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

65

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

66

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

75

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

78

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

79

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

80

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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