideology data measure the same units; that is to say, the municipal geographic boundaries
of the cities included in the Tausanovich and Warshaw ideology data and those of the
FiSCs are the same.307
However, because FiSCs include data from all local governments
that provide services within the municipal area, references to “cities” or “municipalities”
herein do not refer to their municipal governments only but to their territorial boundaries
(or their “city limits,” as commonly phrased).308
As they are comprised of the financial
data from multiple local governments, the FiSCs cannot be viewed as governmental units
in and of themselves: though the FiSCs are geographically coterminous with municipal
58
boundaries, the policies of, and spending in, the FiSCs are not conducted by municipal
governments alone.309
Consequently, this data cannot be used to test the impact of the
structural factors of any one unit of government, such as whether municipal ward or at-
large city council structures, partisan elections, or weak vs. strong mayoral systems are
associated with FiSC expenditures, as doing so would attribute all of FiSC spending to
only one of its included governments, the municipal government, for example, and
erroneously infer that that entity is responsible for the spending of all the other
governments included in the FiSCs.310
In addition, because the expenditures of all local governments are combined in
each FiSC, rather than being decomposed by percentage of spending from each included
government (e.g. the percentage of public health spending from the municipal
government, county, and independent authorities), this analysis cannot assess the relative
“contributions” of each included government, how policymakers from different local
governments interact, or how the extent to which social welfare responsibilities are
divided between multiple governmental units influences FiSC spending. Future research
might explore these issues, though the challenges in gathering data on the structural
characteristics of all governmental units that operate within a given municipality’s
boundaries, such as whether school and special district boards are elected or appointed or
the structures of county boards of commissioners, might be formidable, particularly in
small communities. As employed here, the aggregate FiSC data simply provide(s) a way
to incorporate the fact that policy and spending responsibilities vary across and within
states, and, in so doing, to minimize the potential for downwardly biased estimates that
59
could result from failing to include the expenditures of all local governments that provide
social welfare services within a given municipality.311
The FiSCs are based on the aforementioned Census of State and Local
Governments data, which, in its original form, classifies municipal governments, county
governments, special districts, and school districts as separate data fields.312
Expenditures included in the FiSC data includes all local government direct expenditures,
with the exception of intergovernmental expenditures to (not revenue received from)
other local governments, as including the latter could induce “double counting” of funds
(for example, transfers between city and county governments whose territory includes the
city).313
The 112 cities included in the Lincoln Institute FiSC data show striking variation
in the entities charged with their social welfare service provision. For example, only 18
of the 112 have “city dependent” school districts, where public education is provided
directly by the municipal government. In slightly less than half of FiSCs (54 of 112),
public education is administered by “one or more independent school districts whose
boundaries extend beyond the city’s,” serving both children living both in the city itself
and in neighboring areas.314
While school districts’ extraterritorial expenditures- those
that extend beyond the city boundaries and do not serve city residents- are not included in
the FiSCs, a simple analysis of municipal education expenditures in these 54 cities would
find none, while analyzing school district spending alone could include expenditure on
residents of multiple municipalities and overestimate the amount spent on children living
in the city. Similarly, in 13 states whose cities are included in the FiSC database
(Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, New York, North
60
Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin) the state government has
devolved responsibilities for public welfare (TANF) to the county level.315
Lastly, in 27
of the FiSCs, including in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh,
Salt Lake City, and St. Louis, there are no hospital expenditures, which may be due to the
closure or privatization of public hospitals and the shift to vendor payments to private
hospitals, including through Medicaid, which often is classified as public welfare rather
than hospital spending, for the healthcare of those in need.316
The social welfare expenditure data used in this analysis comes from the 2007
FiSCs, for the reason that the Census of State and Local Governments, is, in actuality,
only a Census for state governments, and not local governments, in most years. In all
years save those ending in “2,” and “7,” only a sample of local governments is surveyed:
full Census years, in which an effort is made to survey all local governments, thus are
preferable.317
2007 was chosen as it overlaps with the time period of the polls used to
construct city-level ideology measures, the 2012 Census of Governments being one year
later than the latest year included in the ideology measures.318
In addition, 2007 is the
last year of pre-recession era spending, and 2012 expenditures may be anomalous,
inasmuch as local government spending was affected negatively (“depressed”) by the
recession and 2012 also may include some residual stimulus funding, which, by its
nature, is not funding local governments typically receive.319
Lastly, Tausanovich and
Warshaw also employ 2007 Census of Governments data in analyzing the relationship
between their indices and total municipal spending. The category of social welfare
expenditure is comprised of the total spending in the FiSC categories of education, public
welfare, public health, hospitals, and housing and community development (one
61
category), the same classifications as in the underlying Census of Governments data and
those most commonly utilized in studies of the local social welfare role.320
The Lincoln
Institute FiSC data also includes information on school district type, which I include as a
binary variable in my analysis to account for the presence of a city-dependent (municipal-
government operated) school district.
FiSC social welfare expenditures vary considerably, consistent with the findings
of prior work on the scope of local social welfare activity. Per capita expenditures on
public education are considerably greater than in the other categories, hospitals, housing
and community development, public health, and public welfare, consistent with the
finding that education is the largest category of local government spending.321
Per capita
education spending ranges from $873 in New Orleans to $3,018 in Buffalo (mean
$1,656). While local governments included in the FiSCs generally spend less on the
remaining categories of social welfare, spending shows considerable differences, even
within states. For example, public welfare expenditures in FiSCs that provide public
welfare services range from a mere $1 per capita in Lubbock, Texas to $3,787 in
Washington D.C. (mean $201.50), public health from $2 per capita in Oklahoma City to
$891 in San Francisco and $892 in Philadelphia (mean $155.50), hospital expenditures,
in the cities that do spend funds on hospital care, from $7 per capita in Detroit to $3,063
per person in nearby Flint (mean $223.20), and per capita housing and community
development spending from $10 in Chesapeake, Virginia to $1,010 in Tampa (Florida)
(mean $236.14). Total social welfare expenditures vary from a minimal $873 per capita
to a maximum of $6,751 (mean $2,081).
62
Data on the demographics of local residents, including the percentage of city
residents who are black and Hispanic, the percent of residents over age 25 who have
college degrees, the percentage of residents under the age of 18, the percentage who are
over age 65, the percentage of residents living in poverty, and the city’s median income
and median home value, are drawn from the decennial Census and from the American
Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, save for data on 2007 population, which
is included in the FiSC database.
Data on the devolution of Temporary Aid to Needy Families, or TANF,
responsibility from state governments to counties is based on Gainsborough and Lobao
and Kraybill.322
Since counties that administer TANF funding likely will appear to spend
more than those in which TANF funding remains with state government, I include a set
of binary (dummy) variables to account for the devolution of TANF to the county level
by the states in which the FiSCs are located. Because TANF generally is a state or
county, rather than a municipal, responsibility, only the overlying counties, not the
municipal governments, operating with the FiSCs typically will receive TANF funds.323
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Methods Overview
In line with previous studies, I employ ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to
model the relationship between ideology and social welfare spending.324
My dependent
variable, social welfare expenditure, is modeled as the total 2007 per-capita spending of
FiSCs on education, public welfare, public health, hospitals, and housing and community
development. Because the central relationship in this analysis is between ideology and
social welfare expenditure, I control for covariates that might bias the relationship, and
which typically are included in studies of local government spending.325
Specifically, I
variously control for the log of the 2007 population, the percentage of city residents who
are black, the percentage who are of non-black and of Hispanic ethnicity, the percentage
of residents who are under the age of 18, the percentage who are over the age of 65, the
percentage of residents living in poverty, the percentage of residents over age 25 who
have a college degree, the city’s median income, and its median home value, as does
much recent work.326
I also control for whether a the FiSC is located in a state that has
devolved TANF responsibility to county government, in line with other work, and for the
existence of a city-dependent school district, given that poor urban school districts may
spend more than other types.327
All financial data is reported for the year 2007 to
correspond with the original source of the data from the U.S Census Bureau, which
reports state and local finances in nominal amounts each year and does not subsequently
adjust the data for inflation.328
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Table 1. Descriptive statistics for key variables
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3
rd Qu. Max
Ideology -1.0 -0.48 -0.21 -0.24 - 0.02 0.41
% Af. Am. 1.0 8.53 20.25 25.21 35.9 84.8
% Hisp. 1.6 6.6 13.9 20.79 31.57 94.7
Med. Home Val. 15.8 120.3 153 192.7 214.6 744.6
% in Poverty 1.6 6.6 13.9 20.79 31.57 94.7
% under 18 13.4 21.85 23.75 23.71 25.9 31.5
% over 65 6.8 9.6 10.9 11.0 11.9 19.1
% College 11.00 24.12 28.80 29.52 34.27 57.4
Med. Inc. 24.8 38.6 45.8 46.3 51.2 101.5
2007 Pop. (log) 88.6 206.1 312.4 535 559.2 8.0
Education Exp. 873 1373 1618 1656 1847 3018
Hospital Exp. 0.0 0.0 33.50 223.20 295.50 3063
Housing/CD Exp. 0.0 97.75 194.50 236.14 302.50 1010
Pub. Health Exp. 0.0 55.00 115.00 155.50 207.20 892
Pub. Welfare Exp. 0.0 17.00 92.00 201.50 293.50 3787
Total SW Exp. 873 1572 1948 2081 2429 6751
Ideology: —1 (liberal) to 1 (conservative) scale
Median home value, median income, and population in thousands; expenditures in dollar amounts.
Due to my desire to focus on my explanatory variable of interest, ideology, I
interpret these demographic covariates principally as controls, which otherwise might
bias the primary relationship of interest, that of municipal-level ideology and municipal-
area social welfare expenditure.329
However, in the analysis that follows, I interpret the
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implications they might have for my findings. I do not identify any variables, including
my primary variable of interest, ideology, as causal: as I lack longitudinal data on how
expenditures change in response to any changes in ideological preferences, and on the
political processes that might lead local officials to respond, particularly when those
officials represent more than one unit of government, my analysis best is construed as
exploratory and descriptive. I cannot suggest that ideology causes social welfare
spending to increase or decrease, only that any movement is suggestive of a relationship
between the two.330
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Chapter VII
Findings and Discussion
I employed six linear regression models to test my hypotheses regarding the
relationship between city ideology and local governments’ social welfare spending.
Similar to Tausanovich and Warshaw, I first conducted basic bivariate regressions; I then
followed these with simple multivariate regressions that incorporated binary (“dummy”)
variables to control for two primary differences in the assignment of local social welfare
activity, whether the municipal government is directly responsible for administering
public schooling (“city-dependent public schools”) and the devolution of responsibility
for TANF from states to county governments.331
I subsequently extended the models to
incorporate a full set of demographic covariates, as described in more detail below.
Model 1. A bivariate regression of the relationship between city-level ideology and the
combined social welfare expenditures of local governments that serve city residents. This
model allows for a preliminary test of whether my results are comparable to Tausanovich
and Warshaw’s finding of a negative relationship between conservative city ideology and
total municipal spending, which they first modeled using bivariate regression.332
Model 2. Building on Model 1, a simple multivariate regression of the relationship
between ideology and social welfare expenditure that incorporates columns of binary
variables for the presence of a city-dependent school district and for the devolution of
administrative responsibility for TANF from states to county governments within a state.
As city-dependent school districts may spend more than other district types and county
governments that are given responsibility by state governments for TANF may appear to
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spend more than counties that are not, this model controls for the possibility for these
factors to bias the relationship between ideology and social welfare expenditure, and to
lead to erroneous inferences regarding local governments’ spending decisions if
ignored.333
Model 3. A baseline demographic model based on Tausanovich and Warshaw, which
controls for the influence of a few key covariates- the percentage of city residents who
are African American; the city’s median home value, a measure of its tax base; the city’s
median income, indicative of both the need for social welfare efforts in a city and (some)
of the resources available to finance them; and the log of 2007 population- on the
relationship between ideology and expenditures (combined local government social
welfare in this analysis, total municipal spending in theirs).334
Similar to Model 1, this
model allows for an assessment of whether my results are broadly consistent with
Tausanovich and Warshaw’s finding of a statistically significant relationship between
municipal-level ideology and total municipal expenditure, controlling for the influence of
city resident characteristics.335
Because my sample is relatively small, I do not expect
coefficients of the same magnitude or level of significance, only comparable trends if the
relationship Tausanovich and Warshaw reveal is applicable to social welfare provision.
Model 4. An extension of Model 3 that incorporates binary variables for the presence of
a city-dependent school district and devolved TANF (“welfare”) administration in
addition to the aforementioned set of demographic controls.
Model 5. An expanded demographic model, which, in addition to ideology and the
demographic covariates employed in both Models 3 and 4 (percentage of city residents
who are African-American, median home value, median income, and the log of 2007
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population), adds covariates for the percentage of city residents who are Hispanic (non-
black), the percentage of residents who are over age 65, the percentage of children
(residents under age 18), the percentage of city residents living in poverty, and the
percentage of adults over age 25 with college degrees.
Model 6. A full model, which, in addition to ideology and the complete set of
demographic covariates from Model 5, adds the binary variables that control for the
presence of a city-dependent school district and for TANF devolution to the local level.
This model includes all the covariates from the previous models, both demographic and
governmental.
As there are only 112 cities in the FiSC database, choosing to use a relatively
small sample involves a tradeoff between the desire to control for population
characteristics that might bias the relationship between ideology and local social welfare
spending and the need to be parsimonious with covariates to mitigate the risk of saturated
or over-specified models.336
Due to these limitations, the work reported here best is
construed as exploratory, intended to examine whether the relationship found by
Tausanovich and Warshaw, that local government (in their case, municipal) expenditure
corresponds to the ideological preferences of city residents, extends to the social welfare
policy arena, and to account for sources of variation in local government responsibility in
doing so.337
Absent the expansion of the FiSC data set to include a greater number of
cities, future scholarship might explore alternate ways to account for differences in local
government responsibility, namely the fragmentation of social welfare responsibilities
among multiple types of local government and variations in state to local program
devolution, that influence the expenditure amounts reported in existing local government
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finance data and might bias the relationship between explanatory variables, such as
ideology and demographics, and spending, issues I examine more fully below.338
In
electing to utilize the FiSC data, I mitigate against the possibility that my findings are due
to variations in responsibility for providing local public services; however, this also limits
the extent to which these results can be generalized to contexts beyond large cities and,
perhaps more pressingly, necessitates a larger sample to more thoroughly explore the
relationship between ideology and local government social welfare spending.339
Model Results
The results of the base models, Models 1 and 2, are consistent with my hypothesis
and with Tausanovich and Warshaw’s previous findings: in the bivariate regression,
ideology is statistically significant (at 0.05), and, as expected, negative, given that
positive ideology values indicate increased conservatism in cities. As they become more
conservative, the cities in my data set spend $509.71 less on social welfare efforts.
Similarly, in Model 2, the simplest multivariate regression, which controls only
for the impact of variations in responsibility for public schooling and TANF
administration on the ideology-expenditure relationship, more conservative cities spend
$482.50 less on social welfare functions. Ideology remains significant at the 0.05 level.
The coefficients for city-dependent public schools and for TANF devolution are
significant, as well, both at 0.001. The results of Model 2 indicate that in cities in which
the municipal government directly administers public education $727.30 more is spent on
it, perhaps due to the effect of equalization aid from state governments.340
The
coefficient for the devolution of TANF is not readily interpretable in and of itself, as it
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simply controls for the “effect” of state devolution of TANF responsibility to county
governments in 13 states, and, as a result, the appearance of greater TANF spending in
cities in those states.341
The results, as reported in Model 2, indicate that local
governments tasked with administering TANF appear to spend $604.10 more on public
welfare functions. As this simply reflects variability in of state to local delegation of
public welfare administration, and not the spending of equivalently-tasked local
governments (counties that have equivalent responsibilities for TANF administration
across states), it underscores the importance of accounting for differences in local
responsibility, given that neglecting to do so can produce biased estimates of local
governments’ social welfare efforts.342
Table 2. Models 1-2. Base models, OLS regression of social welfare expenditure on ideology
Model 1 Model 2
(Intercept) 1958.9 (92.24) *** 1492.50 (102.50) ***
Ideology -509.71 (241.09) * -482.50 (219.60) *
City-Dependent Schools 727.30 (177.30) ***
Devolved TANF 604.10 (131.00) ***
R-squared 0.03905 0.2737
N = 112 Significance levels ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1
Ideology: —1 (liberal) to 1 (conservative) spectrum. Coefficients reported in dollar amounts.
Though the base models provide some preliminary evidence of a significant
relationship between city ideology and local social welfare expenditure, the remaining
models reveal the challenges of attempting to control for rival explanations, namely the
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influences of demographics and variations in responsibility for providing public services,
in an analysis that includes only 112 observations.343
In Model 3, which replicates Tausanovich and Warshaw’s demographic analysis,
ideology no longer is statistically significant. In addition, the coefficients on all variables
become progressively smaller and more challenging to interpret, with rather large
standard errors in the case of a few variables, especially median home value and the log
of 2007 population. In Model 3, only median home value is statistically significant (at
0.05). It is positive, perhaps indicating that a higher property tax base gives cities more
revenue to provide public services, as Peterson claims.344
Model 4 adds binary variables
for the existence of a city-dependent public school system and for TANF devolution, and
only those variables are significant (both at 0.001, as in Model 2). Both are positive.
Median home value, the only significant coefficient in Model 3, no longer is so. Ideology
is not significant in Model 4.
Given the need to control for factors that might affect the relationship between
ideology and local governments’ social welfare spending, including city resident
characteristics that may be related to both support and need for social welfare services,
Models 5 and 6 include a full set of demographic covariates: the percentage of city
residents who are African-American, median home value, median income, the log of
2007 population, the percentage of city residents living in poverty, the percent of city
residents who are Hispanic (non-black), the percentage who are over age 65, the percent
of children under age 18, the percent of city residents living in poverty, and the
percentage of adults over age 25 with college degrees. However, attempting to account
for such a large number of potentially biasing factors renders the results less
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interpretable: 11 explanatory variables may simply be too many for 112 observations to
“carry.”345
In the full demographic model, Model 5, which does not include binary variables
for municipal government provision of public education or the devolution of TANF
responsibility from states to counties, only median income and the percentage of
residents living in poverty are statistically significant, and both are positive. A clear
explanation for the presence of both coefficients being positively signed and statistically
significant in the same model is not immediately evident: a larger percentage of residents
living in poverty, which is significant at 0.001 in Model 5, well may indicate greater need
for social welfare services. Were that the case, however, one might expect median
income, significant at 0.01 in Model 5, to have a negative relationship with social welfare
spending, which it does not.346
While there may be some uncovered mechanism that
explains the existence of both covariates being positive and statistically significant in the
same model, when viewed in light of the changes in the other coefficients, it introduces
the possibility that the results are “noise” produced by model misspecification, saturation
seemingly being the most likely candidate.347
Ideology also is not statistically significant
in Model 5. While ideology’s influence on local expenditures may be subordinate to that
of resident demographics, as the results here indicate, it seems necessary to employ a
larger sample, capable of “absorbing” the full set of covariates without risk of saturation,
to determine with confidence that this is the case.
The results of Model 6, which account for city-dependent public schools and
TANF devolution, in addition to the full set of demographic variables outlined in Model
5, are similar. The only statistically significant coefficients are for the percentage of city
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residents who live in poverty (significant at 0.01), the city’s median income (0.05), as in
Model 5, and those that control for the devolution of TANF (significant at 0.5) and city-
dependent public education (0.001). These results continue to serve as a warning against
ascribing significance to demographics or preferences without accounting for other
factors that might influence the amount of funding local governments have to spend on
public services, particularly those financed through intergovernmental aid, such as social
welfare.348
As in Model 5, ideology remains positive and lacks statistical significance in
Model 6.
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Table 3. Models 3-6, Expanded models, OLS regression of social welfare expenditure on ideology
Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6
(Intercept) 1.72 (1.33) 1.20 (1.19) -2.69 (2.38) -3.97 (2.24)
Ideology -1.79 (2.64) -3.00 (2.49) 1.94 (3.12) 7.08 (3.19)
Percent African American 5.10 (4.22) 5.05 (3.91) 1.02 (5.26) 9.21 (5.0)
Median Home Value 2.48 (9.87) * 1.25 (9.28) 9.72 (1.15) 2.67 (1.06)
Median Income -1.09 (1.06) -3.40 (9.85) 5.14 (1.91) ** 4.54 (1.76) *
2007 Population (log) 1.67 (9.84) 1.26 (8.85) 4.10 (9.67) 4.39 (8.85)
Percent in Poverty 1.11 (2.96) *** 9.35 (2.96) **
Percent Hispanic 3.63 (5.27) 2.07 (4.88)
Percent under 18 y/o -2.44 (4.24) 1.29 (3.95)
Percent over 65 y/o 1.28 (4.89) 6.21 (4.60)
Percent College Degree -1.15 (1.47) -2.19 (1.39)
City-Dependent Schools 6.64 (1.81) *** 7.17 (1.78) ***
Devolved TANF 5.67 (1.40) *** 3.88 (1.49) *
R-squared 0.1136 0.3003 0.2734 0.4064
N = 112 Significance levels ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1
Ideology: —1 (liberal) to 1 (conservative) spectrum. Coefficients reported in dollar amounts.
