paths of neighborhood change: race and crime in urban americaby richard p. taub; d. garth taylor;...

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Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban America by Richard P. Taub; D. Garth Taylor; Jan D. Dunham Review by: Larry Bennett The American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 338-339 Published by: American Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1957132 . Accessed: 17/12/2014 09:48 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . American Political Science Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Political Science Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 09:48:23 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban Americaby Richard P. Taub; D. Garth Taylor; Jan D. Dunham

Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban America by Richard P. Taub; D.Garth Taylor; Jan D. DunhamReview by: Larry BennettThe American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 338-339Published by: American Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1957132 .

Accessed: 17/12/2014 09:48

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Political Science Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toThe American Political Science Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 17 Dec 2014 09:48:23 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban Americaby Richard P. Taub; D. Garth Taylor; Jan D. Dunham

American Political Science Review Vol. 80

oversight of regulatory rule making, the theory of benefit-cost analysis, the quality of analysis that has taken place under the Reagan order, and the overall costs and benefits of imposing benefit-cost analysis in agency deci- sion making through the executive order and OMB review. While the essays do not ignore the political issues that the executive order has spawned, they emphasize and describe with clarify the economic assumptions underlying benefit-cost analysis. Combined with other studies that give primary attention to political considerations such as the tension between congressional and presidential oversight and that between presidential review and the pro- cedural requirements of administrative law, this volume adds much to our understanding of recent efforts of presidents to gain more control over the administrative process, and adds much to an initial and preliminary under- standing of the prospects for the use of benefit- cost analysis in regulatory agencies and its effect on the quality of regulatory decision making.

GARY BRYNER

Brigham Young University

Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban America. By Richard P. Taub, D. Garth Taylor, and Jan D. Dunham. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp. xii + 264. $25.00.)

Richard P. Taub, D. Garth Taylor, and Jan D. Dunham of the University of Chicago have written an impressive but ultimately troubling book. Their objective is quite ambitious: to modify and refine one the cornerstones of American urban sociology: the invasion/suc- cession model of neighborhood change. As their study's title indicates, they purport to emphasize the connections between crime and neighborhood racial turnover. However, in Paths of Neighborhood Change's introductory chapter, which outlines the theoretical issues impinging on the authors' research agenda, the discussion of why they single out crime (as opposed to garbage or governmental unre- sponsiveness, for instance) as a contributor to neighborhood deterioration is at best sketchy. The remainder of the book sustains this split emphasis. For the most part the authors look

at how neighborhood residents assess their communities, make judgments about whether or not to invest in home upkeep, and react to the initiatives of local government and other "institutional actors." Every several pages a discussion of crime appears, but the authors never make the case as to why this particular issue overshadows other neighborhood prob- lems nor fully integrate the crime and neigh- borhood investment analyses.

The strength of this volume is its research design and methodology. The authors examine eight Chicago neighborhoods, and through a combination of direct observation, survey data, and secondary material they manage insightfully to detail each community. Follow- ing three chapters of neighborhood case studies, multiple regression and formal model- ing of the survey results are employed are employed to generate explanations of local investment, neighborhood racial tipping, and crime perception as a component of neigh- borhood change.

By themselves, the neighborhood case studies highlight the variable paths of neigh- borhood change. The mathematical analyses in chapters 6 through 8 also produce some interesting insights, most prominently the ways by which housing market conditions can affect the likelihood of neighborhood racial turnover. As is typically the case, the authors make some arbitrary judgments in manipu- lating and interpreting their data, and these judgments have bearing on their analysis. As both a dependent and independent variable, housing investment is assumed to bode well for a neighborhood, when in reality it is a more ambiguous activity. Homeowners rigging their houses with sophisticated burglar alarms and front door gates, or surrounding their yards with high fences, may not build the confidence of their neighbors. The authors are puzzled at what they interpret as the racial prejudice of blacks directed at other blacks-specifically their fear of neighborhoods becoming totally black-but it does not occur to them that black residents of a city like Chicago associate such segregated neighborhoods with redlining and reduced city services. What the authors view as racial prejudice might alternately be called reasonable apprehension. Finally, Taub, Taylor, and Dunham anchor their discussion of individual investment in theories of collec- tive action, yet they do not connect this

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Page 3: Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban Americaby Richard P. Taub; D. Garth Taylor; Jan D. Dunham

1986 Book Reviews: American Politics

approach to the functions of community organizations, which succeed-on one level at least-by constraining the free-rider temptation.

