William E Lyons - The Politics of Dissatisfaction: Citizens, Services and Urban Institutions: Citizens, Services and Urban Institutions

Bureaucracies, Public Administration, and Public Policy

Kenneth J. Meier
Series Editor

THE STATE OF PUBLIC BUREAUCRACY
Larry B. Hill, Editor

THE POLITICS OF DISSATISFACTION
Citizens, Services, and Urban Institutions
W. E. Lyons, David Lowery, and Ruth Hoogland DeHoog

THE DYNAMICS OF CONFLICT BETWEEN BUREAUCRATS AND LEGISLATORS
Cathy Marie Johnson

THE POLITICS OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS REGULATION
The States and the Divestiture of AT&T
Jeffrey E. Cohen

WOMEN AND MEN OF THE STATES
Public Administrators at the State Level
Mary E. Guy, Editor

ETHICS AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
H. George Frederickson, Editor

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AT THE STATE LEVEL
Politics and Progress in Controlling Pollution
Evan J. Ringquist

THE POLITICS OF SIN
Drugs, Alcohol, and Public Policy
Kenneth J. Meier

Bureaucracies, Public Administration, and Public Policy

Citizens, Services, and Urban Institutions

W. E. Lyons
David Lowery
Ruth Hoogland DeHoog

First published 1992 by M.E. Sharpe.Inc

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 1992 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lyons, William E., 1935.
The politics of dissatisfaction: citizens, services, and urban institutions /
by W. E. Lyons, David Lowery, Ruth Hoogland DeHoog.
p. cm. (Bureaucracies, public administration, and public policy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87332-898-1 (c); ISBN 1-56324-378-4(p)
1. Local governmentUnited StatesPublic opinion.
2. Metropolitan governmentUnited StatesPublic opinion.
3. County servicesUnited StatesPublic opinion.
4. Municipal servicesUnited StatesPublic opinion.
I. Lowery, David.
II. DeHoog, Ruth Hoogland.
III. Title.
IV. Series.
JS323.L97 1992
321.8'0973dc20
91-35287
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-87332-898-2 (pbk)

The M. E. Sharpe, Inc. series on bureaucracies, public policy, and public administration is designed as a forum for the best work on bureaucracy and its role in public policy and governance. Although the series is open with regard to approach, methods, and perspectives, especially sought are three types of research. First, the series hopes to attract theoretically informed, empirical studies of bureaucracy. Public administration has long been viewed as a theoretical and methodological backwater of political science. This view persists despite a recent accumulation of first-rate research. The series seeks to place public administration at the forefront of empirical analysis within political science. Second, the series is interested in conceptual work that attempts to clarify theoretical issues, set an agenda for research, or provide a focus for professional debates. Third, the series seeks work that challenges the conventional wisdom about how bureaucracies influence public policy or the role of public administration in governance.

The Politics of Dissatisfaction: Citizens, Services, and Urban Institutions is destined to be a classic in public administration and public policy; it makes major theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature in both fields. The Politics of Dissatisfaction is a rigorous empirical attempt to assess the public choice view of citizenship and local government. Traditional public administration has long advocated the consolidation of urban governments to provide for equitable treatment of all citizens and to gain the benefits of economies of scale in government services. Public choice theory has challenged this prescription, arguing that fragmentation has its benefits. Multiple small jurisdictions, the argument goes, allow individuals to choose the service/taxation combination that they desire. Providing such choices, public choice contends, will foster the development of an informed democratic citizenry.

The Politics of Dissatisfaction represents the systematic destruction of this public choice perspective on urban government. An elaborate theoretical assessment of public choice conclusions reveals a variety of limitations and inconsistencies. Using an extensive citizen survey of ten urban communities, the authors find that the hypotheses of public choice theory simply are not true. Contrary to the predictions of public choice, citizens in small, fragmented urban areas are not better informed about issues involving local government, they are not more likely to participate in politics, they are not more likely to feel they can influence government, and they are not more satisfied with local government services than are citizens living in consolidated urban governments. Professors Lyons, Lowery, and DeHoog have exposed public choice approaches to urban governance as exercises in wishful thinking.

Given, then, that fragmented urban communities do not provide for better development of democratic citizenship, the normative contrast between consolidation and fragmentation weighs heavily in favor of consolidation. Consolidation provides a larger tax base, a greater opportunity to address significant urban policy problems, and the ability to address questions of economic and political equity. Advocates of municipal reform now have the evidence needed to refute the public choice challenge.

The work presented here does not address other applications or public choice theory to politics. Given the theory's inadequacies in an area where a series of axiomatic internally consistent arguments was presented, scholars would be wise to examine public choice approaches in other areas. Professors Lyons, Lowery, and DeHoog have demonstrated that rigorous empirical evaluation of such theories is possible and have provided a blueprint for others to do so.

Kenneth J. Meier

The research upon which this book is based was founded on conversations between two of its authors, W. E. Lyons and David Lowery, during the early 1980s. We were frustrated with the state of scholarly debate over the content of urban political behavior and institutions. While the urban political behavior literature offered a rich mix of assertions, hypotheses, and even grand theoretical analyses, it was, simply put, a mess. With some important exceptions that we consider in some detail, little or no attention was given to how the various political behaviors observed in real urban settings and studied through a variety of methods relate to each other, or to how citizens select among them when they are dissatisfied with local government. Just as frustrating was the urban institutions literature, which had by then hardened into a fixed competition between proponents of governmental fragmentation and supporters of the traditional reform theory of jurisdictional consolidation. Their competing and dramatic claims struck us as ignoring the complexity of behaviors found in actual urban settings. And the research designs linking institutions to behaviors were simply not up to the task of unraveling their complex linkages, even assuming that we had some broader theoretical guidance about just what linkages to look for. But while frustrated, we realized that such intellectual untidiness should be better viewed as intellectual opportunity.