The results in the basic and full models offer diverging portrayals of the influence
of local ideology on social welfare policy: while the base models suggest a relationship
between city resident ideology and local governments’ social welfare expenditures, the
more complex models indicate that this influence may be constrained by
intergovernmental factors. Additional work is needed to clarify and to expand upon these
findings, including identifying ways to work with larger data sets so that one confidently
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can include more control variables without risk of saturation, to more clearly specify
assumptions made in modeling the scope of local government social welfare provision
and its relationship to resident ideology, and to develop theoretical perspectives that not
only respond to previous scholarship but build on empirical evidence to increase the state
of knowledge on the local social welfare role.349
It is to these issues that I now turn.
Reexamining the Relationship of Ideology and Local Social Welfare Spending
The Tiebout model “largely abstracts from the existence of multiple levels of
government and the existence of interactions across levels of government.”350
In their study of the relationship between mayoral party affiliation and local
government spending, Gerber and Hopkins assert that mayoral partisanship is
“negligible” in “policy areas where federal and state actors assert more authority,”
writing that when “cities share authority with federal and state governments,” the partisan
identification of the city’s mayor “will have a limited influence on policy.”351
They also
find no evidence of a partisan mayoral effect on social policy: specifically, cities that
elect a Democratic mayor do not spend more on social policy areas.352
The results of my
expanded models seem in line with their claims, extended to the ideological preferences
of local residents: the basic models, which are consistent with Tausanovich and
Warshaw’s finding of greater spending in more liberal cities, could indicate that local
ideology has a role in shaping local governments’ social welfare activity, yet the results
of the expanded models may reflect the constraints on local officials’ ability to direct
their governments’ expenditures, including in ways that correspond to residents’
preferences.353
Future studies are necessary in order to determine which of these
conclusions is more accurate on balance. Below I offer a preliminary interpretation of
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the issues that might bear on my findings and outline some considerations that
subsequent investigations of the ideological dimensions of local social welfare policy
could address to move this line of work forward.
Intergovernmental Relations and Constraints: Implications for the Influence of Local
Preferences on Social Welfare Spending
“Contemporary debates about federalism and localism often proceed with, at best,
a glancing reference to each other.”354
As previously noted, much of the funding local governments receive to offer
social welfare services is provided to them via grants from federal or state government, in
part due to the federal government’s aim to employ states and local governments as the
implementing agents of federal policy.355
Despite these circumstances, recent local
public finance scholarship has not often thoroughly examined the extent to which local,
state, and federal activities interact, including in social welfare policy.356
Studies that
have incorporated intergovernmental factors have not yet produced clear evidence of the
extent to which local social welfare expenditures reflect the preferences of policymakers
and constituents participating at the federal and state levels, as well as those of local
residents, or of how preference divergence between federal, state and local actors shapes
policy at the local level.357
Public choice theory tends to depict local governance as a relatively constrained
policy space, yet much of the recent work in this tradition has conceptualized those
constraints purely at the local level, in terms of the competition that results from the
existence of many general purpose local governments within a region, rather than
analyzing how federal and state governments expand or constrict local governments’
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policy options.358
Accordingly, contemporary researchers often appear to assume that
the amount of expenditure governments administer is due principally to the preferences
of their residents, whether construed in narrow economic terms, as a function of their
personal tax-benefit packages or more broadly, to include political views.359
This
framing may be incomplete: because local social welfare policy is less separable from the
federal and state government than public choice theories claim, local governments’
expenditures may include funds delegated to them by federal and state governments, such
as education equalization grants or Medicare funding, not only funds they themselves
seek.360
As Trounstine writes, “the number of responsibilities handled by any given city
is dictated in part by state law and in part by the choices of the community itself.” 361
Though I controlled for differences in state delegation of TANF responsibility to counties
to address the possibility that some local government spending may be due to the choices
of state governments rather than local policymakers, the issue may necessitate a more
expansive conceptual treatment as well as a methodological one: future research may
need not only to account for variations in the scope of local social welfare responsibility
but to more thoroughly articulate the extent to which local preferences can be expected to
influence local governments’ expenditures and the channels through which that influence
flows.362
The null (non-significant) result for ideology and the significant, positive one for
the coefficient on TANF devolution in the expanded models may be due to these effects:
if social welfare expenditures made by local governments are not, in large part, funded
directly by them but by state and federal grants, state and national preferences, not only
local ones, may exert substantive influence on the funds allocated to any particular social
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policy domain, such as the amounts appropriated by the federal government to fund
public welfare or the amounts states delegate to local governments.363
If this is the case,
the grants any local government receives to fund social welfare efforts may not neatly
align with its residents’ ideological preferences, particularly if national and state
constituents hold different views: the extent of correspondence that is reasonable in a
federal system may be less than is assumed in studies that posit a direct, linear
relationship between local preferences and policy outcomes.364
This is not to suggest
that, due to federalism, local policy cannot respond to local views, only that, as Gerber
and Hopkins posit, the extent to which it does so may differ depending on the policy type,
the extent to which local officials are responsible for spending in a given policy area, and
the existence of preference divergence between constituents and policymakers at different
levels of government.365
Though Tausanovich and Warshaw assert that individuals’ ideology does not vary
across levels of government, that residents’ local and national-level policy preferences
are similar, a specific city’s ideology may differ from other cities’ in their state, from
state-level ideology, and from the aggregation of ideological preferences at the national
level.366
For example, residents of Austin likely are more liberal than Texans are at large,
while individuals in Colorado Springs might be more conservative than Coloradans
generally.367
If residents of a particular city are more conservative (liberal) than are
voters and policymakers at the national and state level(s), intergovernmental social
welfare policy, including the amount the federal government allocates to states and local
governments, may be to the ideological left (right) of their preferences.368
Individual
local governments may receive more or less social welfare policy responsibility or
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funding than their residents desire, whether directly from the federal government, as a
result of state officials’ decisions to “pass through” federal funding to local governments,
including delegated responsibilities for Medicaid or TANF, or through state-adopted
initiatives such as education equalization grants.369
This preference divergence, and the
ability of federal and state policy to constrain the influence of local preferences on policy,
partly might explain my results.370
Though it seems reasonable that the grants local governments receive should
reflect their constituents’ preferences and, accordingly, that policymakers whose
residents are more ideologically supportive of social welfare efforts should seek and
receive more intergovernmental funds for such purposes, research does not uniformly
lead to such conclusions.371
Scholars differ in the extent to which they ascribe agency to
local officials in their interactions with federal and state governments. Some work
depicts local governments as principally “junior partners” in the social welfare policy
arena, the relatively constrained recipients of federal and state policy decisions, including
the amounts allocated for specific types of social welfare provision by the federal or state
government, states’ decisions to retain responsibility for administering a particular policy
or to delegate it to county governments, and the design of individual programs.372
Others
posit a more active relationship between local governments and their supra-ordinate
jurisdictions, characterizing the former as more empowered than passive and policy as
the outcome of “negotiations” between federal, state, and local officials.373
Recent local social welfare scholarship often (though not exclusively) follows the
latter course. Studies of local governments’ social welfare provision often characterize
grant receipt as a function of seeking, rather than receiving, behavior, hypothesizing that
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localities that desire to provide a social welfare activity or support a specific program are
more likely than less supportive communities to solicit available grant funds for that
purpose.374
A more actively engaged local government does not necessarily equate to a
more supportive one, however: though local officials in communities whose residents
favor social welfare spending may lobby state and federal policymakers to increase
funding for related grant programs, if delegated social welfare policy ties a local
government to a more expansive social welfare role than its residents desire, local
policymakers might pressure federal and state officials to “roll back” policies or to
narrow the scope of activity for which they hold localities responsible.375
Local officials
also may choose to allocate funds they do receive in ways that benefit political supporters
or relatively more advantaged groups rather than needy residents.376
However, as Volden
observes, “many models of federalism are not explicit about what motivates politicians
and how national and state political interests interact.”377
Studies that address how
federal, state, and local actors influence both each other and local policy outcomes could
move theory on local governments closer to the empirical data, which evinces less a
“layer cake” of clearly divided governmental responsibilities than an interrelated set of
interests.378
Can Expenditures Respond to Local Preferences? Modeling Alternate Quantities of
Interest in Studies of Local Social Welfare Activity
Local government studies that employ expenditure as their quantity of interest
seem to be based on the assumption that the amount of funds any local government
receives is largely within that government’s control, a perspective consistent with the
public choice framing, which depicts towns and cities as financing services solely
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through resident tax revenue.379
In this context, the claim that local expenditures are a
function of local preferences seems reasonable. Nonetheless, intergovernmental relations,
particularly the contribution of federal grants to local social welfare efforts and variations
in the extent to which state governments assign county governments responsibility for
policy administration, render these assumptions problematic.380
Though local, state, and
federal interests may interact to influence the amounts the federal and state governments
allocate to a particular policy domain or program (e.g. the amount appropriated by the
federal government for TANF or the Community Development Block Grant), the design
of policy, and the extent to which responsibilities are shared between levels of
government, the exact grant amount any local government receives may be beyond local
officials’, and residents’, immediate ability to influence: intergovernmental social welfare
grants often are determined by formulae that are based on relatively slow-to-change
factors such as the age of a community’s housing stock, its population, its poverty level
or its per capita income.381
As a result, the precise amount any local jurisdiction receives
may be due to its residents’ demographics, not only their preferences: more liberal
communities might receive less social welfare funding than they desire if they are
economically advantaged relative to their “competitors” for intergovernmental funds.382
Local governments, of course, are free to supplement grant funds with their own
revenues, at least in theory, an issue that some studies have explored.383
However, if
local governments already offer social welfare services using intergovernmental grants,
residents may not see the value in raising their taxes to support additional funding on
such efforts, particularly if Americans’ anti-tax sentiment and belief in the ability of
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governments to continue to fund their activities without raising taxes contribute to a low
baseline tolerance for tax increases.384
Nonetheless, because public choice claims that the funding of local services
through resident tax revenue should induce affluent residents to exit if their local
governments use tax funds for social welfare purposes, some public finance scholars have
focused only on local governments’ own source (directly financed) expenditures or
attempted to examine own source and grant funds separately, effectively controlling for
intergovernmental influences by separating them out.385
Though the desire to focus on
locally funded spending seems sensible, doing so implies that public choice theories are
testable only if one minimizes the “noise” that comes from including expenditures that
are not locally determined, effectively disregarding substantive amounts of locally-
administered social welfare. Modeling only spending derived from local revenue also
may lead one to the potentially problematic inference that local and intergovernmental
funds are easily separable: that policies are independently adopted, that local spending is
uninfluenced by federal or state action, or that own-source funded spending reflects only
local preferences and grant funds intergovernmental ones.386
Distinguishing between the
amount of funds that is influenced by local preferences and that which is imposed by
others, particularly absent information on what cities and towns “would have spent”
without intergovernmental aid, seems especially challenging both conceptually and
methodologically.387
As Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal write, “it is not obvious how to
apportion spending into that which is purely voluntary and that which is controlled or
driven by outside policies.”388
Certainly, broad tendencies could be identified- for
example, that local governments whose residents are more ideologically supportive of
83
social welfare policy spend more both from local sources and from intergovernmental
grants- but more fine-grained analyses may be quite difficult.389
Due to these issues, expenditure may not be the most meaningful quality to
analyze in studies of the local social welfare role, or the factor that local ideology is most
likely to influence, let alone in as easily-predicted ways.390
By focusing on the amount of
expenditure, researchers assume that local officials largely determine it, which is only a
valid assumption if local officials also control the revenue sources that determine how
much they have to spend: if they do not, this could explain why ideology does not have
the hypothesized “effect” on local social welfare expenditures when governmental and
demographic covariates are incorporated in the models.391
Therefore, in order to increase understanding of the local social welfare role, it
may be necessary to examine other quantities of interest. Ideology may have more
influence on the ways in which local governments allocate the funding they receive rather
than simply the amount they have to spend if the latter is partly exogenously
determined.392
Block grants, in particular, provide local officials with discretion in how
they allocate funds within prescribed, often general expenditure categories, leaving room
for local policymakers to target preferred uses or even constituents who are likely to
support them.393
Constituents who disapprove of social welfare spending also may be
able to restrict how local governments allocate the funds they receive from federal and
state government, which analyses of spending amounts alone would not detect.394
For
example, opponents might pressure local policymakers to limit funds to projects that
benefit “undeserving” residents, such as transitional housing for the homeless or
treatment facilities for individuals with substance abuse issues. Similarly, Craw observes
84
that “…decisions on providing social welfare functions, such as a public housing project
or a public health clinic, may provoke a ‘Not in My Backyard’ (NIMBY) reaction by
homeowners fearful of the racial or economic changes to the community or the
consequences to their property values.”395
Scholars also have argued that examining the substance of policy rather than
spending is more likely to promote understanding of local governments’ social welfare
role.396
Some work based on substantive policy measures has been conducted on
individual programs: studies have examined variations in the extent to which state and
county governments more punitively regulate client behavior or apply more restrictive
time limits in their TANF programs, whether local governments target their Community
Development Block Grants to political constituents or to neighborhoods most in need,
and how public and affordable housing development is concentrated in minority
neighborhoods.397
Processes of this nature would be quite complex to model beyond a
few cities or programs, as the Census of Governments does not include program-specific
data, only general categories of expenditure (e.g. public welfare rather than TANF,
housing vs. Housing Choice Vouchers) and offers no detailed information on the types of
activities expenditures support, such as whether a city spends the majority of its public
health funding on preventive services or infectious disease testing or the types of TANF
subsidies it offers.398
Researchers would need to gather data from multiple agencies and
levels of government on the specific programs included in a given policy area, a
potentially taxing effort when the field involves many actors. Nevertheless, such detailed
work might produce greater substantive knowledge of local social welfare policy,
85
including whether political preferences have more influence in some policy areas than
others.399
Advancing Theory on the Local Social Welfare Role:
Substantive and Methodological Implications
“Where demands/needs converge with capacity/authority is the political space
wherein local political strategies are decided.” 400
If researchers do choose to analyze expenditure amounts, more thorough
investigations of variations in local government authority might improve their ability to
formulate hypotheses grounded in the empirics of local government social welfare
activity and to identify generalized tendencies in local governments’ social welfare
behavior.401
In testing public choice theories, local government scholars often treat
municipal or county governments as interchangeable units, inferring that that the two
forms of government have equivalent functions and therefore will “act” similarly.402
However, as Farmer and Hajnal and Trounstine each note, the assumptions of public
choice may not hold for counties due to their functions as administrative “arms” of state
government and their historic role in providing local social welfare services, especially
public health and welfare.403
County governments may not behave as public choice
predicts because they operate under different conditions than the theory outlines: Farmer
writes that “the fear of taxpayer migration is not as prevalent for counties as it is for cities
and.…political economic and political institutional influences will often promote
redistributive policies.” Testing public choice theories on counties may not be
substantively meaningful and examining the determinants of county social welfare
expenditures better may be grounded in historical analyses.404
Investigating historical
changes in county government social welfare provision could lead researchers to
86
altogether different hypotheses than public choice might predict, including regarding the
factors that influence it.405
Moving beyond economic perspectives, political constraints
on county officials may be weaker than for municipal leaders: county election turnout
might be lower than municipalities’ in cities that elect their county officials.406
While
ideology still may affect county governments’ social welfare activities, it could have a
lesser impact, being subordinate to the policy decisions of, and perhaps the preferences
conveyed to, federal and state governments and more limited local electoral influence.407
Secondly, in equating the terms “local government” and “municipality,” scholars
appear to assume that municipal governments are responsible for a full range of social
welfare functions, including administering and funding public health and hospitals, public
welfare, housing and community development, and (in some studies) education.
However, as previously noted, municipal governments often do not directly administer
many of the social welfare areas that researchers have assigned to them, most
prominently education and public welfare functions.408
Public choice theory frequently
has been critiqued for being based on the erroneous assumption that all of local spending
in a given community is controlled by one, single-purpose government, a flaw that some
recent work seems to have extended in using public choice as the reference point for
studying a policy area, social welfare, that is more fragmented among multiple local
governments than the theory predicts.409
Because of this fragmentation, some scholars
even assert that it is fundamentally “inappropriate” to test public choice theories in the
contemporary American context: the empirical data simply does not conform to the
public choice depiction of autonomous, all-purpose municipal governments, so studies
87
based on single units of government may not be able to provide complete explanations of
the local social welfare role.410
Researchers who choose to employ municipal-level data may need to pay more
attention to modeling only the expenditures that municipal governments are most likely
to control, lest studies risk drawing inferences that are illogical or specious.411
Correctly
accounting for variations in the scope of local service provision seems particularly crucial
for studies that examine the political actions, such as voting and community organizing,
thought to influence local policy. As Trounstine notes, “because the responsibilities of
cities vary widely, the set of outcomes for which voters might hold incumbents
responsible,” and therefore are able to be influenced by municipal political activity, “also
varies.”412
For example, since most public education is provided not by municipal
governments but by independent school districts, municipal spending on education may
not be a conceptually or methodologically meaningful construct in most cities and
towns.413
The processes by which municipal leaders would be expected to influence, or
channel resident views concerning, spending that they do not oversee directly are
particularly unclear. Similarly, studies that hypothesize- and conclude- that most
municipalities spend little on public welfare might more thoroughly outline the basis for
the hypothesis that municipal governments would assume significant public welfare
responsibilities, given that this function is typically the responsibility of county
governments and that most states and local governments have significantly curtailed their
own-funded General Assistance programs in recent decades.414
As Sharp and Maynard-
Moody write, “there is a certain irony in the fact that such a variety of competing theories
are available to account for variation in one of the least extensive functions of local
88
government, welfare activity,” which, as they note, is “not among the common functions
of city governments.”415
In addition, the aggregate social welfare category may not be an analytically
simple one to model if one chooses to employ data on the spending of a single unit of
government, as expenditures in the primary areas of social welfare policy (education,
housing and community development, public health, hospitals, and public welfare) tend
to be divided among different units of local government, not centralized in one.416
While
some scholars of local public finance have opted to address variation by examining only
“core services,” those common to the governments included in their analyses, this seems
intractable in research on social welfare, as inter and intra-state differences in the
governmental units responsible for social welfare policy likely preclude a common
“core.” 417
Since any one of the five policy domains comprising the social welfare
construct might be provided by different local governments in different cities, aggregate
social welfare analyses of single governments will exclude spending that is not
administered by those units. Scholars may need to examine each policy area- education,
public health, hospitals, housing and community development, and public welfare-
separately, using the unit of government most likely to be responsible for it, and construct
a coherent “story” regarding the local social welfare role from these distinct findings.418
Of course, doing so does not address the division of responsibilities between local
governments or how the behavior of one might affect the decisions of another, nor will
focusing on any one unit encompass all local spending in a given social welfare domain.
While county government may be the dominant administrator of a given type of social
welfare, such as public health, municipal governments also could choose to allocate
89
funding to that function if they have compelling reason to do so, though one still should
expect that governments with more functional authority will have greater expenditures.419
Nonetheless, there is little work that examines how local officials’ policy
decisions interact to influence the expenditures of overlapping governments, such as how
the amount a municipal government spends on a given policy domain might be affected
by the extent to which a county does so.420
In one of the few studies to address policy
fragmentation and the only work that includes substantive theorizing on the issue, Sharp
and Maynard-Moody conclude that cities tend not to spend funds on public welfare if the
state and county have already done so, as city policymakers view public welfare
functions as having been “taken care of” by these other governments.421
They also
reiterate Liebert’s (1974)’s claim that “spending on most major municipal expenditure
items is determined less by community policy commitments than by whether city hall, a
county, a special district or a state.”422
If this assertion is even broadly accurate, studies
of local social welfare policy that have not incorporated variations in local governments’
responsibilities may be on less than solid empirical ground.423
Alternatively, Volden
hypothesizes that policymakers might spend funds on a policy area that already is
supported by another unit of government if they perceive political gains from doing so,
though this may depend on the extent to which local officials have both authority and the
ability to access funds to achieve these policy aims.424
Due to the limited evidence on
these key questions, “future studies breaking down expenditures by policy area and
determining the degree of joint provision within those areas would advance our
understanding” of how governments interact.425
90
A more thorough grasp of the fragmentation of social welfare provision also
might lead to more firmly-grounded expectations regarding the relationship of resident
preferences and local governments’ social welfare spending.426
For example, Mullin and
Hughes challenge the view that the “city,” as equated with the municipal government,
“defines the political community,” at the local level, writing that in order to understand
local participation, scholars should broaden their focus beyond general purpose entities
and examine the other governments that provide local services. “Does informal political
community generally follow municipal boundary lines, or do the boundaries of school
and special districts also influence how people interact and engage with politics?”427
If
their question is answered with the rhetorical “yes,” future work could explore the ways
in which residents convey their preferences to policymakers, and the extent to which
policymakers are able to respond, when services are fragmented.428
Though it seems
uncontroversial to suggest that, in a democratic system, policy should represent public
preferences, fragmentation may limit to the extent to which it does so in practice, as a
larger number of multi-purpose jurisdictions increases the participation costs to local
residents and can lessen citizen awareness of which local government oversees a given
function.429
Accordingly, future studies could examine the extent to which increases in
service fragmentation might weaken the responsiveness of local policy.430
Due to the
challenges of linking Census of Governments spending data with information on local
service boundaries and incorporating the “detailed, textured focus on the nature of
specific public goods and policy problems” that, as Mullin and Hughes assert, is required
to develop complete theories of how local fragmentation affects policy outcomes, studies
of relatively small numbers of communities may be necessary at first.431
Scholars likely
91
will continue to face tradeoffs between negotiating sources of bias in large-n data and
using smaller samples that may provide more precise but potentially less representative or
generalized information on the full scope of local social welfare provision.