The foregoing problems are real, but it should be repeated that they occur within the context of a generally rigorous and creative analytical operation. What troubles this reader most about Paths of Neighborhood Change are some of the conclusions the authors draw. On one hand are perfectly sensible correctives to some observers' faith that local organiza- tions, by themselves, can save neighborhoods, or the analogous thinking that the problems of frostbelt cities can be solved through purely local initiatives. Yet the authors also support neighborhood triage, when there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the residents of written-off neighborhoods would receive the job counseling, psychological supports, and financial aid requisite for starting life anew in some other location. Similarly, the authors hold to a faith in the benevolence of institu- tional actors as agents of neighborhood stabil- ity. This flies in the face of the experience of about half their Chicago neighborhoods, in which institutional actors have sought to speed or impede neighborhood change for reasons often quite insensitive to the welfare of local residents. Oddly, in a study that goes so far in describing how distinctive are the courses of neighborhood evolution, the authors them- selves fall prey to reifying the concept of neigh- borhood and forget that people with lives, jobs, expectations, and fears are the neighbor- hood. Policy should be informed by the needs of these people and not by the idea of neigh- borhood improvement.

LARRY BENNETT

DePaul University

Democrat Versus Democrat: The National Party's Campaign to Close the Wisconsin Primary. By Gary D. Wekkin. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984. Pp. x + 253. $23.00.)

When Democrats circle the wagons, says the old joke, their rifles aim inward. In the wake of

wagons circled-for an internecine shootout that isn't over yet.

Democrat Versus Democrat describes one of the battles in this now eighteen-year war-that between the Democratic National Committee and Wisconsin Democrats over the latter's beloved open primary. Wekkin has captured it with a rigorous eye and a lively pen. The book begins with an important theoretical score- card, telling the players' positions. Of all the questions raised in this first chapter-federal, factional, legal-perhaps none is more impor- tant than the democratic: "the question of whether democratic government means direct, popular participation in decisionmaking-or popular control over those who decide" (p. 12). The first, the "classical" position, "has been the credo of most Progressives and McGovern-era reformers and of the many Wisconsin Democrats who have opposed implementation of the DNC's closed-primary rule." The alternative cudgels are carried by "revisionist democrats such as E. E. Schatt- schneider and some advocates of 'responsible party government"' (p. 13).

Subsequent chapters illustrate mainly that, alas, players did not often choose their stands on such elevated grounds. For example, some reform Democrats at the national level sup- ported closure largely because George Wallace had done well in Wisconsin's "Democratic" primary by dint of Republican and indepen- dent votes. Regulars also supported closure, thinking (wrongly) that crossover voting had robbed Hubert Humphrey of a 1972 victory in the crucial Wisconsin primary. Wisconsin party-organization members, who had aspira- tions within the national party organization, were more easily resigned to closing the primary than were Wisconsin politicians, who had to face Wisconsin voters. Jimmy Carter saved the state's open primary in 1980, when polls showed he would do well in it. But presidential candidates spurned the primary in 1984, when it fell too late to be vital to them. And so it went, in a dismal parade of calcula- tions about whose ox would be gored, whose ax would be ground.

It is not a criticism of this book, but a tribute to it, to say that there is plenty of room for argument here. For example, in rendering the revisionists' position as one of the conflicting theories of democracy, Wekkin cogently shows that both makers of and participants in

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