In assessing the extent to which local social welfare effort responds to public
preferences, researchers also should consider the possibility that fragmentation, in and of
itself, may be influenced by intergovernmental factors: the division of social welfare
responsibilities between municipalities, counties, school districts, and special districts
may be a function of the policy choices made by federal and state policymakers who
oversee spending in a particular area, including the units of government they prefer to
fund.432
For example, the 1937 Housing Act established local public housing authorities
precisely to insulate public housing provision from municipal government control,
though this did not make the implementation of the public housing program immune to
public protest.433
If Farmer is correct in his assertion that their function as “arms” of state
government protects county governments’ leaders from some degree of public
accountability, jurisdictional choice, the assignment of social welfare responsibilities to
one form of local government over another, also may be correlated with ideology: social
welfare provision may be assigned to counties or special districts precisely because
residents are thought to be ideologically opposed to such activity and are less likely to
participate in these venues.434
The combination of the fragmentation of local services and the influence of
federal and state policy, including funded grants and the preferences they convey, thus
complicate the notion that local preferences alone influence the expenditures local
governments make on social welfare programs: though social welfare does appear to be a
92
more ideological domain than the “neutral politics of street-paving,” local residents may
compete with a variety of other voices and priorities to influence it.435
As it stands,
researchers’ varying assumptions and predictions regarding how local governments are
likely to behave have produced a rather inconclusive body of scholarship on the local
social welfare role.436
Responding to public choice may have come at the expense of
formulating additional, original theories, grounded in empirics rather than normative
predictions, that more completely explain the social welfare activities of local
governments, including the extent to which they are influenced by public preferences.437
Though my work cannot settle these questions, it is hoped that this preliminary treatment
has raised a few important issues to consider in studies that follow.
93
Appendix I. List of Fiscally Standardized Cities
(Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2015)
City State
City State
Birmingham Alabama
Minneapolis Minnesota
Mobile Alabama
St. Paul Minnesota
Montgomery Alabama
Kansas City Missouri
Anchorage Alaska
St. Louis Missouri
Mesa Arizona
Jackson Mississippi
Phoenix Arizona
Lincoln Nebraska
Tucson Arizona
Omaha Nebraska
Little Rock Arkansas
Las Vegas Nevada
Anaheim California
Reno Nevada
Bakersfield California
Albuquerque New Mexico
Fremont California
Buffalo New York
Fresno California
New York New York
Huntington
Beach California
Rochester New York
Long Beach California
Syracuse New York
Los Angeles California
Yonkers New York
Modesto California
Charlotte North
Carolina
Oakland California
Durham North
Carolina
Riverside California
Greensboro North
Carolina
Sacramento California
Raleigh North
Carolina
San Diego California
Akron Ohio
San Francisco California
Cincinnati Ohio
San Jose California
Cleveland Ohio
Santa Ana California
Columbus Ohio
Stockton California
Dayton Ohio
Aurora Colorado
Toledo Ohio
Colorado
Springs Colorado
Oklahoma
City Oklahoma
Denver Colorado
Tulsa Oklahoma
Washington DC
Portland Oregon
Ft. Lauderdale Florida
Philadelphia Pennsylvania
Hialeah Florida
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania
Jacksonville Florida
Providence Rhode Island
Miami Florida
Chattanooga Tennessee
Orlando Florida
Knoxville Tennessee
94
St. Petersburg Florida
Memphis Tennessee
Tampa Florida
Nashville Tennessee
Atlanta Georgia
Arlington Texas
Columbus Georgia
Austin Texas
Chicago Illinois
Corpus
Christi Texas
Ft. Wayne Indiana
Dallas Texas
Gary Indiana
El Paso Texas
Indianapolis Indiana
Ft. Worth Texas
Des Moines Iowa
Garland Texas
Kansas City Kansas
Houston Texas
Wichita Kansas
Lubbock Texas
Lexington Kentucky
San Antonio Texas
Louisville Kentucky
Salt Lake
City Utah
Baton Rouge Louisiana
Chesapeake Virginia
New Orleans Louisiana
Norfolk Virginia
Shreveport Louisiana
Richmond Virginia
Baltimore Maryland
Virginia
Beach Virginia
Boston Massachusetts
Seattle Washington
Springfield Massachusetts
Spokane Washington
Worcester Massachusetts
Tacoma Washington
Detroit Michigan
Madison Wisconsin
Flint Michigan
Milwaukee Wisconsin
Grand Rapids Michigan
Warren Michigan
95
Endnotes
1 H. George Frederickson and Rosemary O’Leary, “Local Government Management: Change,
Crossing Boundaries, and Reinvigorating Scholarship.” American Review of Public Administration 44, no.
45 (2014): 75.
2 Clayton P. Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy: Interest Groups and the Courts
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), xi, 190; Scott L. Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood: The
Spatial Context of Local Redistribution,” Social Science Quarterly 90, no. 3 (2009): 516-517.
3 Brian Adams, Citizen Lobbyists: Local Efforts to Influence Public Policy (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2007): 28-29; Katherine Baicker, Jeffrey Clemens, and Monica Singhal, “Fiscal
Federalism in the United States,” Harvard University and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
working paper, June 2010: 1, 10; Sang Ok Choi, Sang-Seok Bae, Sung-Wook Kwon and Richard Feiock,
“County Limits: Policy Types and Expenditure Priorities,” American Review of Public Administration 40,
no. 1 (2008): 30; Michael Craw, “Overcoming City Limits: Vertical and Horizontal Models of Local
Redistributive Policy Making,” Social Science Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2006): 361, 362; Michael Craw,
“Deciding to Provide: Local Decisions on Providing Social Welfare,” American Journal of Political
Science 54, no. 4 (2010): 906-908; Jayce L. Farmer, “County Government Choices for Redistributive
Services,” Urban Affairs Review 47, no. 1 (2011): 61-62; Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko, “Do
Political Parties Matter? Evidence from U.S. Cities,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 124, no. 1 (2009):
402-403; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 8; Zoltan Hajnal and Jessica Trounstine,
“Uneven Democracy: Turnout, Minority Interests, and Local Government Spending,” unpublished
manuscript (undated): 8; Zoltan L. Hajnal and Jessica Trounstine, “Who or What Governs? The Effects of
Economics, Politics, Institutions, and Needs on Local Spending,” American Politics Research 20, no. 10
(2010): 2-4; Nathan J. Kelly, “Political Choice, Public Policy, and Distributional Outcomes,” American
Journal of Political Science 49, no. 4 (2005): 867; David Lowery, “A Transactions Cost Model of
Metropolitan Governance: Allocation Versus Redistribution in Urban America,” Journal of Public
Administration Research and Theory 10, no.1 (2000): 62; Stephen Macedo, ed., Democracy at Risk: How
Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do About It (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 71; Megan Mullin and Sara Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” in Oxford
Handbook of State and Local Government, ed. Donald P. Haider-Markel (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 3 ; Wallace E. Oates, “The Many Faces of the Tiebout Model,” in The Tiebout Model at Fifty:
Essays in Public Economics in Honor of Wallace Oates, ed. William A. Fischel (Cambridge, MA, Lincoln
Institute of Land Policy, 2006): 41; Elizabeth Maggie Penn, “Institutions and Sorting in a Model of
Metropolitan Fragmentation,” Complexity 9, no. 5 (2004): 63; Paul Peterson, City Limits (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981): 64; Richard C. Schragger, “Is a Progressive City Possible: Reviving
Urban Liberalism for the Twenty-First Century,” Harvard Law & Policy Review 7 (2013): 232, 235, 236;
Harold Wolman, “What Cities Do: How Much Does Urban Policy Matter?” in Oxford Handbook of
Urban Politics, ed. Peter John, Karen Mossberger, and Susan E. Clarke (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012): 8; Anaid Yerena, “The Impact of Advocacy Organizations on Low-Income Housing Policy in
U.S. Cities,” Urban Affairs Review (2014, ahead of print): 8.
4 Adams, Citizen Lobbyists, 27; Kendra Bischoff, “School District Fragmentation and Racial
Residential Segregation: How Do Boundaries Matter?” Urban Affairs Review 44, no. 2 (2008): 184-185;
Eric J. Brunner, “School Quality, School Choice, and Residential Mobility,” Education, Land, and
Location: Proceedings of the 2013 Land Policy Conference, ed. Gregory K. Ingram and Daphne A. Kenyon
(Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2014): 62; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 963; Nestor
Davidson, Cooperative Localism: Federal Local Cooperation in an Era of State Sovereignty,” University of
Colorado Legal Studies Research Paper no. 7-13 and Virginia Law Review 93 (2007): 1006-1007; Peter
Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001): 97; Christopher B. Goodman, “Local Government
96
Fragmentation and the Local Public Sector: A Panel Data Analysis,” unpublished working paper, Rutgers,
The State University of New Jersey, 2012: 1; Rebecca Hendrick, Benedict Jimenez and Kamna Lal, “Does
Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending?” Urban Affairs Review 47, no. 4 (2012): 467;
Michael Howell-Moroney, “The Tiebout Hypothesis 50 Years Later: Lessons and Lingering Challenges for
Metropolitan Governance in the 21st Century,” Public Administration Review 68, no. 1 (2008): 97, 100; Iris
Hui, “Who Is Your Preferred Neighbor? Partisan Residential Preferences and Neighborhood Satisfaction,”
American Politics Research 41, no. 6 (2013): 1000; Benedict S. Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored?
Interjurisdictional Competition and the Budgetary Choices of Poor and Affluent Municipalities,” Public
Administration Review 74, no. 2 (2014): 246-247; Christine A. Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space:
How Metropolitan Configurations Influence Central City Policy Responsiveness,” Review of Policy
Research 23, no. 6 (2006): 1163; Larita Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts in American
Government,” Accounting and the Public Interest 11, no. 1 (2011): 58; Macedo, Democracy at Risk, 76;
Stephen Macedo and Christopher F. Karpowitz, “The Local Roots of American Inequality,” PS: Political
Science and Politics, 39, no. 1 (2006): 59-64; 61; Barbara Coyle McCabe and Richard C. Feiock. “Nested
Levels of Institutions: State Rules and City Property Taxes,” Urban Affairs Review 40, no. 5 (2005): 642;
Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 517-518; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 1, 3; Oates,
“The Many Faces of the Tiebout Model,” 22; Jessica Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in
Cities,” Annual Review of Political Science 13 (2010): 411; Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 9.
5 Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 910; Katherine Levine Einstein and Vladimir Kogan, “Pushing the
City Limits: Policy Responsiveness in Municipal Government,” unpublished manuscript, 2013: 7; Gillette,
Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, xi, 8; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 249;
Macedo, Democracy at Risk, 71; Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 522; Peterson, City Limits, 32,
48, 51; Schragger, “Is a Progressive City Possible,” 235-236; Trounstine, “Representation and
Accountability in Cities,” 408.
6 Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 2, 3, 8, 33; Christopher
R. Berry, Imperfect Union: Representation and Taxation in Multilevel Governments (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009): 188; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 361-362; Craw, “Deciding to
Provide,” 908; Michael Craw, “Caught at the Bottom? Redistribution and Local Government in an Era of
Devolution,” State and Local Government Review 47, no. 1 (2015): 69; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and
Swanstrom, Place Matters, 145-147; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 78; Howell-Moroney, “The
Tiebout Hypothesis 50 Years Later,” 98-99; Dale Krane, Carol Ebdon, and John R. Bartle, “Devolution,
Fiscal Federalism, and Changing Patterns of Municipal Revenues: The Mismatch between Theory and
Reality,” University of Nebraska Omaha Public Administration Faculty Publications, Paper 58, 2004: 6, 9;
McCabe and Feiock, “Nested Levels of Institutions, 643; Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 520-
521; Nechyba, Thomas J. , “The Efficiency and Equity of Tiebout in the United States: Taxes, Services,
and Property Values,” Land Policies and Their Outcomes (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land
Policy, 2007), 73; Christine Kelleher Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local Government,” State and
Local Government Review 42, no. 2 (2010): 144-145; Jason Sorens, “Fiscal Federalism, Jurisdictional
Competition, and the Size of Government,” Constitutional Political Economy 25, no. 4 (2014): 371;
Yerena, “The Impact of Advocacy Organizations,” 7.
7 Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 8, 33; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 10, 24; Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: The
Political Economy of Urban America, 6th
ed. (New York: Pearson Education, 2008): 313; Julia Lynch “A
Cross-National Perspective on the American Welfare State,” in Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social Policy, ed.
Daniel Beland, Christopher Howard, and Kimberly J. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014),
120; U.S. Census Bureau, “Chapter 5- Expenditure,” Government Finance and Employment Classification
Manual 2006. Washington, DC: Author, October 2008): 19, 37, 45, 50-67; U.S. Census Bureau, Historical
Overview of U.S. Census Bureau Data Collection Activities about Governments, 1850 to 2005
(Washington, DC: Author, June 2, 2008), 3, 4, 6, 11; Michael J. Wasylenko, “Commentary,” in Municipal
Revenues and Land Policies: Proceedings of the 2009 Land Policy Conference (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln
Institute of Land Policy, 2010), 497. Though not all studies of local social welfare activity include
education, Hajnal and Trounstine find that education expenditure is “governed by strikingly similar factors
97
as other redistributive spending,” which warrants its inclusion here. Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What
Governs,” 24.
8 Author’s calculations based on Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 68-69.
9 Berry, Imperfect Union, 107; U.S. Census Bureau, “Expenditure,” 19, 37, 45, 50-67; U.S.
Census Bureau. Glossary of Selected Terms Used in U.S. Census Bureau Publication on Government
Finances, Annual Survey of Government Finances and Census of Governments (Washington, DC: Author,
December 17, 2008): 3, 4, 6, 11; U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Surveys of State and Local Government
Finances, and Census of Government Finance, Historical Aggregates of State and Local Government
Finance Data, Important Notes (Washington, DC: Author, July 16, 2014), 3, 4, 6, 11.
10 Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 361; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 906, Craw, “Caught at the
Bottom,” 69; Michael Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation and Second-Order Devolution on Efficacy of
Local Public Welfare Policy,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 45, no. 2 (2015): 273; Dreier,
Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 146, 147; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local
Democracy, 41; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 15, 16; Elaine B. Sharp, Does Local
Government Matter? How Urban Policies Shape Civic Engagement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012): 30; Elaine B. Sharp and Steven Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,”
American Journal of Political Science 35, no. 4 (1991): 935.
11 Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 1; Craw, “Overcoming
City Limits,” 362; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 908; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy,
10, 50; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 8; Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 517,
520.
12
Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 61; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 302; Minkoff,
“Minding Your Neighborhood,” 533-4; Peterson, City Limits, 20, 21, 93, 147; Schragger, “Is a Progressive
City Possible,” 232, 235; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 29; Sorens, “Fiscal Federalism,” 357-358;
Clarence N. Stone, “Rethinking the Policy-Politics Connection,” Policy Studies 26, no. 3-4 (2005): 241,
242.
13
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 20; Choi, Bae, Kwon
and Feiock, “County Limits,” 37; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 10, 11, 43; Hajnal
and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 4; Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 523, 532, 534;
Nechyba, “The Efficiency and Equity of Tiebout,” 69, 77; Peterson, City Limits, 43.
14
Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 41.
15
Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 41; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven
Democracy,” 9; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 4; Christine A. Kelleher and David
Lowery, “Central City Size, Metropolitan Institutions, and Political Participation,” British Journal of
Political Science 39, no. 1 (2009): 70.
16
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1162.
17
Samuel J. Abrams and Morris P. Fiorina, “The ‘Big Sort’ That Wasn't: A Skeptical
Reexamination.” PS: Political Science and Politics 45, no. 2 (2012): 204, 206; Brady A. Baybeck, “Local
Political Participation,” in Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government, ed. Donald P. Haider- Markel
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8; Katherine Levine Einstein, “Divided Regions: Race,
Political Segregation, and the Polarization of Metropolitan America,” American Political Science
Association 2011 Annual Meeting Paper, August 13, 2011: 37; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6;
Peterson, City Limits, 17; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 414.
98
18
Berry, Imperfect Union, 22, 154; Jaclyn Bunch, “Does Local Autonomy Enhance
Representation? The Influence of Home Rule on County Expenditures,” State and Local Government
Review 46, no. 2 (2014): 109; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1012; Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing the
City Limits” (2011), 5-6; Zoltan Hajnal and Jessica Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived
Inequities in Local Politics,” Political Research Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2014): 59; Kelleher, “Regional Place
and City Space,” 1159, 1162, 1176; Robert C. Lowry, “Public Welfare Spending and Private Social
Services in U.S. States,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 13, no. 1 (2012): 6; Palus, “Responsiveness in
American Local Government,” 135; Schragger, “Is a Progressive City Possible,” 237, 240; Chris
Tausanovich and Christopher Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government,” unpublished
working paper, 2014: 1; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 415-416; Charles
Williams and J. Mark Pendras, “Urban Stasis and the Politics of Alternative Development in the United
States.” Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Publications, Paper 306, University of Washington, 2013: 296.
19
Author’s note; see also Berry, Imperfect Union, 145, Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place
Matters, 45.
20
Berry, Imperfect Union, 145.
21
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 23; Baybeck, “Local
Political Participation,” 10; Berry, Imperfect Union, 170, 192; Caughey and Warshaw, “Dynamic
Estimation,” 14; Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing the City Limits” (2013) 8; Gerber, Elisabeth R. and Daniel
J. Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter: Estimating the Effect of Mayoral Partisanship on City Policy,”
American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 2 (2011): 331; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Understanding and
Identifying Perceived Inequities,” 57, 59; Zoltan Hajnal and Jessica Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban
Politics? Race, Class, Ideology, and the Urban Vote,” Urban Affairs Review 50, no. 1 (2014): 66; Mullin
and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6, 9, 10; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 27; Chris Tausanovich
and Christopher Warshaw, “Measuring Constituents’ Policy Preferences in Congress, State Legislatures,
and Cities,” Journal of Politics, 75, no. 2 (2013): 335, 337, 339, 340; Tausanovich and Warshaw ,
“Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 1, 51-52, Chris Tausanovich and Christopher
Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government,” American Political Science Review 108, no. 3
(2014): 605; Jessica Trounstine, “Living Apart: The Role of Public Spending in Metropolitan Area
Segregation,” unpublished Manuscript, University of California, Merced, undated: 3; Trounstine,
“Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 410.
22
Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 1, 5-6; Berry, Imperfect Union, 64; Macedo and
Karpowitz, “The Local Roots of American Inequality,” 59-60.
23
Adams, Citizen Lobbyists, 27; Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United
States,” 21; Einstein, “Divided Regions,” 8; Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing the City Limits” (2013), 8;
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 14; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 7, 12;
Hajnal and Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics,” 64, 66; Kelleher and Lowery, “Central City Size,”
74; Michael A. Pagano, “Cities’ Shifting Fiscal Circumstances and Challenges,” Presentation prepared for
the National Association of Regional Councils, February 10, 2015: no page numbers; Jessica Trounstine,
“All Politics is Local: The Reemergence of the Study of City Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 3
(2009): 611; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 414, 415, 418; Wolman, “What
Cities Do,” 12.
24
Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing the City Limits” (2013), 3; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City
Space,” 1162; Macedo and Karpowitz, “The Local Roots of American Inequality,” 62; Mullin and Hughes,
“Local Boundaries,” 9; Jonathan Rodden , “The Geographic Distribution of Political Preferences,” Annual
Review of Political Science 13 (2010): 333; Trounstine, “All Politics is Local,” 613; Trounstine,
“Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 416.
99
25
Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 416; also noted by Kelleher,
“Regional Place and City Space,” 1162.
26
Robert Agranoff, “Local Governments in Multilevel Systems: Emergent Public Administration
Challenges,” American Review of Public Administration 44, no. 4 (2014): 50S; Baybeck, “Local Political
Participation,” 4; Berry, Imperfect Union, 1; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 965; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 15; Benedict S. Jimenez, “Externalities in the Fragmented
Metropolis: Local Institutional Choices and the Efficiency-Equity Trade-Off,” American Review of Public
Administration (2014, ahead of print): 6; Christine R. Martell and Adam Greenwade, “Profiles of Local
Government Finance,” in Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government Finance, ed. Robert P. Ebel
and John E. Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2; Mullin and Hughes, “Local
Boundaries,” 1.
27
Berry, Imperfect Union, 42, 43, 188; Goodman, “Local Government Fragmentation” (2012), 2;
Christopher B. Goodman, “Local Government Fragmentation and the Local Public Sector: A Panel Data
Analysis.” Public Finance Review 43, no. 1 (2015): 83; Christopher Hoene and Michael A. Pagano, Cities
& State Fiscal Structure, Research Report on America’s Cities (Washington, DC: National League of
Cities, 2008), 9; Jimenez, “Externalities in the Fragmented Metropolis,” 6; James H. Lewis and David K.
Hamilton, “Race and Regionalism: The Structure of Local Government and Racial Disparity,” Urban
Affairs Review 47, no. 3 (2012): 357; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 1, 6; Sarah Reckhow, “The
Delegated State and the Politics of Federal Grants,” unpublished manuscript, Michigan State University,
undated: 14; Elaine B. Sharp, “Local Government, Social Programs, and Political Participation: A Test of
Policy-Centered Theory,” State and Local Government Review 41, no. 3 (2009): 184.
28 Frederickson and O’Leary, “Local Government Management,” 65; also noted in Berry,
Imperfect Union, 42-43.
29
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 2; Berry, Imperfect
Union, 7, 76, 89, 179, 188; Goodman, “Local Government Fragmentation” (2015), 83; Goodman, “Local
Government Fragmentation,” (2012), 2, 16.
30
Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 4; Ann O’M. Bowman and Richard C. Kearney,
“Second Order Devolution: Data and Doubt,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 41, no. 4 (2011): 564;
Ann O’M. Bowman and Richard C. Kearney, “Transforming State-Local Relations,” paper prepared for the
Deil Wright Symposium, 2014 Annual Conference of the American Society for Public Administration
(Washington, DC, March 14-18, 2014), 2; David K. Hamilton, David Y. Miller, and Jerry Paytas,
“Exploring the Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions of the Governing of Metropolitan Regions,” Urban
Affairs Review 40, no. 2 (2004): 151; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 251; Christiana K.
McFarland and Christopher W. Hoene, Cities and State Fiscal Structure 2015 (Washington, DC: National
League of Cities, Center for City Solutions and Applied Research, 2015), 3; Peterson, City Limits, 10, 11,
50; U.S. Census Bureau, 2007 Census of Governments, Individual State Descriptions: 2007 (Washington,
DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2012), xi; U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Aggregates, 8; U.S.
Census Bureau Governments Division, Governments Integrated Directory, Technical Documentation
(Washington, DC: Author, 2007), 1, 2, 5.
31 Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation,” 273; Goodman, “Local Government Fragmentation”
(2012), 9; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 14; 28, 29; Lowry, “Public Welfare Spending,”
10; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 23. For an exception, see Minkoff, “Minding Your
Neighborhood,” 526.
32
Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 313; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government
Finance,” 3; Trounstine, “Living Apart,” 15; U.S. Census Bureau, Lists and Structure of Governments-
Population of Interest: School Districts (Washington, DC: Author, May 31, 2012), 1; U.S. Census Bureau,
State & Local Government Finances by Level and Type of Government and by State, 2007 data (2015).
100
33
J. Edwin Benton, “An Assessment of Research on American Counties,” Public Administration
Review 65, no. 4 (2005): 462; J. Edwin Benton, “Trends in Local Government Revenues: The Old, the
New, and the Future,” in Municipal Revenues and Land Policies: Proceedings of the 2009 Land Policy
Conference, ed. Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,
2010), 82; Ann O’M. Bowman and Richard C. Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing Power and Authority?
Perceptions of Local Government Actors,” Urban Affairs Review 48, no. 4 (2012): 10; Choi, Bae, Kwon
and Feiock, “County Limits,” 29; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 61, 66; Frederickson and
O’Leary, “Local Government Management,” 65; Sharp, “Local Government, Social Programs, and
Political Participation,” 184; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 30; U.S. Census Bureau, State &
Local Government Finances by Level and Type of Government and by State, 2007 data.
34
U.S. Census Bureau, State & Local Government Finances by Level and Type of Government
and by State, 2007 data (2015).
35
Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 526; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6, 9,
10.
36
Berry, Imperfect Union, 25, 89, 188; Goodman, “Local Government Fragmentation” (2012), 2,
16; Nechyba, “The Efficiency and Equity of Tiebout,” 74; Peterson, City Limits, 10, 501.
37
Bickers and Stein, “Interlocal Cooperation,” 808; Bischoff, “School District Fragmentation,” 193; Craw,
“Caught at the Bottom,” 71; Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation,” 271, 281; Einstein, “Divided Regions,”
22; Goodman, “Local Government Fragmentation” (2012), 4, 8; Goodman, “Local Government
Fragmentation” (2015), 84, 86; Hamilton, Miller and Paytas, “Exploring the Horizontal and Vertical
Dimensions,” 159; Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local
Spending,” 470, 480, 489; Rebecca Hendrick and Yu Shi, “Macro-Level Determinants of Local
Government Interaction: How Metropolitan Regions in the United States Compare.” Urban Affairs Review
47, no. 4 (2012) 2, 4, 19; Jimenez, “Externalities,” 11; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 247;
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1167; Kelleher and Lowery, “Central City Size,” 61; Jae Hong
Kim and Nathan Jurey, “Local and Regional Governance Structures: Fiscal, Economic, Equity and
Environmental Outcomes,” Journal of Planning Literature 28, no. 2 (2013): 115; Palus, “Responsiveness
in American Local Government,” 141; Wolman , “What Cities Do,” 11.
38
Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order Devolution,” 568; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,”
368; Goodman, “Local Government Fragmentation” (2015), 92; Goodman, “Local Government
Fragmentation” (2012), 7; Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase
Local Spending,” 478; Lowry, “Public Welfare Spending,” 10; Barbara Coyle McCabe, “State Institutions
and City Property Taxes: Revisiting the Effects of the Tax Revolt, “Journal of Public Budgeting,
Accounting, and Financial Management 12, no. 2 (2000): 209; Minkoff , “Minding Your Neighborhood,”
526; Scott L. Minkoff, “The Proximate Polity: Spatial Context and Political Risk in Local Developmental
Goods Provision,” Urban Affairs Review 48, no. 3 (2012): 359; Peterson, City Limits, 51; Sharp and
Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 943; Urban-Brookings Institute Tax Policy
Center, State & Local Finance Data Query System, 2015 (online notes). Prior to 1941, the Census Bureau
surveys of local government finance actually did combine the financial data of both municipal governments
and overlying governments, save county governments, that served city residents, in line with the data I
employ in my analysis. U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Overview, 4; U.S. Census Bureau, City
Government Finances Data User Notes, Annual Survey of Government Finances and Census of
Governments (Washington, DC: Author, August 26, 2008), 3.
39
Chernick, Langley and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances, 12; Craw, “Overcoming
City Limits,” 368.
40
Lowry, “Public Welfare Spending,” 6; also noted in Minkoff , “Minding Your Neighborhood,”
519 and “The Proximate Polity,” 359 and Peterson, City Limits, 51. However, research based on
aggregated data generally has been less evident in recent years.
101
41 Benton, “An Assessment of Research,” 463; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 375; Craw,
“Deciding to Provide,” 910; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 15, 16; Mullin and Hughes, “Local
Boundaries,” 6; Peterson, City Limits, 11; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 413,
417; Craig Volden, “Intergovernmental Grants: A Formal Model of Interrelated National and Subnational
Political Decisions,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 37, no. 2 (2007): 210.
42
Howard Chernick, Adam H. Langley, and Andrew Reschovsky, Comparing Central City
Finances Using Fiscally Standardized Cities. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper (WP14HC2)
(Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2014), 2, 6, 7; Adam H. Langley, Methodology Used to
Create Fiscally Standardized Cities Database (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper
(WP13AL1) (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2013), 1, 2.
43
Because the data I employ aggregates the expenditures of all local governments that operate
within the municipal boundary, I cannot assess the impact of any individual government that operates
within the municipal area, such as the percentage of spending made by the county government. It also is
possible that the number of local governments within a municipal area influences spending; that when
responsibilities are divided among a greater number of governments, total expenditures may increase, as
some prior research indicates (e.g. Berry, Imperfect Union, 24, 101, 129, 172, 181; Goodman, “Local
Government Fragmentation” (2015), 85, 87, 89, 90; Goodman, “Local Government Fragmentation” (2012),
14; Stephen Slivinski, “Out of Sight: How Special Taxing Districts Circumvent Spending Limits and
Decrease Accountability in Government,” Goldwater Institute Policy Report No. 265 (Phoenix, AZ:
Goldwater Institute, 2014),1, 4, 12, 15).
44
Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 365; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1003; Krane, Ebdon
and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10, 16; Michael A. Pagano, “Cities’ Shifting Fiscal Circumstances and
Challenges.” Presentation prepared for the National Association of Regional Councils, February 10, 2015:
no page numbers.
45
Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 78; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10, 16.
46
Agranoff, “Local Governments in Multilevel Systems,” 57S.
47 Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 1; Berry, Imperfect
Union, 5, 188; Brunner, “School Quality,” 62; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 9; Wolman, “What
Cities Do,” 11; Yerena, “The Impact of Advocacy Organizations,” 8.
48 Adams, Citizen Lobbyists, 27; Berry, Imperfect Union, 189; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 910;
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1006-1007; William A. Fischel, “Footloose at Fifty: An Introduction to
the Tiebout Anniversary Essays,” in The Tiebout Model at Fifty: Essays in Public Economics in Honor of
Wallace Oates, ed. William A. Fischel (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2006), 12;
Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 34, 46; Kelleher and Lowery, “Central City Size,” 65,
66; Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 58; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 5;
Macedo, Democracy at Risk, 76; Macedo and Karpowitz, “The Local Roots of American Inequality,” 62;
Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 2; Oates, “The Many Faces of the Tiebout Model,” 22, 29; J. Eric
Oliver and Shang E. Ha, “Vote Choice in Suburban Elections,” American Political Science Review 101, no
3 (2007): 393; Sorens, “Fiscal Federalism,” 208, 209; Dean Stansel, “Interjurisdictional Competition and
Local Government Spending in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Public Finance Review, 34, no. 2 (2006): 173;
Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 9.
49
Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 35; Robert P. Inman and Daniel L.
Rubinfeld, “Economics of Federalism,” Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics, 2014: 4; Minkoff, “The
Proximate Polity,”355; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 2-4, Trounstine, “Representation and
Accountability in Cities,” 408.
102
50 Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 1, 10; Bunch, “Does
Local Autonomy Enhance Representation,” 108; Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 31; Craw
“Overcoming City Limits,” 368; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 906; Christopher Ellis and Christopher
Faricy, “Social Policy and Public Opinion: How the Ideological Direction of Spending Influences Public
Mood,” Journal of Politics 73, no. 4 (2011): 1097; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, xi,
8; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 8, 23; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,”
9, 10, 24; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 5; Lowery, “A Transactions Cost Model,” 62; Minkoff,
“Minding Your Neighborhood,” 519; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 3; Oates, “The Many Faces
of the Tiebout Model,” 41; Mark Carl Rom; “Social Welfare Policy,” in Oxford Handbook of State and
Local Government, ed. Donald P. Haider-Markel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3;
Schragger, “Is a Progressive City Possible,” 235; Sharp, “Local Government, Social Programs, and
Political Participation,” 188-189; David L. Sjoquist and Andrew V. Stephenson, “An Analysis of
Alternative Revenue Sources for Local Governments,” in Municipal Revenues and Land Policies:
Proceedings of the 2009 Land Policy Conference, ed. Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong (Cambridge,
MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010), 438; Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 8.
51 Bunch, “Does Local Autonomy Enhance Representation,” 109; Craw , “Overcoming City
Limits,” 364; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 61; Ferreira and Gyourko, “Do Political Parties
Matter,” 403; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 9; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle,
“Devolution,” 5; Lowery, “A Transactions Cost Model,” 69-70; Macedo, Democracy at Risk, 71; Palus,
“Responsiveness in American Local Government,” 134; Wendy Plotkin, “Urban Public Policy: A Plague
Upon the Cities?” Journal of Urban History 29, no. 6: 775; Craig Volden, “Intergovernmental Political
Competition in American Federalism,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 2 (2005): 328.
52 Bunch, “Does Local Autonomy Enhance Representation,” 109; Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock,
“County Limits,” 30; Fischel, “Footloose at Fifty,” 7; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 8,
9; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 248; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 322; Krane, Ebdon
and Bartle, “Devolution,”4-5; Lowry, “Public Welfare Spending,” 6; Peterson, City Limits, 41, 43; Stone,
“Rethinking the Policy-Politics Connection,” 242; David E. Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers to
Local Governments,” in Municipal Revenues and Land Policies: Proceedings of the 2009 Land Policy
Conference, ed. Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,
2010), 59.
53 Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 4; Bunch, “Does Local
Autonomy Enhance Representation,” 109; Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits” 30; Dreier,
Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 207, 208; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local
Democracy, 74; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 302-303; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,”
1161; Lowery, “A Transactions Cost Model,” 70; Peterson, City Limits, 4, 20, 21, 71, 115, 121, 183;
Plotkin, “Urban Public Policy,” 775; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 29; Stone, “Rethinking the
Policy-Politics Connection,” 241-242; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 413.
54
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 3, 4, 8, 33; Craw,
“Caught at the Bottom,” 69; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, xi; Howell-Moroney,
“The Tiebout Hypothesis 50 Years Later,” 98, 99; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 6-9; Peterson,
City Limits, 34.
55
Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 362; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 6;
Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 516, 517; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1159;
Schragger, “Is a Progressive City Possible,” 234.
56
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 6; Berry, Imperfect
Union, 106; Ronald C. Fisher, “The State of State and Local Government Finance,” Federal Reserve Bank
of St. Louis. Regional Economic Development 6, no. 1 (2010): 4, 6; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What
103
Governs,” 24; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 4; Leslie McCall and
Lane Kenworthy, “Americans’ Social Policy Preferences in the Era of Rising Inequality,” Perspectives on
Politics 7, no. 3 (2009): 467.
57
Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 68-69. Note that direct expenditures consist of all expenditures
made by local governments, including those they finance through grants from federal and state government,
not merely those they fund through locally-raised sources, or “own-source” revenue. U.S. Census Bureau,
Historical Aggregates, 3; Urban Institute State and Local Finance Initiative, State and Local Expenditures
(Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2015), 1.
58 Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 362; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 10,
84; Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 516, 517, 519; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 30;
Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 935.
59
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 25; Berry, Imperfect
Union, 25, 188; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1006-1007; Goodman, “Local Government
Fragmentation” (2015), 83; Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase
Local Spending,” 468; Nechyba, “The Efficiency and Equity of Tiebout,” 74; Wolman, “What Cities Do,”
1, 10.
60
Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 4; Benton, “An Assessment of Research,” 66;
Bischoff, “School District Fragmentation,” 206; Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does Local Government
Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 468; Jack R. Huddleston, An Introduction to Local Government
Budgets: A Guide for Planners, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Workshop on Curriculum for Graduate
Planning Programs: The Nuts and Bolts of Development Finance (Cambridge and Madison: Lincoln
Institute of Land Policy and University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2005), 2; Sharp, “Local Government,
Social Programs, and Political Participation,” 184; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 18. For
example, in a 2005 paper, Huddleston (An Introduction, 2) found that county governments allocated
approximately one quarter of their total expenditures to “social services and income maintenance.”
61
Bowman and Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing Power and Authority,” 4; Bunch, “Does Local
Autonomy Enhance Representation,” 107; Jered B. Carr, “Local Government Autonomy and Reliance on
Special Districts: A Reassessment,” Political Research Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2006): 482; Jimenez,
“Externalities,” 10; McCabe and Feiock, “Nested Levels of Institutions,” 637; McFarland and Hoene,
Cities and State Fiscal Structure, 3; Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 48.
62
Benton, “Trends in Local Government Revenues,” 83, 84, 91; Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing the
City Limits” (2013), 6; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 5; Hoene and Pagano, Cities
& State Fiscal Structure (2008), 2; Huddleston, An Introduction, 31; Michael B. Katz, “Was Government
the Solution or the Problem? The Role of the State in the History of American Social Policy,” Theoretical
Sociology 39 (2010): 487-502: 493; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10, 15; Macedo, Democracy
at Risk, 115; McCabe, “State Institutions,” 209; McCabe and Feiock, “Nested Levels of Institutions,” 639;
Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 8; Lori Riverstone-Newell, “When Local Activism Challenges
Higher Authority,” Renegade Cities, Public Policy, and the Dilemmas of Federalism (Boulder, CO: First
Forum Press, 2014), 3;Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government,” (2014a), 3;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 606; Wildasin,
“Intergovernmental Transfers,” 50.
63
Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 5; Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order Devolution,”
575; Robert J. Eiger III, “Casting Light on Shadow Government: A Typological Approach,” Journal of
Public Administration Research and Theory 16, no. 1 (2005): 127; Fisher, “The State of State and Local
Government Finance,” 9; Huddleston, An Introduction, 31; Langley, Methodology, 5; Macedo, Democracy
at Risk, 89; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 2-3; Barbara Coyle McCabe,
“Special-District Formation among the States,” State and Local Government Review 32, no. 2 (2000): 121,
104
128; U.S. Census Bureau Governments Division, Governments Integrated Directory 2007: 7; U.S. Census
Bureau, Historical Aggregates, 8.
64
Brady Baybeck, “Sorting Out the Competing Effects of Racial Context,” Journal of Politics 68,
no. 2 (2006): 386; Lewis and Hamilton, “Race and Regionalism,” 357; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of
Local Government Finance,” 2.
65
U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census,
Geographic Areas Reference Manual, Chapter 9: Places (Washington DC: Author, 1994): 30.
66 Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 2; National League of Cities,
Local U.S. Governments (Washington, DC: Author, 2013), 1-2.
67
National League of Cities, Local US Governments, 1-2; U.S. Census Bureau, Individual State
Descriptions: 2007), v; U.S. Census Bureau Governments Division, Governments Integrated Directory
2007: 1.
68 National League of Cities, List of Consolidated City-County Governments (Washington, DC:
Author, 2013) 1; U.S Census Bureau, “Geographic Terms and Concepts— Consolidated City,” 2010
Geographic Terms and Concepts (Washington, DC: author, undated), no page number; U.S. Census
Bureau., “Table 458. City Governments— Expenditures and Debt for Largest Cities: 2006,” Statistical
Abstract of the United States: 2012 (Washington, DC: Author, 2012).
69 Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 5; Bowman and Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing
Power and Authority,” 2; Bunch, “Does Local Autonomy Enhance Representation,” 106; Chernick,
Langley and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances, 6; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 912; Hajnal
and Trounstine “Uneven Democracy,” 14; Hoene and Pagano, Cities & State Fiscal Structure (2008), 2;
Christine A. Kelleher and Susan Webb Yackee, “An Empirical Assessment of Devolution’s Policy
Impact,” Policy Studies Journal 32, no. 2 (2004): 257; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 15;
Langley, Methodology, 1; Martell and Greenwade “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 2; McFarland
and Hoene, Cities and State Fiscal Structure, 3; Peterson, City Limits, 10; Sharp, “Local Government,
Social Programs, and Political Participation,” 185; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in
Municipal Government” (2014a), 26; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal
Government” (2014b), 621.
70
Richard C. Fording, Joe Soss, and Sanford F. Schram. “Devolution, Discretion, and the Effect of
Local Political Values on TANF Sanctioning,” Social Service Review 81, no. 2 (2007): 289; Linda Lobao
and David S. Kraybill, “The Emerging Roles of County Governments in Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan
Areas: Findings From a National Survey,” Economic Development Quarterly 19, no. 3 (2005): 246, 253;
Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram, “The Color of Devolution: Race, Federalism, and the
Politics of Social Control,” American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 3 (2008): 538; Wildasin,
“Intergovernmental Transfers,” 60.
71
Fisher, “The State of State and Local Government Finance,” 19; Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal,
“Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 488; Alan G. Hevesi, “Outdated
Municipal Structures: Cities, Towns, and Villages — 18th
Century Designations for 21st Century
Communities,” Local Government Issues in Focus 2, no. 3 (2006): 5; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of
Local Government Finance,” 3; McFarland and Hoene, Cities and State Fiscal Structure, 3; Mullin and
Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6, 9; Peterson, City Limits, 11; U.S. Census Bureau, Individual State
Descriptions: 2007, vii.
72 U.S. Census Bureau, Individual State Descriptions: 2007, vii.
73
U.S. Census Bureau, Individual State Descriptions: 2007, vii.
105
74
National League of Cities, Local US Governments, 3; U.S. Census Bureau, Population of
Interest: School Districts, 1; U.S. Census Bureau, Individual State Descriptions: 2007, vii.
75
U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 429. Number of Local Governments by Type: States— 2007,”
Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012 (Washington, DC: Author, 2012); U.S. Census Bureau, State
& Local Government Finances by Level and Type of Government and by State, 2007 data, no page number.
76
Ellen Salinsky, “Governmental Public Health: An Overview of State and Local Public Health
Agencies,” National Health Policy Forum Background Paper No. 77. Washington, DC: George
Washington University, 2010), 10.
77 Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 14, 28; Tausanovich and Warshaw,
“Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 26; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in
Municipal Government” (2014b), 621.
78
U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 458. City Governments- Expenditures and Debt for Largest Cities:
2006,” Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2012 (Washington, DC: Author, 2012).
79
Rebecca J. Campbell, “Leviathan and Fiscal Illusion in Local Government Overlapping
Jurisdictions,” Public Choice 120, no. 3 (2004): 2; Chernick, Langley and Reschovsky, Comparing Central
City Finances, 6; Lisbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, “Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of
Multilevel Governance,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 2 (2003): 240; Jimenez, “Separate,
Unequal, and Ignored,” 250-251; Shanthi Karuppusamy and Jered B. Carr, “Interjurisdictional Competition
and Local Public Finance: Assessing the Modifying Effects of Institutional Incentives and Fiscal
Constraints,” Urban Studies 49, no. 7 (2012): 1561; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 15; Lewis
and Hamilton, “Race and Regionalism,” 357; Minkoff , “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 526; Mullin and
Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6; Peterson, City Limits, 10; Tausanovich and Warshaw , “Representation in
Municipal Government” (2014a), 26; Tausanovich and Warshaw , “Representation in Municipal
Government” (2014b), 621.
80 For example, in a recent article, Einstein and Kogan (2015) write that the majority of the
municipalities they studied spent nothing on welfare functions, but counties, not municipal governments,
typically are responsible for administering public welfare functions. See Katherine Levine Einstein and
Vladimir Kogan, “Pushing the City Limits: Policy Responsiveness in Municipal Government,” Urban
Affairs Review (2015, ahead of print).
81
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a);
“Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 621; also see Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does
Local Government Increase Local Spending,” 503; and Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 9.
82
Berry, Imperfect Union, 7-8, 190; Stansel, “Interjurisdictional Competition,” 174.
83
Berry, Imperfect Union, 7, 190; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 39; Oates,
“The Many Faces of the Tiebout Model,” 30.
84
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 16; Craw, “Caught at
the Bottom,” 69; Fisher, “The State of State and Local Government Finance,” 6; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle,
“Devolution,” 9; Michael A. Pagano, “Creative Designs in the Patchwork Quilt of Municipal Finance,” in
Municipal Revenues and Land Policies: Proceedings of the 2009 Land Policy Conference, ed. Gregory K.
Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010), 117, 119; Urban
Institute State and Local Finance Initiative, State and Local Revenues (Washington, DC: Urban Institute,
2015), 1; Volden, “Intergovernmental Grants,” 210, 227, 228.
106
85 Benton, “Trends in Local Government Revenues,” 94, 100, 102; Judd and Swanstrom, City
Politics, 308; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 11; Urban Institute State and Local Finance
Initiative, State and Local Revenues, 4.
86
Benton, “Trends in Local Government Revenues,” 95, 100.
87
Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 69.
88
Pagano, “Creative Designs,” 128.
89
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 16; Berry, Imperfect
Union, 25, 188, 189; Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 74; Howell-Moroney, “The Tiebout Hypothesis 50
Years Later,” 100.
90
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 33-34; Berry, Imperfect
Union, 189; Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 69; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 37;
Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does Local Government Increase Local Spending,” 484; Howell-Moroney,
“The Tiebout Hypothesis 50 Years Later,” 101; Inman and Rubinfeld, “Economics of Federalism,” 4, 6;
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,”1161-1162; Suzanne Leland and Kurt Thurmaier, “Political and
Functional Local Government Consolidation: The Challenges for Core Public Administration Values and
Regional Reform,” American Review of Public Administration 44, no. 45 (2014): 396; Lowery, “A
Transactions Cost Model,” 56; Macedo and Karpowitz, “The Local Roots of American Inequality,” 62;
McCabe and Feiock, “Nested Levels of Institutions,” 642; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 4;
Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local Government,” 134, 143, 144; Peterson, City Limits, 34; Dean
Stansel, “Competition, Knowledge, and Local Government,” Review of Austrian Economics 25, no. 3
(2012): 250; Stone, “Rethinking the Policy-Politics Connection,” 242, 243.
91
Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 31; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,”
255; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,”1159; Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 355;
Robert J. Sampson, “Racial Stratification and the Durable Tangle of Neighborhood Inequality,” Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621 (2009): 276.
92
Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 194.
93
Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 37; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1013;
Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 46; McCabe and Feiock, “Nested Levels of
Institutions,” 642; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 6-10; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City
Space,” 1159, 1162; Oates, “The Many Faces of the Tiebout Model,” 31; Palus, “Responsiveness in
American Local Government,” 144-145; Schragger, “Is a Progressive City Possible,” 232, 240, 251; Stone,
“Rethinking the Policy-Politics Connection,” 242-244, 257.
94
Pagano, “Cities’ Shifting Fiscal Circumstances and Challenges,” no page number. See also
Berry, Imperfect Union, 189; Inman and Rubinfeld, “Economics of Federalism,” 6, Schragger, “Is a
Progressive City Possible,” 240; and Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 418.
95
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1003.
96
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 2, 25; Craw,
“Overcoming City Limits,” 365, 377; Miller, and Paytas, “Exploring the Horizontal and Vertical
Dimensions,” 151; Lowery, “A Transactions Costs Model,” 61; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 18;
Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 328.
97
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 10; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What
Governs,” 5; Karuppusamy and Carr, “Interjurisdictional Competition and Local Public Finance,” 1550-
107
1551; Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local Government,” 144; Tausanovich and Warshaw,
“Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 617-620; Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 11.
98
Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 9.
99
Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 4; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6, 9;
Peterson, City Limits, 11.
100
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1006-1007; Fording, Soss and Schram, “Devolution,
Discretion,” 295; Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 331; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What
Governs,” 6; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6; Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local
Government,” 134, 144-145; Peterson, City Limits, 17; Tausanovich and Warshaw , “Representation in
Municipal Government” (2014a), 1; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 414, 416.
101 Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 6.
102
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 21; Devin Caughey
and Christopher Warshaw, “Dynamic Estimation of Latent Opinion Using a Hierarchical Group-Level IRT
Model,: Political Analysis 23, no. 2 (2015): 14; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 369; Einstein and
Kogan, “Pushing the City Limits,” 8; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 14; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 12; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding
Perceived Inequities,” 57, 59; Hajnal and Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics,” 71; Laura Reese,
“The Past, Present, and Future of Urban Affairs Research,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. S2 (2014):
547; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Measuring Constituents’ Policy Preferences,” 335, 337, 339, 340, 341;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government ,” 2014a, 1, 51-52; Tausanovich
and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 605; Trounstine, “All Politics is
Local,” 615.
103
Abrams and Fiorina, “The ‘Big Sort’ That Wasn’t,” 203; Christopher Ellis, “Why The New
Deal Still Matters: Public Preferences, Elite Context, and American Mass Party Change, 1974-2000,”
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 20, no. 1 (2010): 119, 121-122, and 125; Edward L.
Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward, “Myths and Realities of American Political Geography,” Journal of Economic
Perspectives 20, no. 2 (2006): 135; Seth Hill and Chris Tausanovich., “A Disconnect in Representation?
Comparison of Trends in Congressional and Public Polarization,” unpublished working paper, Department
of Political Science, University of California, San Diego and Department of Political Science, University of
California, Los Angeles, 2013: 19.
104
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Measuring Constituents’ Policy Preferences,” 331; Tausanovich
and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 52; Tausanovich and Warshaw,
“Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 622; also noted by Christopher Warshaw and
Jonathan Rodden, “How Should We Measure District-Level Political Opinion on Individual Issues?”
Journal of Politics 74, no. 1: 211-212.
105
Wendy K. Tam Cho, James G. Gimpel, and Iris Hui, “Voter Migration and the Geographic
Sorting of the American Electorate,” unpublished working paper, University of Iowa, 2010: 7; Craw,
“Overcoming City Limits,” 369; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 913; Robert S. Erickson, “Income
Inequality and Policy Responsiveness,” Annual Review of Political Science, 18 (2015): 22; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 5-6; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 9; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,” 65, 67; Peterson, City
Limits, 52, 53.
106
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,”23; Byungkyu Kim and Richard C. Fording,
“Second-Order Devolution and the Implementation of TANF in the U.S. States,” State Politics and Policy
Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2010): 357; Peterson, City Limits, 53, 56, 57.
108
107
Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 120; Michael Craw, “Taming the Local Leviathan: Institutional and
Economic Constraints on Municipal Budgets,” Urban Affairs Review 43, no. 5 (2008): 671; Dreier,
Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 141; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 20;
Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 491;
Howell-Moroney, “The Tiebout Model at 50,” 101; Peterson, City Limits, 50, 52, 53, 132; Yerena, “The
Impact of Advocacy Organizations,” 10.
108
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 917; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 40;
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 21; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 250; Judd
and Swanstrom, City Politics, 303; Lowry, “Public Welfare Spending,” 21; Mullin and Hughes, “Local
Boundaries,” 3; Peterson, City Limits, 48, 50; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare
Role,” 941; Joe Soss, Jacob S. Hacker, and Suzanne Mettler, eds., Remaking America: Democracy and
Public Policy in an Age of Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 13, 16.
109 Soomi Lee, Dongwon Lee, and Thomas E. Borcherding, “Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods
Provision: Evidence from U.S. Municipalities and School Districts,” Urban Affairs Review (2015, ahead of
print): 9.
110
Berry, Imperfect Union, 96; Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 32; Dreier,
Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 141; Ellis and Faricy, “Social Policy and Public Opinion,”
1098; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 250; and Douglas A. Wolf and Anna A. Amirkhanyan.
“Demographic Change and Its Public Sector Consequences,” Public Administration Review 70, no. s1
(2010): S16 on distinct needs; Berry, Imperfect Union, 96; Lee, Lee, and Bocherding, “Ethnic Diversity
and Public Goods Provision,” 9; Sally Wallace, “The Evolving Financial Architecture of State and Local
Governments,” in Oxford Handbook of State and Local Governments, ed. Robert D. Ebel and John E.
Petersen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9 and Wolf and Amirkhanyan, “Demographic
Change,” S16-17 on distinct preferences.
111 Berry, Imperfect Union, 154, 189; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 6;
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1162; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in
Cities,” 416.
112
Hajnal and Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics,” 65, 67; Kelleher, “Regional Place and
City Space,” 1166; Minkoff, “Minding Your Neighborhood,” 531-532; Palus, “Responsiveness in
American Local Government,” 138, 142-143.
113
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 8, 11;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 605, 608.
114
Inman and Rubinfeld, “Economics of Federalism,” 6; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 302;
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1162; Peterson, City Limits, 20, 21, 147.
115
Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 10, 33, 41, 83; Hajnal and Trounstine,
“Who or What Governs,” 4; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1162; Nechyba, “The Efficiency
and Equity of Tiebout,” 77-78; Penn, “Institutions and Sorting,” 63-64; Schragger, “Is a Progressive City
Possible,” 240, 244.
116
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 20; Peterson, City
Limits, 43; Schragger, “Is a Progressive City Possible,” 244-245.
117
Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 88-89.
118
Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 149; Gillette, Local Redistribution and
Local Democracy, 54, 90.
109
119 Gillette Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 90.
120
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 20; Gillette, Local
Redistribution and Local Democracy,11; Nechyba, “The Efficiency and Equity of Tiebout,” 69; Oates,
“The Many Faces of the Tiebout Model,” 41; Stephen Page, “A Strategic Framework for Building Civic
Capacity,” Urban Affairs Review (2015, ahead of print): 9; Schragger, “Is a Progressive City Possible,”
240, 244, 245.
121 Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 10, 11, 43; Hajnal and Trounstine,
“Uneven Democracy,” 9; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 4; Minkoff, “Minding Your
Neighborhood,” 532; Nechyba, “The Efficiency and Equity of Tiebout,” 69, 77-78.
122
Katz, “Was Government the Solution,” 488.
123
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 911; Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation,” 275; Kim and
Fording, “Second-Order Devolution,” 343; Trounstine, “All Politics is Local,” 612; Volden,
“Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 328.
124
Daniel Beland, Christopher Howard, and Kimberly J. Morgan, “The Fragmented American
Welfare State: Putting the Pieces Together,” in Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social Policy, ed. Daniel Beland,
Christopher Howard, and Kimberly J. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6-7; R. Kent
Weaver, “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,” in Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social Policy, ed.
Daniel Beland, Christopher Howard, and Kimberly J. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014),
356; Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 59.
125
Plotkin, “Urban Public Policy,” 776.
126
Beland, Howard, and Morgan, “The Fragmented American Welfare State,” 6; Benton, “An
Assessment of Research,” 462; Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 29; Frances Fox Piven,
“Institutions and Agents in the Politics of Welfare Reform,” in Remaking America: Democracy and Public
Policy in an Age of Inequality, ed. Joe Soss, Jacob S. Hacker, and Suzanne Mettler (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 2007), 145.
127
Scott Allard, “State Dollars, Non-state Provision: Local Nonprofit Welfare Provision in the
United States,” in The Politics of Non-state Social Welfare, ed. Melani Cammett and Lauren M. Mac Lean
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 240; Kevin Arceneaux, “Does Federalism Weaken Democratic
Participation in the United States?”, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 35, no. 2 (2005): 301; William R.
Barnes, “Beyond Federal Urban Policy, “Urban Affairs Review 40, no. 5 (2005):579; Timothy J. Conlan
and Paul L. Posner, “Federalism Trends, Tensions, and Outlook,” in Oxford Handbook of State and Local
Government Finance, ed. Robert D. Ebel and John E. Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012),
2; Yeheskel Hasenfeld and Eve E. Garrow, “Nonprofit Human-Service Organizations, Social Rights, and
Advocacy in a Neoliberal Welfare State,” Social Service Review 86, no. 2 (2012): 297; Paul Kantor, “The
Two Faces of American Urban Policy,” Urban Affairs Review 49, no. 6 (2013): 824; Michael B. Katz,
“The American Welfare State and Social Contract in Hard Times,” Journal of Policy History 22, no. 4
(2010): 510-511; Stephen Pimpare, “Toward a New Welfare History,” Journal of Policy History 19, no. 2
(2007): 237; Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 59.
128 Pimpare, “Toward a New Welfare History,” 240; also noted by Katz, “The American Welfare
State,” 510-511 and Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 59.
129
Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 61; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local
Democracy, 64, 65, 68; Katz, “The American Welfare State,” 510; Wildasin, “Intergovernmental
Transfers,” 59.
110
130 Pimpare, “Toward a New Welfare History,” 237-238, 240.
131
Kim and Fording, “Second-Order Devolution,” 343; Margaret Weir, The Uncertain Future of
Welfare Reform in the Cities (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997), 4; Wildasin,
“Intergovernmental Transfers,” 60.
132
Frederickson and O’Leary, “Local Government Management,” 65; National League of Cities,
Local U.S. Governments (Washington, DC: Author, 2013), 1.
133
Margaret Weir, “States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism,” Studies in American
Political Development 19 (2005):158.
134
Trounstine, “All Politics is Local,” 613; Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,”
327.
135
Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 70; see also Hasenfeld and Garrow, “Nonprofit Human Service
Organizations,” 298; Alice O’Connor, “Swimming against the Tide: A Brief History of Federal Policy in
Poor Communities,” in The Community Development Reader, ed. James DeFilippis and Susan Saegert
(New York: Routledge, 2008), 14; Robert Y. Shapiro, From Depression to Depression? Seventy-five years
of Public Opinion Toward Welfare, paper prepared for the panel on “The Politics of TANF Reauthorization
at the 31st Annual Fall Research Conference of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management,
Washington DC, November 5-7, 2009: 7; Soss, Fording and Schram, “The Color of Devolution,” 550.
136
Weir, The Uncertain Future of Welfare Reform in the Cities, 4; see also Suzanne Mettler and
Julianna Koch, “Who Says They Have Ever Used a Government Social Program? The Role of Policy
Visibility,” unpublished manuscript, Cornell University Department of Government, 2012: 17 and Suzanne
Mettler and Alexis N. Walker, “Citizenship,” in Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social Policy, ed. Daniel Beland,
Christopher Howard, and Kimberly J. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 629.
137
Beland, Howard, and Morgan, “The Fragmented American Welfare State,” 11; Gillette, Local
Redistribution and Local Democracy, 61; Katz, “The American Welfare State,” 518; Mettler and Koch,
“Who Says They Have Ever Used a Government Social Program,” 11; O’ Connor, “Swimming against The
Tide,” 12, 15; Pimpare, “Toward a New Welfare History,” 242; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter,
183; Soss, Fording and Schram, “The Color of Devolution,” 550.
138
Allard, “State Dollars,” 241; Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United
States,” 5, 6; Conlan and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 3; Peterson, City Limits, 78; Sharp, “Local
Government, Social Programs, and Political Participation,” 185; Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,”
59-60.
139
Barnes, “Beyond Federal Urban Policy,” 581; Benton, “Trends in Local Government
Revenues,” 93; Conlan and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 3; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 973;
Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 121; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 310; Kantor,
“The Two Faces of American Urban Policy,” 825; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 2; Peterson,
City Limits, 86; Wendell E. Pritchett and Mark H. Rose, “Introduction: Politics and the American City,
1940-1990,” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 2 (2008): 215.
140
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 5-6; Barnes, “Beyond
Federal Urban Policy,” 578; Benton, “Trends in Local Government Revenues,” 106; Conlan and Posner,
“Federalism Trends,” 3; Kimberly J. Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare State: Tax Policy and the Political
Movement against Government,” in Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of
Inequality, ed. Joe Soss, Jacob S. Hacker, and Suzanne Mettler (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
2007), 33; Sarah Reckhow, “The Delegated State and the Politics of Federal Grants,” unpublished
manuscript, Michigan State University, undated: 9.
111
141 Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 377; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 907; Fisher, “The State
of State and Local Government Finance,” 17; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 82-83;
Nathan J. Kelly and Christopher Witko, “Federalism and American Inequality,” Journal of Politics 74, no.
2 (2012): 418; Peterson, City Limits, 76; Reckhow, “The Delegated State,” 13; Sharp, “Local Government,
Social Programs, and Political Participation,”184; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 18, 185; Stansel,
“Competition, Knowledge, and Local Government,” 246; Volden, “Intergovernmental Grants,” 227, 228.
142
Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 934. Also cited by Conlan
and Posner “Federalism Trends,” 4; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 906-907; Hajnal and Trounstine,
“Uneven Democracy,” 10; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 6; R. Shep Melnick,
“Entrepreneurial Litigation: Advocacy Coalitions and Strategies in the Fragmented American Welfare
State,” in Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality, ed. Joe Soss, Jacob S.
Hacker, and Suzanne Mettler (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 54; Volden, “Intergovernmental
Political Participation,” 328.
143
Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 327. Also noted by Benton, “Trends in
Local Government Revenues,” 106; Richard P. Nathan, “Updating Theories of American Federalism,”
paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA,
September 2, 2006: 3, 4, 14 and Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 48, 61.
144 Barnes, “Beyond Federal Urban Policy” 582; Bickers and Stein, “Interlocal Cooperation,” 801;
Conlan and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 4; Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 69; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and
Swanstrom, Place Matters, 145; Peter Eisinger, “Cities in the New Federal Order: Effects of Devolution,”
LaFollette Policy Report 8, no. 1 (1997): 3; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 310; Kantor, “The Two
Faces of American Urban Policy,” 826; Katz, “Was Government the Solution,” 492; Krane, Ebdon, and
Bartle, “Devolution,” 2; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 9; Reckhow,
“The Delegated State,” 9; Riverstone-Newell, “When Local Activism Challenges Higher Authority,” 8-9;
Sharp, “Local Government, Social Programs, and Political Participation,” 185; Urban Institute State and
Local Finance Initiative, State and Local Revenues, 5.
145
Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 69; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 126-
127; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, 31.
146
Leah Brooks and Justin H. Phillips, “An Institutional Explanation for the Stickiness of Federal
Grants,” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 26, no. 2 (2008): 249; Craw, “Taming the Local
Leviathan,” 664; McCabe, “State Institutions,” 208; Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence and Lincoln
Institute for Land Policy, 50-State Property Tax Comparison Study (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute for
Land Policy, 2014), 13; Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare State,” 33-35; Pagano, “Creative Designs,”
Pagano, “117, 125; Pagano, “Cities’ Shifting Fiscal Circumstances,” no page number; Volden,
“Intergovernmental Political Participation,” 334.
147 Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare State,” 27-28.
148
Molly C. Michelmore, “‘What Have You Done for Me Lately?’: The Welfare State, Tax
Politics, and the Search for a New Majority, 1968-1980,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 4 (2012): 720.
149
Michelmore, “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” 720; Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare
State,” 27, 34, 35; Soss, Hacker, and Mettler, Remaking America, 10, 16.
150
Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare State,” 30.
151
Suzanne. Mettler, “The Transformed Welfare State and the Redistribution of Political Voice,”
unpublished manuscript, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, March
30, 2006: 32, 38; Mettler and Koch, “Who Says,” 28.
112
152 Michelmore, “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” 727.
153
Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare State,” 36.
154
Barnes, “Beyond Federal Urban Policy,” 586; Andrea Louise Campbell and Michael W.
Sances, “Constituencies and Public Opinion,” in Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social Policy, ed. Daniel
Beland, Christopher Howard, and Kimberly J. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 209;
Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare State,” 36.
155
Barnes, “Beyond Federal Urban Policy,” 586; Vicki Been, Josiah Madar, and Simon
McDonnell, “Urban Land Use Regulation: Are Homevoters Overtaking the Growth Machine?” Journal of
Empirical Legal Studies 11, no. 2 (2014), 228; Beland, Howard, and Morgan, “The Fragmented American
Welfare State,” 11; Benton, “Trends in Local Government Revenues,” 82; Campbell and Sances,
“Constituencies and Public Opinion,” 209; Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare State,” 27, 36; Volden,
“Intergovernmental Grants,” 211.
156
Barnes, “Beyond Federal Urban Policy,” 582; Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order
Devolution,” 566; Robert M. Buckley and Alex F. Schwartz, “Housing Policy: The Evolving Subnational
Role,” in Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government Finance, ed. Robert D. Ebel and John E.
Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 13; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place
Matters, 127; Frederickson and O’Leary, “Local Government Management,” 45; Judd and Swanstrom, City
Politics, 376; Katz, “Was Government the Solution,” 492; Lowery, “A Transactions Cost Model,” 71. For
example, Gordon and Rueben found that the property tax had declined from 31% of total local government
revenues in 1977, the year preceding the passage of Proposition 13, to 24% in 2007, the year of the analysis
that follows. In 2007, 23.7% of county revenues, 19.2% of municipal revenues, 8.7% of special district
revenues, and 34.5% of school district revenues came from property taxes, a decline from 1977 for all but
special districts, which raised 11% of their 1977 revenues from the property tax. Tracy M. Gordon and
Kim Rueben, “How Alternative Revenue Structures Are Changing Local Government,” in Municipal
Revenues and Land Policies, ed. Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln
Institute of Land Policy, 2010), 479-480.
157
Steven G. Anderson, Anthony P. Halter, and Brian M. Gryzlak, “Changing Safety Net of Last
Resort: Downsizing General Assistance for Employable Adults,” Social Work 47, no. 3 (2002): 254;
Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 137; L. Jerome Gallagher, “A Shrinking Portion of the
Safety Net: General Assistance from 1989 to 1998,” New Federalism: Issues and Options for States, Series
A, No. A-36 (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 1999), 6; Olivia Golden et al, Assessing the New
Federalism: Eight Years Later (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2005), 9; Liz Schott and Clare Cho,
General Assistance Programs: Safety Net Weakening Despite Increased Need (Washington, DC: Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, December 19, 2011), 2, 7, 8; Liz Schott and Misha Hill, State General
Assistance Programs Are Weakening Despite Increased Need (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities, July 9, 2015), 2; Greg M. Shaw, “Changes in Public Opinion and the American Welfare
State,” Political Science Quarterly 124, no. 4 (2010): 642; Cori E. Uccello and L. Jerome Gallagher.
“General Assistance Programs: The State-Based Part of the Safety Net,” New Federalism: Issues and
Options for States, Series A, No. A-4 (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, January 1997), 5.
158 Fisher, “The State of State and Local Government Finance,” 6; Jacob S. Hacker, “Privatizing
Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the
United States,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 3 (2004): 251; Rom, “Social Welfare Policy,” 3;
Liz Schott, LaDonna Pavetti, and Ife Floyd, How States Use Federal and State Funds Under the TANF
Block Grant (Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, April 8, 2015), 2; Weaver,
“Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,” 362.
159
Jeffrey M. Berry, Kent E. Portnoy, Robin Liss, Jessica Simoncelli, and Lisa Berger. “Power
and Interest Groups in City Politics,” unpublished manuscript, Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston,
113
2006: 2-3; Kenneth N. Bickers and Robert M. Stein, “Interlocal Cooperation and the Distribution of
Federal Grant Awards,” Journal of Politics 66, no. 3 (2004): 801; Buckley and Schwartz, “Housing
Policy,” 13; Conlan and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 8; Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 69; Dreier,
Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 126-127, 130; Einstein, “Divided Regions,” 1; Katz, “Was
Government the Solution,” 494; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 1, 15; Lobao and Kraybill, “The
Emerging Roles of County Governments,” 245; Lowery, “A Transactions Cost Model,” 71; Martell and
Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 8; Rolf Pendall, Robert Puentes, and Jonathan
Martin. “From Traditional to Reformed: A Review of the Land Use Regulations in the Nation’s 50 Largest
Metropolitan Areas,” Research Brief, Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institution (Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution, 2006), 5; Riverstone-Newell, “When Local Activism Challenges Higher
Authority,” 2, 10; Danilo Trisi and LaDonna Pavetti, TANF Weakening as a Safety Net for Poor Families
(Washington, DC: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 13, 2012), 2, 15.
160
Anderson, Halter, and Gryzlak, “Changing Safety Net,” 255.
161
Kim and Fording, “Second-Order Devolution,” 343-434; Sharp, Does Local Government
Matter, 34.
162
Also noted in Peterson, City Limits, 211, 212.
163
Hacker, “Privatizing Risk,” 243, 245, 248; Jacob S. Hacker, “Bringing the State Back In: The
Promise (and Perils) of the New Social Welfare History,” Journal of Policy History 17, no.1 (2005): 148-
150; also noted by Beland, Howard, and Morgan, “The Fragmented American Welfare State,”15; Berry et
al., “Power and Interest Groups,” 3; Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, “Why Do Welfare States Persist?”
Journal of Politics 68, no. 4 (2006): 817; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 916; Erickson, “Income Inequality
and Policy Responsiveness,” 26; Morgan, “Constricting the Welfare State,” 38; Peterson, City Limits, 211;
Paul Pierson, “The New Politics of the Welfare State,” World Politics 48, no. 2 (1996): 143, 144, 175.
164 Beland, Howard, and Morgan, “The Fragmented Welfare State,” 15; Gais, “Stretched Net,”
564; Rom, “Social Welfare Policy,” 3; Raymond C. Scheppach, and W. Bartley Hildreth, “The
Intergovernmental Grant System,” in Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government Finance, ed.
Robert D. Ebel and John H. Petersen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7; Shaw, “Changes in
Public Opinion,” 642.
165 Lewis and Hamilton, “Race and Regionalism,” 357.
166
Benton, “An Assessment of Research,” 462; Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order
Devolution,” 578; Bowman and Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing Power and Authority,” 10; Farmer,
“County Government Choices,” 61-62; Frederickson and O’Leary, “Local Government Management,” 65;
Salinsky, “Governmental Public Health,” 7, 10; Sharp, “Local Government, Social Programs, and Political
Participation,” 184-185, 190; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 29-30, 37; Sharp and Maynard-
Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942.
167
Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 103; Golden, Assessing the New
Federalism, 9-10; “Eisinger,” Cities in the New Federal Order,” 5; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories
of the Local Welfare Role,” 942; Weir, The Uncertain Future of Welfare Reform in the Cities, 2.
168
Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order Devolution,” 565; Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 72;
Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation,” 271; Fording, Soss, and Schram, “Devolution, Discretion,” 286;
Golden, Assessing the New Federalism, 1; Kelleher and Yackee, “An Empirical Assessment,” 254; Kim
and Fording, “Second-Order Devolution,” 341; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 1, 3; Soss,
Fording, and Schram , “The Color of Devolution,” 537.
169
Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order Devolution,” 565; Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation,”
271; Kelleher and Yackee, “An Empirical Assessment,” 257; Kim and Fording, “Second-Order
114
Devolution,” 343-344; Lobao and Kraybill, “The Emerging Roles of County Governments,” 246, 253;
Sharp, “Local Government, Social Programs, and Political Participation,” 185; Sharp, Does Local
Government Matter, 31, 50; Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 60.
170
Fording, Soss, and Schram, “Devolution, Discretion,” 289; Lobao and Kraybill, “The Emerging
Roles of County Governments,” 246, 253; Soss, Fording and Schram, “The Color of Devolution,” 538;
Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 60.
171
Allard, “State Dollars,” 241; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 62; Davidson,
“Cooperative Localism,” 974; Thomas Gais, “Stretched Net: The Retrenchment of State and Local Social
Welfare Spending Before the Recession,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 39, no. 3: 559;Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 10; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 12; Jimenez,
“Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 255; Reckhow, “The Delegated State,” 13; Melnick, “Entrepreneurial
Litigation,” 54; Salinsky, “Governmental Public Health,” 14, 17; Sharp “Local Government, Social
Programs, and Political Participation,” 185; 190; Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 53-54.
172 Thomas Gais, Lucy Dadayan, and Suho Bae, “The Decline of States in Financing the U.S.
Safety Net: Retrenchment in State and Local Social Welfare Spending, 1977-2007,” paper presented at
Reducing Poverty: Assessing Recent State Policy Innovations and Strategies, Emory University, Atlanta,
November 19-20, 2009: 3.
173
Golden, Assessing the New Federalism, 26-27; Peterson, City Limits, 10, 11; Sharp, Does Local
Government Matter, 34.
174
Fisher, “The State of State and Local Government Finance,” 8-9; see also Ronald C. Fisher and
Andrew Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” in Oxford Handbook of State and Local
Government Finance, ed. Robert D. Ebel and John H. Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012), 21; and Wildasin, “Intergovernmental Transfers,” 55-56.
175 David Brady and Lane M. Destro, “Poverty,” in Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social Policy, ed.
Daniel Beland, Christopher Howard, and Kimberly J. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014),
589; Hendrick and Shi, “Macro-Level Determinants,” 21; Reckhow, “The Delegated State,” 9; Volden,
“Intergovernmental Political Participation,” 328.
176 Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 4; Nicholas G. Bauroth, “The Effect of Limiting
Participation in Special District Elections to Property Owners: A Research Note,” Public Budgeting and
Finance 27, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 11; Berry, Imperfect Union, 26-27, 116; Eiger, “Casting Light on Shadow
Government,” 127; Alexander Fink and Richard E. Wagner, “Political Entrepreneurship and the Formation
of Special Districts,” unpublished manuscript, Department of Economics, George Mason University,
undated: 11; Jimenez, “Externalities,” 6; Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 55;
Macedo, Democracy at Risk, 89; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 2-3;
Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6; Slivinski, “Out of Sight,” 6; U.S. Census Bureau Governments
Division, Governments Integrated Directory 2007, 3.
177
Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order Devolution,” 578-9; Fink and Wagner, “Political
Entrepreneurship,” 3; McCabe, “Special District Formation,” 124, 126; Slivinski, “Out of Sight,” 1-3;
Frank J. Thompson, “State and Local Governance Fifteen Years Later: Enduring and New Challenges,”
Public Administration Review 68, no. s1 (2008): S9.
178
Fink and Wagner, “Political Entrepreneurship,” 2; Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special
Districts,” 54; U.S. Census Bureau, Individual State Descriptions, vii.
179
McCabe, “Special District Formation,” 124; see also Benton, “An Assessment of Research,”
466; Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 54, and Slivinski, “Out of Sight,” 2.
115
180 Buckley and Schwartz, “Housing Policy,” 5; D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The
Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 137; Judd and
Swanstrom, City Politics, 122; Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 86.
181 Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6; Volden, “Intergovernmental Grants,” 210.
182
Benton, “Trends in Local Government Revenues,” 109.
183
Allard, “State Dollars,” 252; Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order Devolution,” 565;
Bowman and Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing Power and Authority,” 6; Bowman and Kearney,
“Transforming State-Local Relations,” 6; Leah Brooks and Justin Phillips, “The Politics of Inequality:
Cities as Agents of Redistribution,” unpublished manuscript, 2010: 2; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,”
1007-1008; Robert J. Dilger and Eugene Boyd, Block Grants: Perspectives and Controversies
(Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2014), 7; Golden Assessing the New Federalism, 1;
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,” 58;
Hasenfeld and Garrow, “Nonprofit Human-Service Organizations,” 364; Kelleher and Yackee, “An
Empirical Assessment,” 253-255 and 266-267; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 3; Lax and Phillips,
“The Democratic Deficit in the States,”165.
184
Brooks and Phillips, “The Politics of Inequality,” 2; Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation,”
271, 275, 289; Dilger and Boyd, Block Grants, 2, 7; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 255;
Kelleher and Yackee, “An Empirical Assessment,” 254-255; Kim and Fording, “Second-Order
Devolution,” 346-347; Lobao and Kraybill, “The Emerging Roles of County Governments,” 247; Soss,
Fording, and Schram, “The Color of Devolution,” 538; Schott, Pavetti and Floyd, How States Use Federal
and State Funds, 9.
185
Mark Purcell, “Urban Democracy and the Local Trap,” Urban Studies 45, no. 11 (2006): 1925-
1926.
186
Kelly and Witko, “Federalism and American Inequality,” 418.
187
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 962, 1025; Hasenfield and Garrow, “Nonprofit Human-
Service Organizations,” 305; Kyu-Nahm Jun, “Escaping the Local Trap? The Role of Community-
Representing Organizations in Urban Governance,” Journal of Urban Affairs 35, no. 3 (2012): 344-354;
Schott, Pavetti and Floyd, How States Use Federal and State Funds, 16; Soss, Fording, and Schram, “The
Color of Devolution,” 538; Trisi and Pavetti, TANF Weakening as a Safety Net, 1.
188
Campbell, “Universalism, Targeting, and Participation,” 129; Inman and Rubinfeld,
“Economics of Federalism,” 7; Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 336.
189
Kim and Fording, “Second-Order Devolution,” 357; also noted by Andrea J. Campbell,
“Universalism, Targeting, and Participation,” in Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an
Age of Inequality, ed. Joe Soss, Jacob S. Hacker, and Suzanne Mettler (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 2007), 129 and Weaver, “Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,” 367.
190 Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 99; Nechyba, “The Efficiency and Equity
of Tiebout,” 74.
191
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1025; Jun, “Escaping the Local Trap,” 344; Nechyba, “The
Efficiency and Equity of Tiebout,” 74.
192
Stanley Feldman and Christopher Johnston, “Understanding the Determinants of Political
Ideology: Implications of Structural Complexity,” Political Psychology 35, no. 3 (2014): 338; see also
Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 32; Jason Sorens, Fait Muedini and William P. Ruger,
116
“U.S. State and Local Public Policies in 2006: A New Database,” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 8, no. 3
(2008): 317.
193
Edward G. Carmines, and Nicholas J. D’Amico, “The New Look in Political Ideology
Research,” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 208, 211; Shaw, “Changes in Public Opinion,”
636; Christopher Wlezien, “The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preferences for Spending,” American
Journal of Political Science 39, no. 4 (1995): 983.
194
Carmines and D’Amico, “The New Look in Political Ideology Research,” 213; Ellis, “Why the
New Deal Still Matters,” 113; Feldman and Johnston, “Understanding the Determinants of Political
Ideology,” 351-352.
195 Carmines and D’Amico, “The New Look in Political Ideology Research,” 212-213; Feldman
and Johnston, “Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology,” 342; Rodden, “The Geographic
Distribution of Political Preferences,” 333.
196 Ellis, “Why the New Deal Still Matters,” 112; Ellis and Faricy, “Social Policy and Public
Opinion,” 1102-1103; Christopher Wlezien, “Patterns of Representation: Dynamics of Public Preferences
and Policy.” Journal of Politics 66, no. 1 (2004): 3-4.
197
Ellis and Faricy, “Social Policy and Public Opinion,” 1102; Nathan J. Kelly and Peter K. Enns,
“Inequality and the Dynamics of Public Opinion: The Self-Reinforcing Link between Inequality and Mass
Preferences.” American Journal of Political Science 54, no. 4 (2010): 862; Joseph Daniel Ura and
Christopher R. Ellis, “Income, Preferences and the Dynamics of Policy Responsiveness,” PS: Political
Science and Politics, October 2008: 787.
198
Carmines and D’Amico, “The New Look in Political Ideology Research,” 212; Caughey and
Warshaw, “Dynamic Estimation,” 8; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1166; Jeffrey R. Lax and
Justin H. Phillips, “The Democratic Deficit in the States,” American Journal of Political Science 56, no. 1
(2012): 158; John G. Matsusaka, “Popular Control of Public Policy: A Quantitative Approach,” Quarterly
Journal of Political Science 5, no. 2 (2010): 136.
199
Carmines and D’Amico, “The New Look in Political Ideology Research,” 212.
200
Feldman and Johnston, “Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology,” 338.
201 Ellis and Stimson, cited in Carmines and D’Amico, “The New Look in Political Ideology
Research,” 212 and in McCall and Kenworthy, “Americans’ Social Policy Preferences,” 467.
202
Einstein, “Divided Regions,” 12; Kelly and Enns, “Inequality and the Dynamics of Public
Opinion,” 865, 857; Elizabeth Rigby and Gerald C. Wright, “Political Parties’ Representation of the Poor in
the American States,” American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 3 (2013): 554; Soss, Hacker, and
Mettler, Remaking America, 13; Ura and Ellis, “Income, Preferences, and the Dynamics of Policy,” 787,
789. However, some, albeit fewer, studies do indicate differences: both Alesina and La Ferrara (2001) and
Reed-Arthurs and Sheffrin find statistically significant differences in group support for tax redistribution
from those with high incomes to both the middle class and poor, with women and minorities more
supportive and the more educated less so (Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara, “Preferences for
Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities,” Harvard Institute of Economic Research (HIER) Discussion
Paper Number 1936. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2001: 2, 14, 20; Rebbecca Reed-Arthurs and Steven
M. Sheffrin, “Understanding the Public’s Attitudes towards Redistribution through Taxation,” Tulane
Economics Working Paper 1005, 2010: 7.
203 Abrams and Fiorina, “The ‘Big Sort’ That Wasn’t,” 204. For an exception, see Hajnal and
Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics,” 67.
117
204
Glaeser and Ward, “Myths and Realities,” 131; Christopher D. Johnston and Benjamin J.
Newman, “Economic Inequality and U.S. Public Policy Mood Across Space and Time,” American Politics
Research: 1-28 (2015, ahead of print): 14.
205
Bishop, The Big Sort, 9, 10, 44; Glaeser and Ward, “Myths and Realities,” 119.
206
Bishop, The Big Sort, 25.
207
Glaeser and Ward, “Myths and Realities,” 119, 123; also noted by Hill and Tausanovich, “A
Disconnect in Representation,” 5, 12, 19, 24 and Seth Hill and Chris Tausanovich, “No, Americans Have
Not Become More Ideologically Polarized,” Washington Post, Monkey Cage blog, October 13, 2015: 2.
208
Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz and John Michael McTague, “Partisan Mountains and Molehills:
The Geography of U.S. State Intraparty Factionalism,” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 8, no. 1 (2008):
22.
209 Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 245; Pearson-Merkowitz and McTague,
“Partisan Mountains and Molehills,” 12, 22; Rodden, “The Geographic Distribution of Political
Preferences,” 329; Trounstine, “All Politics is Local,” 614.
210
Shapiro, From Depression to Depression, 23; see also Abrams and Fiorina, “The ‘Big Sort’
That Wasn’t,” 203; Christopher Faricy, “The Politics of Social Policy in America: The Causes and Effects
of Indirect versus Direct Social Spending,” Journal of Politics 73, no. 1 (2011): 76; Andre Gelman, “The
Twentieth-Century Reversal: How Did the Republican States Switch to the Democrats and Vice Versa?”
Statistics and Public Policy 1, no. 1 (2014): 1, 2, 5; Hill and Tausanovich, “A Disconnect in
Representation,” 19; Hill and Tausanovich, “No, Americans,” 2; Corey Lang and Shanna Pearson-
Merkowitz, “Partisan Sorting in the United States, 1972-2012: New Evidence from a Dynamic Analysis,”
Political Geography, 48 (2015): 120; and Voice of the People, A Not So Divided America (Washington,
DC: Author, July 2, 2014), 3.
211 Matthew Dickinson, “Sorted, Not Polarized: Why the Distinction Matters,” Presidential
Power blog, Middlebury College, July 11, 2014: 2; Gelman “The Twentieth-Century Reversal,” 2; Hill and
Tausanovich, “A Disconnect in Representation,” 19; Hill and Tausanovich , “No, Americans,” 2; Shapiro,
From Depression to Depression, 23; Kyle E. Walker, “Political Segregation of the Metropolis: Spatial
Sorting by Partisan Voting in Metropolitan Minneapolis-St Paul,” City and Community 12, no. 1 (2013):
37.
212
Berry, Imperfect Union, 112.
213
Bishop, The Big Sort, 44, 45; Cho, Gimpel and Hui, “Voter Migration,” 15, 16; Gelman, “The
Twentieth-Century Reversal,” 1; Hill and Tausanovich, “A Disconnect in Representation,” 2, 3, 4; Nolan
McCarty, Jonathan Rodden, Boris Shor, Chris Tausanovich, and Chris Warshaw, “Geography and
Polarization,” paper prepared for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
Chicago, September 2013: 18; Ian McDonald, “Migrating and Sorting in the American Electorate,”
American Politics Research 39, no. 3 (2011): 512, 526; Walker, “Political Segregation,” 36-38.
214
Bishop, The Big Sort, 12-13, 44, 45; Philip Bump, “There Really Are Two Americas. An
Urban One and a Rural One,” Washington Post, October 21, 2014: 3; Cho, Gimpel and Hui, “Voter
Migration,” 21; James G. Gimpel and Iris S. Hui, “Seeking Politically Compatible Neighbors? The Role of
Neighborhood Partisan Composition in Residential Sorting,” Political Geography 48 (September 2015):
130, 139; Hui, “Who Is Your Preferred Neighbor,” 998; Lang and Pearson-Merkowitz, “Partisan Sorting in
the United States,” 119, 120, 123, 127, 128; McCarty et al., “Geography and Polarization,” 4; McDonald,
“Migrating and Sorting,” 522, 526; Matt Motyl, Ravi Iyer, Shigehiro Oishi, Sophie Trawalter, and Brian A.
Nosek, “How Ideological Migration Geographically Segregates Groups,” Journal of Experimental Social
118
Psychology 51 (2014): 2-4, 10; Rodden, “The Geographic Distribution of Political Preferences,” 322;
Walker, “Political Segregation,” 36-38.
215
Brady Baybeck and Scott D. McClurg, “What Do They Know and How Do They Know It? An
Examination of Citizen Awareness of Context,” American Politics Research 33, no. 4 (2005): 495; Bishop,
The Big Sort, 12, 199, 205; Cho, Gimpel and Hui, “Voter Migration,” 2-3, 5, 7, 8, 10; Gimpel and Hui,
“Seeking Politically Compatible Neighbors,” 131, 132, 139; Hui, “Who is Your Preferred Neighbor,” 998;
Lang and Pearson-Merkowitz, “Partisan Sorting in the United States,” 120, 128; McDonald, “Migrating
and Sorting,” 516; Rodden, “The Geographic Distribution of Political Preferences,” 331-332; Sapna
Swaroop and Maria Krysan, “The Determinants of Neighborhood Satisfaction: Racial Proxy Revisited,”
Demography 48, no. 3 (2011): 1210; Walker, “Political Segregation,” 50-51.
216
Cho, Gimpel and Hui, “Voter Migration,” 6, 23; Gimpel and Hui, “Seeking Politically
Compatible Neighbors,” 131, 132, 133, 139; Hui, “Who Is Your Preferred Neighbor,” 999, 1000, 1006,
1015; Motyl et al., “How Ideological Migration,” 11; Wolf and Amirkhanyan, “Demographic Change,”
S20.
217
Stephen, Ansolabehere and John Lovett, “Measuring the Political Consequences of Residential
Mobility,” unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, 2008: 13, 14; Baybeck and McClurg, “What Do
They Know,” 493; Bishop, The Big Sort, 12; Cho, Gimpel and Hui, “Voter Migration,” 3, 5, 25; Gimpel
and Hui, “Seeking Politically Compatible Neighbors,” 131; Hill and Tausanovich, “A Disconnect in
Representation,” 6, 24; Lang and Pearson-Merkowitz, “Partisan Sorting in the United States,” 119, 120;
Walker, “Political Segregation,” 39, 40.
218
Lang and Pearson-Merkowitz, “Partisan Sorting in the United States,” 120-121; Rodden, “The
Geographic Distribution of Political Preferences,” 322; Walker, “Political Segregation,” 38.
219
Beland, Howard, and Morgan, “The Fragmented American Welfare State,” 11-12; Campbell
and Sances, “Constituencies and Public Opinion,” 209; Katz, “Was Government the Solution,” 498; Mettler
and Koch, “Who Says They Have Ever Used a Government Social Program,” 11.
220
Shaw, “Changes in Public Opinion,” 636; Wlezien, “Patterns of Representation,” 6-7.
221
Shaw, “Changes in Public Opinion,” 634.
222
Ellis and Faricy, “Social Policy and Public Opinion,” 1097, 2007.
223
Shaw “Changes in Public Opinion,” 636; Wlezien, “The Public as Thermostat,” 989-990;
Wlezien, “Patterns of Representation,” 6.
224
P.J. Henry, Christine Reyna, and Bernard Weiner, “Hate Welfare But Help the Poor: How the
Attributional Content of Stereotypes Explains the Paradox of Reactions to the Destitute in America,”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34, no. 1 (2004): 38, 53; Shapiro, From Depression to Depression, 8.
225
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 23; Kim and Fording, “Second-Order
Devolution,” 357; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 7.
226
Shaw “Changes in Public Opinion,” 632, 634; also referenced by Bruce Stokes, Public
Attitudes Toward the Next Social Contract, New America Foundation, Next Social Contract and Economic
Growth Program (Washington, DC: Author, 2013), 10.
227
Christopher DeSante, “Working Twice as Hard to Get Half as Far: Race, Work Ethic, and
America’s Deserving Poor,” American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 2 (2013): 350; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 23.
119
228
Though one might assume that increases in the percentage of minority residents in a given
community might lead local policymakers to be more responsive to minority group concerns, this assumes
that policymakers give equal attention to advantaged and disadvantaged residents, a potentially problematic
claim given that members of advantaged groups participate politically at greater rates. Adams, Citizen
Lobbyists, 24; Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 40, 42; Sharp, Does Local Government
Matter, 39, 64.
229
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1025; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying and
Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,” 67; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 7.
230
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 19, 21.
231
Yotam Margalit, “Explaining Social Policy Preferences: Evidence from the Great Recession,”
American Political Science Review (2015, ahead of print): 17; Stokes , Public Attitudes Toward the Next
Social Contract, 4.
232
Stokes, Public Attitudes Toward the Next Social Contract, 10.
233
Soss, Hacker, and Mettler, Remaking America, 12; Stokes, Public Attitudes Toward the Next
Social Contract, 10, 13.
234
Faricy, “The Politics of Social Policy,” 75; Rigby and Wright, “Political Parties’
Representation,” 554.
235
Reed-Arthurs and Sheffrin, “Understanding the Public’s Attitudes,” 10-11, 23.
236
Margalit, “Explaining Social Policy Preferences,” 7, 13; see also Ellis and Faricy, “Social
Policy and Public Opinion,” 1102; Kelly, “Political Choice, Public Policy, and Distributional Outcomes,”
868 and Rigby and Wright, “Political Parties’ Representation,” 554.
237
Jeffrey M. Stonecash, “Political Parties and Social Policy,” in Oxford Handbook of U.S. Social
Policy, ed. Daniel Beland, Christopher Howard, and Kimberly J. Morgan (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 170-171.
238
Erikson, “Income Inequality and Policy Responsiveness,” 12, 15-16.
239
Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien, “On the Limits to Inequality in Representation,”
PS: Political Science and Politics 41, no. 2 (2008): 319; Wlezien, “Patterns of Representation,” 1, 17-19.
240
Margalit, “Explaining Social Policy Preferences,” 4; Ura and Ellis, “Income, Preferences, and
the Dynamics of Policy,” 786.
241
Erikson, “Income Inequality and Policy Responsiveness,” 17; Gillette, Local Redistribution
and Local Democracy, 40; Mettler, “The Transformed Welfare State,” 35, 38; Ura and Ellis, “Income,
Preferences, and the Dynamics of Policy,” 786.
242
Caughey and Warshaw, “Dynamic Estimation,” 14; Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County
Limits,” 40, 42; Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing the City Limits,” 5, 9; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying
and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,”57, 59; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City
Space,” 1162, 1176; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Measuring Constituents’ Policy Preferences,” 335, 337,
339, 340; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 1, 51-52;
Tausanovich and Warshaw , “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 605; Trounstine,
“Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 416-417.
120
243
For examples, see Kelleher and Yackee, “An Empirical Assessment;” Fording, Soss and
Schram, “Devolution, Discretion;” Soss, Fording, and Schram, “The Color of Devolution.”
244 Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 23; Sharp, “Local Government, Social
Programs, and Political Participation,” 185; Sharp, Does Local Government Matter, 183; Soss, Fording and
Schram, “The Color of Devolution,” 540.
245
Abrams and Fiorina, “The ‘Big Sort’ That Wasn’t,” 204; Trounstine, “Representation and
Accountability in Cities,” 414, 416.
246
Choi, Bae, Kwon, and Feiock, “County Limits,” 36, 38, 40, 42; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who
or What Governs,” 12, 16, 21.
247
Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 376; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 917.
248
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,”
66; Walker, “Political Segregation,” 51-52.
249
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,”
59.
250
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,”
65, 67; also noted in Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 5-6; Trounstine, “Representation and
Accountability in Cities,” 413, and Trounstine, “Living Apart,” 2.
251
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,”
65, 67.
252
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,”
67.
253
See Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 40; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What
Governs,” 19, 21; Hajnal and Trounstine,” Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local
Politics,” 60-61; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1166; Palus, “Responsiveness in American
Local Government,” 134; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a),
5; “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 606.
254
Kelleher “Regional Place and City Space,” 1172-1173; Palus, “Responsiveness in American
Local Government,”134.
255
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1166; Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local
Government, “138.
256
Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local Government,” 138; see also Hajnal and Trounstine,
“Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,” 50-51, 60-61 and Kelleher,
“Regional Place and City Space,” 1166.
257
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1176; Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local
Government,” 145.
258 Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1176; Lax and Phillips, “The Democratic Deficit in
the States,” 148; Matsusaka, “Popular Control of Public Policy,” 159; Rigby and Wright “Political Parties’
Representation,” 559 and 563.
259
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 967; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6.
121
260 Eiger, “Casting Light on Shadow Government,” 128; Peterson, City Limits, 11.
261 Bauroth , “The Effect of Limiting Participation,” 72; Colleen Casey, “Public Values in
Governance Networks: Management Approaches and Social Policy Tools in Local Community and
Economic Development,” American Review of Public Administration 45, no. 1 (2015): 114; Gregory K.
Ingram and Yu-Hung Hong, “Municipal Revenue Options in a Time of Crisis,” in Municipal Revenues and
Land Policies: Proceedings of the 2009 Land Policy Conference, ed. Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-Hung
Hong (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010), 14; National League of Cities, Local US
Governments, 2.
262 Berry, Imperfect Union, 64; Eiger, “Casting Light on Shadow Government,” 128; Frederickson
and O’Leary, “Local Government Management,” 56; 1 David K. Hamilton, “Does Regionalism Detract
from Local Democracy? The Impact of Government Scale on Participation,” Journal of Public
Management and Social Policy 18, no 2. (Fall 2012): 5; Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does Local
Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 486; Judd and Swanstrom , City Politics, 325;
Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 54, 60-61, 65; Macedo , Democracy at Risk, 89-90;
Macedo and Karpowitz, “The Local Roots of American Inequality,” 60; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles
of Local Government Finance,” 2; McCabe, “Special District Formation,” 129; Megan Mullin, “The
Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance on Public Policy,” American Journal of Political Science
52, no. 1 (2008): 126-127; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 2, 5; Gina Scutelnicu, “Special
Districts as Institutional Choices for Service Delivery: Views of Public Officials on the Performance of
Community Development Districts in Florida,” Public Administration Quarterly (Fall 2014): 286;
Slivinski, “Out of Sight,” 1.
263
Nicholas G. Bauroth, “The Strange Case of Disappearing Special Districts: Toward a Theory of
Dissolution,” American Review of Public Administration 40, no. 5 (2010): 589.
264
Berry, Imperfect Union, 64-65, 67; Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 53,
57, 60, 61, 65; Macedo, Democracy at Risk, 74, 89-90; Slivinski, “Out of Sight,” 1, 15, 16.
265
Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 53, 57; Macedo, Democracy at Risk
74; McGrath and Rubio-Cortes, “The New Civic Index,” 11; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 1;
Scutelnicu, “Special Districts as Institutional Choices,” 290.
266
Allard, “State Dollars,” 252; Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 10; Goodman, “Local
Government Fragmentation” (2012) 4; Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 57, 59, 60,
65; Hendrick, Jimenez, and Lal, “Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 485;
Michael McGrath and Gloria Rubio-Cortes, “The New Civic Index,” National Civic Review (Summer
2012): 11; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 4; Scutelnicu, “Special Districts as Institutional
Choices,” 290.
267 Berry, Imperfect Union, 2, 21, 69; Killian, “The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 59;
Mullin, “The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance,” 126.
268
Berry, Imperfect Union, 30; Ingram and Hong, “Municipal Revenue Options,” 14; Killian,
“The Continuing Problem of Special Districts,” 54. See also Eiger, “Casting Light on Shadow
Government,” 135, on general applicability and Hamilton, “Does Regionalism Detract,” 15 and Mullin,
“The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance,” 135, as examples of “general” or utility-focused
studies. Though most scholarship focuses on districts generally or on public utility districts, most special
districts are “direct service providers” rather than infrastructure administrators, and their functions are
broader than the literature indicates, encompassing “all the major functions of local government, including
social services…” Berry, Imperfect Union, 30, 34
122
269
Mullin, “The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance,” 135.
270
Bauroth, “The Effect of Limiting Participation,” 80.
271
Slivinski, “Out of Sight,” 2.
272
Lewis and Hamilton, “Race and Regionalism,” 358.
273
Mullin, “The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance,” 126-128, 137; Scutelnicu,
“Special Districts as Institutional Choices,” 296.
274
Scutelnicu, “Special Districts as Institutional Choices,” 296.
275
Allard, “State Dollars,” 254; Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 8; Jimenez, “Separate,
Unequal and Ignored,” 256; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6, 9. Because I do not have data on
the number of governments contained in each city I study, I cannot assess whether the relationship between
ideology and social welfare spending might be attenuated when services are fragmented, though this seems
a particularly important issue for future studies to explore. If critiques of fragmentation as inhibiting
responsiveness are valid, one might expect a weaker relationship. Killian, “The Continuing Problem of
Special Districts,” 60; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 4.
276
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 5; Kelleher and Lowery, “Central City Size,”
72; Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 11.
277 Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 363; “Deciding to Provide,” 908; Minkoff, “Minding Your
Neighborhood,” 520; also cited in Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 21; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 23; and Peterson, City Limits, 48, 49, 50, 56, 64.
278 Bickers and Stein, “Interlocal Cooperation,” 806; Bunch, “Does Local Autonomy Enhance
Representation,” 108-110, 115; Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 32, 36; Einstein, “Divided
Regions,” 8; Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing the City Limits,” 11; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven
Democracy,” 20; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 12, 19, 21, 24; Kelly, “Political
Choice,” 866 and 868; Kim and Fording, “Second-Order Devolution,” 350, 362; Lowry, “Public Welfare
Spending,” 7-8; Palus, “Regional Place and City Space,” 136; Peterson, City Limits, 173; Rigby and
Wright, “Political Parties’ Representation,” 554; Rodden, “The Geographic Distribution of Political
Preferences,” 333; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 2, 18,
25; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 605, 612, 621;
Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,”413, 414.
279
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,”4; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,”
1172-1173; Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local Government,” 134.
280
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1172-1173.
281
Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 416.
282
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 2. It is
important to note here that the scores measure resident preferences, not policy outcomes; specifically, the
extent to which residents are conservative or liberal, rather than how liberal local policies, or elected
officials, might be (author’s note).
123
283
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Measuring Constituents’’ Policy Preferences,” 332; Tausanovich
and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 10; Tausanovich and Warshaw,
“Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 608.
284
Chris Tausanovich, “Income, Ideology, and Representation,” paper prepared for the Russell
Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences Conference on Big Data, 2014: 4.
285
Caughey and Warshaw, “Dynamic Estimation,” 8.
286
For example, Hajnal and Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics;” Kelleher, “Regional
Place and City Space;” Palus, “Responsiveness in American Local Government.”
287
Rigby and Wright, “Political Parties’ Representation,”556.
288
Caughey and Warshaw, “Dynamic Estimation,” 8.
289
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 59, 63, 64,
65; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 608, 628, 629.
290
Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom, Place Matters, 101; Lowery, “A Transactions Cost
Model,” 59-60, 63; Peterson, City Limits, 25; John Singleton, “Sorting Charles Tiebout,” Center for the
History of Political Economy Working Paper Series No. 2013-20, Duke University, 2014: 17; Tausanovich
and Warshaw, “Representation In Municipal Government” (2014a), 64-65; Tausanovich and Warshaw
“Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 629.
291
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 907; Jun, “Escaping the Local Trap,” 347; Anthony J. Nownes,
“Local and State Interest Group Organizations,” in Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government, ed.
Donald P. Haider-Markel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6, 7; Tausanovich and Warshaw,
“Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 25, 27; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation
in Municipal Government” (2014b), 621; Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 10.
292
Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 10.
293
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 11;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 608. Because all the
municipalities in my data set, described below, are cities, the terms are equivalent in this analysis.
294
Wendy K. Tam Cho and Thomas J. Rudolph, “Untangling the Spatial Structure of Political
Participation,” unpublished working paper, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005: 9; Hajnal
and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 13; Hajnal and Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics,” 69;
Hendrick and Shi, “Macro-Level Determinants,” 7; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1165;
Trounstine, “All Politics is Local,” 615; Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 1.
295
Author’s note; see also Nachyba, “The Efficiency and Equity of Tiebout,” 81-83.
296
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 49;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 622.
297
Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing the City Limits,” 12; Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,”
1164; Rodden, “The Geographic Distribution of Political Preferences,” 331; Tausanovich and Warshaw,
“Measuring Constituents’ Policy Preferences,” 340; Tausanovich and Warshaw “Representation in
Municipal Government” (2014a), 18; Tausanovich and Warshaw “Representation in Municipal
Government” (2014b), 613.
124
298
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 49;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 622.
299
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 18
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b) 613.
300
Gillette, Local Redistribution and Local Democracy, 42-43.
301
Bickers and Stein, “Interlocal Cooperation,” 810; Lewis and Hamilton, “Race and
Regionalism,” 357; Peterson, City Limits, 10, 50.
302
See, for example, Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 14, 28
303 Chernick, Langley and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances, 2, 4; Langley,
Methodology, 2; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6.
304
Langley, Methodology, 1-2; also cited in Chernick, Langley and Reschovsky, Comparing
Central City Finances, 6-7; Howard Chernick Adam H. Langley, and Andrew Reschovsky, Newly Released
Data Show Long-Lasting Impact of the Great Recession on Central Cities, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Data Brief (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2014), 2 and Lincoln Institute of Land
Policy. Explanation of Fiscally Standardized Cities (Cambridge, MA: Author, undated), 1.
305 Chernick, Langley, and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances, 7-8 and Langley,
Methodology, 9.
306
Because the database focuses on relatively large cities, small and rural states, whose largest
cities do not meet the population threshold for inclusion, as detailed below, are not included: there are no
cities in the data from Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North
Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming (author’s analysis)
307
Byron Miller and Walter Nicholls, “Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as a Space
of Politicization,” Urban Geography 34, no. 4 (2013): 456. Tausanovich and Warshaw measure ideology at
the level of the city or town, e.g. the municipal area, while FiSCs include all expenditures made within the
municipal boundary. The expenditures included in FiSCs may not be made by the municipal governments,
but residents included in the Tausanovich and Warshaw data live within the boundaries of the FiSCs
(author’s note).
308
Chernick, Langley and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances, 12.
309
Chernick, Langley and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances, 12.
310
Chernick, Langley and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances, 12; Craw,
“Overcoming City Limits,” 368.
311
Hamilton, Miller and Paytas, “Exploring the Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions,”151; U.S.
Census Bureau, “Section 8: State and Local Government Finances and Employment.” Statistical Abstract
of the United States: 2012 (Washington, DC: Author, 2012), 266.
312 Langley, Methodology, 1; Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Source of Local Government Data
Used for FiSCs (Cambridge, MA: Author, undated), 1; U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Surveys of State and
Local Government Finances, 5; U.S. Census Bureau, Data Files on Historical Finances of Individual
Governments, 2.
125
313
Bickers and Stein, “Interlocal Cooperation,” 810; Langley, Methodology, 2; Lincoln Institute of
Land Policy, Definitions for Key Revenue and Spending Variables (Cambridge, MA: Author, undated), 1;
U.S. Census Bureau, Glossary of Selected Terms, 3.
314
Langley, Methodology, 13.
315
Lobao and Kraybill, “The Emerging Roles of County Governments,” 246, 253
316
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7; Suzanne Sataline,
“Cash-Poor Governments Ditching Public Hospitals,” Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2010: 1. Since the
FiSCs are aggregates of municipal government, county government, and special district, including hospital
authority, spending, this effectively indicates that no local governments are directly administering hospital
care in these cities (author’s note).
317
U.S. Census Bureau, State and Local Government Finances Summary: 2008 (Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 2011), 1; U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Surveys of State and Local
Government Finances, 2, 3, 10; U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Aggregates, 4, 7.
318 Johnston and Newman, “Economic Inequality and U.S. Public Policy Mood,” 24.
319
Bowman and Kearney, “Transforming State-Local Relations,” 6; Trisi and Pavetti, TANF
Weakening as a Safety Net, 3.
320
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 10, 24; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and
Ignored,” 249; Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, List of Variables in the Fiscally Standardized Cities
Database (Cambridge, MA: Author, undated), 1; Peterson, City Limits, 51, 52.
321 Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 6; Fisher, “The State
of State and Local Government Finance,” 4, 6; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 24;
Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 4; McCall and Kenworthy, “Americans’
Social Policy Preferences,” 467.
322
U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey Data Products (Washington, DC: Author,
February 2013). There is no more recent data than Gainsborough (2003) on the status of state to
local/county devolution, and even the most recent work continues to be based on this decade-old source
material (Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 74).
323 Sharp, “Local Government, Social Programs, and Political Participation,” 185. Expenditure
data in the Lincoln Institute FiSC database is differentiated by policy type, not program or funding source,
as is the case with the Census of Governments data in general; however, after the decline in General
Assistance, TANF is the nation’s primary public “welfare” program, so it would be expected that most
local public welfare funds come from TANF; author’s note. See also U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Surveys
of State and Local Government Finance and Census of Governments, Finance, 2007, 5 and U.S. Census
Bureau, Data Files on Historical Finances of Individual Governments, 2.
324
Bunch, “Does Local Autonomy Enhance Representation,” 113; Einstein and Kogan, “Pushing
the City Limits,” 13; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Uneven Democracy,” 16; Karuppusamy and Carr,
“Interjurisdictional Competition and Local Public Finance,” 1561.
325
Brooks and Phillips, “An Institutional Explanation,” 257.
326
Berry, Imperfect Union, 96, 134; Bickers and Stein, “Interlocal Cooperation,” 812; Leah
Brooks, Justin Phillips, and Maxim Sinitsyn, “The Cabals of a Few of the Confusion of a Multitude: The
Institutional Trade-off between Representation and Governance,” American Economic Journal: Economic
Policy 3, no. 1 (2011): 15; Bunch, “Does Local Autonomy Enhance Representation,” 112; Jered B. Carr
126
and Antonio Tavares, “City Size and Political Participation in Local Government: Reassessing the
Contingent Effects of Residential Location Decisions Within Urban Regions,” Urban Affairs Review 50,
no. 2 (2014): 279-280; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 369; Craw, “Taming the Local Leviathan,” 670-
671; “Deciding to Provide,” 913; Choi, Bae, Kwon and Feiock, “County Limits,” 38; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics,” 56; Hendrick and Shi,
“Macro-Level Determinants,” 11; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 250; Johnston and Newman,
“Economic Inequality and U.S. Public Policy Mood,” 17; Lobao and Kraybill, “The Emerging Roles of
County Governments,” 254; Lee, Lee, and Bocherding, “Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods Provision,” 9;
Peterson, City Limits, 52, 53; Trounstine, “Living Apart,” 9. As the Census Bureau classifies Hispanic as
ethnicity, not race, and black as a race, including all Hispanic residents, rather than non-black Hispanics,
would count some black Americans twice (author’s analysis).
327
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 912; Kim and Fording, “Second-Order Devolution,” 350; Lobao
and Kraybill, “The Emerging Roles of County Governments,” 246, 253; McFarland and Hoene, Cities and
State Fiscal Structure 2015, 3.
328
U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Surveys of State and Local Government Finances, 4; U.S. Census
Bureau, Data Files on Historical Finances of Individual Governments: Fiscal Year1967 and 1970-2012
(Washington, DC: Author, February 2015), 2.
329 Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1169.
330
Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 8; Baybeck and McClurg, “What Do They Know,”
493; Megan E. Gilster, “Putting Activism in Its Place: The Neighborhood Context of Participation in
Neighborhood-Focused Activism,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 1 (2013): 46; Hacker, “Bringing the
State Back In,” 3; Jimenez, “Separate, Unequal, and Ignored,” 256; Kelly and Enns, “Inequality and the
Dynamics of Public Opinion,” 857; Lee, Lee, and Bocherding, “Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods
Provision,” 9; Matsusaka, “Popular Control of Public Policy,” 159.
331
Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 15; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in
Municipal Government” (2014a), 18; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal
Government” (2014b), 612- 613.
332
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 18;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 612- 613.
333
Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 365; Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation,” 274; Krane,
Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 15; McFarland and Hoene, Cities and State Fiscal Structure 2015, 3. For
example, because the variable for the devolution of TANF effectively measures actions taken at the state
level, specifically state governments’ decision(s) to assign TANF administrative responsibility to county
governments, one cannot make any conclusions regarding local governments’ choices from this measure.
Bowman and Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing Power and Authority,” 4; Craw, “Overcoming City
Limits,” 365; Golden, “The Other Side of Devolution,” 6-7; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 15;
Peterson, City Limits, 11.
334
Peterson, City Limits, 53; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal
Government” (2014a), 19, 36; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government”
(2014b), 613.
335
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 19, 36;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 613.
336
Hajnal and Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics,” 66; Trounstine, “Living Apart,” 9.
127
337
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7; Bowman and
Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing Power and Authority,” 2; Hamilton and Paytas, “Exploring the
Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions,”151; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10, 15.
338
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7; Bowman and
Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing Power and Authority,” 2; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 365; Fisher
and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 10; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10,
15, 16.
339
Bowman and Kearney, “Transforming State-Local Relations,” 2; Hendrick and Shi, “Macro-
Level Determinants,” 7; Peterson, City Limits, 104.
340
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1011; McFarland and Hoene, Cities and State Fiscal
Structure 2015, 9; National League of Cities, Financing Public Education (Washington, DC: Author,
2013):1-2.
341
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States, 26; Lobao and
Kraybill, “The Emerging Roles of County Governments,” 246, 253.
342
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7, 25, 26; Bowman
and Kearney, “Transforming State-Local Relations,” 2; Chernick, Langley, and Reschovsky, Comparing
Central City Finances Using Fiscally Standardized Cities, 2, 4; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 365;
Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovermental Grant Programs,” 10; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,”
10, 15, 16.
343
Hajnal and Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics,” 66.
344
Peterson, City Limits, 58, 64.
345
Trounstine “Living Apart,” 9.
346
If a city has a relatively high percentage of more affluent residents, it could raise a city’s
median income even if the city also has a significant amount of poverty: nonetheless, if one infers that a
greater number of poor residents weakens a city’s tax base and requires local governments to provide
services to residents who cannot afford to pay for them, it also seems reasonable to assume that local
governments may be relying on intergovernmental grants to provide those services. Gais, “Stretched Net,”
559; Peterson, City Limits, 58, 75, 76. If grant assistance is based on the extent of financial need of
residents in a city, as I explore below, higher median incomes should lower the amount of grant aid
received. Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 7, 16; Yerena, “The Impact of
Advocacy Organizations,” 19. Consequently, it is challenging to identify an intuitive explanation for
significant, positive coefficients for both median income and the percent of residents living in poverty in
light of even basic knowledge of the ways in which local governments finance the services they provide.
347
Trounstine, “Living Apart,” 9.
348
Bowman and Kearney, “Transforming State-Local Relations,” 2; Gais, “Stretched Net,” 559;
Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10, 15, 16. As the amounts in the FiSC database simply are the
totals of local government expenditures in each service category, e.g. education or public health, one cannot
separately analyze the amount of expenditure that comes from intergovernmental grant aid vs. local tax
revenue or the extent to whether local jurisdictions who receive grants are supplementing them with their
own locally-raised revenues, though substantive analyses of the policy areas that comprise the social
welfare construct, including funding trends or histories, could provide some insight on the former, in
particular.
128
349
Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10; see also Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal
Federalism in the United States,” 8, 33; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 362; Craw, “Caught at the
Bottom,” 69; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 6, 9; Trounstine, “Representation and
Accountability in Cities,” 412.
350
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 25.
351
Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 327, 330, 332.
352
Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 326.
353
Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 327, 328, 330.
354
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 960.
355
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 25, 26, 30; Conlan
and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 4; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 364, 366; Craw, “Deciding to
Provide,” 909-910; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 974; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 63,
76; Gais, “Stretched Net,” 559; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 21; Howell-Moroney,
“The Tiebout Hypothesis 50 Years Later,” 98; Scheppach and Hildreth, “The Intergovernmental Grant
System,” 6; Urban Institute State and Local Finance Initiative, “State and Local Expenditures,” 3.
356
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 960; Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant
Programs,” 8-9; Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 26;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 621.
357
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 30; Craw, “Deciding
to Provide,” 912; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 969, 1016; Farmer, “County Government Choices,”
63; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 15; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in
Cities,” 413.
358
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 3, 25, 30; Craw,
“Deciding to Provide,” 910; Peterson, City Limits, 50, 51, 58. For an exception, see Gerber and Hopkins,
When Mayors Matter,” 332.
359
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1016; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 4.
360
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 25-26; Conlan and
Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 3, 4; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 362, 364; Craw, “Deciding to
Provide,” 909, 910, 912; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1011-1012; Golden, “The Other Side of
Devolution,” 6-7; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 15; Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles
of Local Government Finance,” 7-8; McFarland and Hoene, Cities and State Fiscal Structure 2015, 9;
Urban Institute, “State and Local Expenditures,” 1.
361
Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 417; also noted in Golden, “The
Other Side of Devolution,” 6-7.
362
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 910; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1017; Farmer, “County
Government Choices,” 60; Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 10; Hajnal and
Trounstine “Who or What Governs,” 7; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 412.
363 Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 20, 21, 28, 30; Conlan
and Posner, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 2; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 364; Craw,
“Deciding to Provide,” 909; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 63; Golden, “The Other Side of
Devolution,” 6-7; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 15.
129
364 Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 20, 21, 28; Nancy,
Burns, Laura Evans, Gerald Gamm, and Corrine McConnaughy, “Urban Politics in the State Arena,”
Studies in American Political Development 23, no. 1 (2009): 15; Conlan and Posner, “State
Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 7; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 364; Craw, “Caught at the
Bottom,” 69; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1016; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 63, 79;
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 15; Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,”
353. Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal specifically note that, due to intergovernmental factors, it is possible
that funds “may show up on the balance sheet of the lower level of government but not represent the
expression of local preferences.” Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,”
28.
365
Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 327, 328, 330.
366
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014a), 59, 63-65;
Tausanovich and Warshaw, “Representation in Municipal Government” (2014b), 608, 628, 629; see also
Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 328. Gerber and Hopkins also note “there have been few
studies of partisan identification across the levels of the U.S. federal system.” Gerber and Hopkins, “When
Mayors Matter,” 328.
367
Tausanovich and Warshaw have calculated state ideology values in other work, but I did not
analyze them.
368
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 20, 21, 28.
369
Conlan and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 7; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 910, 919; Craw,
“Caught at the Bottom,” 69; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 63, 76, 79; Hajnal and Trounstine,
“Who or What Governs,”15.
370
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1016.
371
Conlan and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 7; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 909; Davidson,
“Cooperative Localism,” 969, 1011, 1016; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 4; Robert C.
Lowry and Matthew Potoski, “Organized Interests and the Politics of Federal Discretionary Grants,”
Journal of Politics 66, no. 2 (2004): 516, 530.
372
Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 362, 364; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 909, 910, 919; Craw
“Caught at the Bottom,” 69; Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 332; Golden, “The Other Side
of Devolution,” 6-7; Peterson, City Limits, 10, 11, 212; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in
Cities,” 413.
373
Conlan and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 10; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 969, 1023:
Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10; Lowry and Potoski, “Organized Interests,” 516.
374
Brooks and Phillips, “An Institutional Explanation,” 255; Brooks, Phillips, and Sinitsyn, “The
Cabals of a Few,” 11; Lowry and Potoski, “Organized Interests,” 516, 530. To be clear, this is not to
suggest that local governments whose officials and residents are more favorably inclined toward social
welfare initiatives are more likely to seek grants than to fund services through local tax revenues, only that
more ideologically supportive communities are more likely than cities and towns whose residents less favor
such spending to pursue intergovernmental grants.
375
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 919; Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 969; 1023.
376
Brooks and Phillips, “The Politics of Inequality,” 1, 2, 9; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 919;
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 969, 1023.
130
377 Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 329.
378
Conlan and Posner, “Federalism Trends,” 4, 10; Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental
Grant Programs,” 1; Kelly and Witko, “Federalism and American Inequality,” 418; Volden,
“Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 327.
379 Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 909; Craw, “Caught at the Bottom,” 69.
380
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7, 25; Craw,
“Overcoming City Limits,” 362, 376; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 912, 918; 919; Farmer, “County
Government Choices,” 76; Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 10; Kelly and
Witko, “Federalism and American Inequality,” 418.
381
Brooks and Phillips, “An Institutional Explanation,” 255; Brooks and Phillips, “The Politics of
Inequality,” 8; Brooks, Phillips, and Sinitsyn, “The Cabals of a Few,” 2; Fisher and Bristle, “State
Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 7; Lowry and Potoski, “Organized Interests,” 517; Scheppach and
Hildreth, “The Intergovernmental Grant System,” 5. These demographic characteristics also may be
correlated with the independent variables employed here, which may explain some of the “noise” in
Models 3 through 6. Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 363-364; Gais, “Stretched Net,” 565; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “What Underlies Urban Politics,” 66; Peterson, City Limits, 55. For example, Gais observes
that “fiscal capacity” may be “correlated with other economic and social factors as well as federal grant
formulas,” while Craw posits that “poverty rates and social welfare spending are endogenous at the local
level.” Gais, “Stretched Net,” 565; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 363-364. Considering that median
income often proxies for fiscal capacity in public choice models, based on the supposition that it will
positively affect local social welfare expenditures, the existence of grant formulae that weight lower per
capita or median income more heavily, or use it to award more funds, is particularly problematic for
interpreting spending amounts. Gais, “Stretched Net,” 565.
382 Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1012.
383
Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 376; Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,”
337. 384
Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 943.
385 Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 371; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 917; Einstein and Kogan,
“Pushing the City Limits,” 14-16; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 76-77; Peterson, City Limits, 58,
78, 82; Yerena, “The Impact of Advocacy Organizations,” 19.
386
Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 371; Hendrick and Shi, “Macro-Level Determinants,” 21;
Peterson, City Limits, 78.
387
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7, 28, 30; Craw,
“Overcoming City Limits,” 364; Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 8, 9;
Hendrick and Shi, “Macro-Level Determinants,” 21.
388
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 30. Whether grants
substitute for or supplement local efforts remains an open question in the literature on local governments’
social welfare provision: few studies address the issue and those that do appear to interpret similar results
differently, e.g. Brooks, Phillips, and Sinitsyn, “The Cabals of a Few,” 2; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,”
371.
389
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 25, 26; 30; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 21; Hendrick and Shi, “Macro-Level Determinants,” 21.
131
390
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7; Craw, “Deciding to
Provide,” 907; Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 8-10; Hajnal and Trounstine,
“Who or What Governs,” 22; Hamilton, Miller and Paytas, “Exploring the Horizontal and Vertical
Dimensions,” 151; Lowry and Potoski, “Organized Interests,” 517. Fisher and Bristle observe that, to date,
there has been limited scholarly exploration of the linkages between federal/state and state/local grant
“structures,” how state grants to local governments, and the decisions states make regarding their
delegation of grant funds, might be influenced by the decisions made by the federal government in
allocating states those funds. Fisher and Bristle, “State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 8-9.
391
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7; Craw, “Deciding to
Provide,” 907; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 22.
392
Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 30; Fisher and Bristle,
“State Intergovernmental Grant Programs,” 2.
393
Brooks and Phillips, “The Politics of Inequality,” 1-2, 9; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 911.
394
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 907.
395
Craw, Deciding to Provide,” 907.
396
Lowry and Potoski, “Organized Interests,” 518; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 9;
Wolman, “What Cities Do,” 12.
397
Brooks and Phillips, “The Politics of Inequality,” 1, 2, 9; Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 907.
398
Gais, “Stretched Net,” 560; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 9; U.S. Census Bureau,
Historical Aggregates, 5.
399
For example, one might anticipate that local preferences might have greater influence on policy
domains which are more publically visible or less controlled by state governments, such as education.
Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 60, 76, 79.
400 Riverstone-Newell, “When Local Activism Challenges Higher Authority,” 14.
401
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 2, 3, 7, 8, 16, 33;
Bowman and Kearney, “Are U.S. Cities Losing Power and Authority,” 2; Hendrick, Jimenez and Lal,
“Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 468; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle,
“Devolution,” 6, 9, 10, 15, 16.
402
Baybeck, “Local Political Participation,” 4; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6.
403
Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 60, 78; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What
Governs,” 7.
404
Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 60, 78.
405
Bowman and Kearney, “Transforming State-Local Relations,”10; Farmer, “County
Government Choices,” 60, 78; Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 7.
406
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1007; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 79.
Davidson asserts that it is necessary for scholars to “distinguish between local governments that are
conceptually independent…from other public bodies that truly function as administrative arms of state
132
government,” particularly given that counties vary in the extent of their substantive authority. Davidson,
“Cooperative Localism,” 1007.
407
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1017; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 60, 79.
408 Bowman and Kearney, “Second Order Devolution,” 574; Sharp and Maynard-Moody,
“Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942; Sheppach and Hildreth, “The Intergovernmental Grant
System,” 6.
409
Bowman and Kearney, “Transforming State-Local Relations,” 2; Chernick, Langley, and
Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances Using Fiscally Standardized Cities, 2, 5; Craw, “Caught at
the Bottom,” 69; Goodman, Local Government Fragmentation” (2012), 2; Hendrick, Jimenez and Lal,
“Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 468; Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle,
“Devolution,” 10, 15; Langley, Methodology, 1; Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6; Peterson, City
Limits, 10, 50, 51; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942.
410
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal 25; Chernick, Langley, and Reschovsky, Comparing Central
City Finances Using Fiscally Standardized Cities, 2, 4; Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 368; Hendrick,
Jimenez and Lal, “Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 468; Peterson, City
Limits, 11. Though earlier research, including that of Peterson, attempted to address differences in the
scope of local governments’ responsibilities by aggregating data to the state level, doing so results in not
being able to examine the behavior of individual governments, the units of analysis posited in public
choice; however, studies of individual local governments seem to ignore this variation in service
responsibility altogether. Baicker, Clemens and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 7;
Chernick, Langley, and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances Using Fiscally Standardized Cities,
2, 4; Hendrick, Jimenez and Lal, “Does Local Government Fragmentation Increase Local Spending,” 468;
Peterson, City Limits, 50, 51.
411
Chernick, Langley, and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances Using Fiscally
Standardized Cities, 2, 4; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942.
412
Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 417.
413
Martell and Greenwade, “Profiles of Local Government Finance,” 3; Trounstine, “Living
Apart,” 15; U.S. Census Bureau, Local Government Finances by Level and Type of Government and by
State, 2007 data.
414
Hajnal and Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 15; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of
the Local Welfare Role,” 942.
415
Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942, 947-948.
416
Chernick, Langley, and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances Using Fiscally
Standardized Cities, 2, 4; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942.
417
Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 332; Karuppusamy and Carr, “Interjurisdictional
Competition and Local Public Finance,” 56.
418 For an example of preliminary work in this vein, see Craw’s “Overcoming City Limits,” which
separates expenditures by type in the latter three policy areas, though not by individual units of
government. Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,” 369.
419
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 910; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 76; Hajnal and
Trounstine, “Who or What Governs,” 14; Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 337, 353.
133
420
Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local
Welfare Role,” 943-945; Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Participation,” 329.
421
Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942-945.
422
Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942. See also Peterson,
City Limits, 11. On a related note, Craw proposes that states should delegate policy responsibilities to local
governments “in in ways that avoid duplicating state and local effort.” Craw, “Overcoming City Limits,”
66.
423 Chernick, Langley, and Reschovsky, Comparing Central City Finances Using Fiscally
Standardized Cities, 4. For example, Craw reports the result that public welfare expenditures are greater in
counties, his units of analysis, with a “greater county share of funding,” a conclusion that the history of
county governments’ role in administering public welfare functions and, more recently, administering
TANF, would predict. Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 376.
424
Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 353.
425
Volden, “Intergovernmental Political Competition,” 338
426 Backer, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 3, 25; Goodman,
“Local Government Fragmentation” (2012), 2; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 10; Mullin and
Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6.
427
Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 6, 9.
428
Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 412.
429
Hendrick, Jimenez and Lal, “Macro-Level Determinants,” 485; Sharp and Maynard-Moody,
“Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942.
430
Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 9; Hendrick, Jimenez and Lal, “Macro-Level
Determinants,” 485; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942.
431
Mullin and Hughes, “Local Boundaries,” 9-10.
432
Craw, “Deciding to Provide,” 910; Craw, “The Effect of Fragmentation,” 274; Gerber and
Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 332; Peterson, City Limits, 10, 11; Sharp and Maynard-Moody,
“Theories of the Local Welfare Role,” 942; Trounstine, “Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 412.
433
Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster, 23.
434
Davidson, “Cooperative Localism,” 1011; Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 76, 79.
435 Farmer, “County Government Choices,” 63; Gerber and Hopkins, “When Mayors Matter,” 337;
Kelleher, “Regional Place and City Space,” 1176; Lowry and Potoski, “Organized Interests,” 530;
Trounstine, Representation and Accountability in Cities,” 416.
436
Krane, Ebdon, and Bartle, “Devolution,” 6, 9.
437
Baicker, Clemens, and Singhal, “Fiscal Federalism in the United States,” 2, 3, 16, 33; Craw,
“Caught at the Bottom,” 69; Krane, Ebdon and Bartle, “Devolution,” 6, 9, 15; Mullin and Hughes, “Local
Boundaries,” 6, 9; Peterson, City Limits, 71; Sharp and Maynard-Moody, “Theories of the Local Welfare
Role,” 942.
134
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