The Formation of American Local Governments: Private Values in Public Institutions

by Nancy Burns

Why have Americans created thousands of new local governments in recent years, a rate much higher than population increases demand? Conflicts over local power--the power to tax, to issue bonds, and to provide services--have produced solutions that are often as ruthless as they are resourceful.
The first text to illustrate the impact of creating new local governments, this compelling study provides an illuminating examination of the nature of local politics today. Skillfully combining case studies, institutional history, and quantitative analyses, Nancy Burns argues that economic interests, states, the federal government, and inventive individuals have changed the parameters of local institutions, thereby changing local politics. Rather than working for change within the existing system, countless groups have created new municipalities and "special districts," local governments that serve private interests more than the public good. Businesses and developers, who tend to initiate and dominate the process, often serve as organizational bases to help allied groups--such as wealthy homeowners--achieve their goals. Because of the autonomy that local governments enjoy in the U.S., the formation of these new governments has had an impact on the quality of life for many Americans.
New boundaries, created mostly along race and class lines, determine access to education, housing, and basic services, allowing the privilege of exclusion to accompany the privilege of municipal management. Revealing the place of local institutions in the larger political spectrum, this landmark work offers students of urban politics and political science a unique look at the structural features of American local politics.

208 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 1994

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the faults of the book do not lie with the author. The book emerges from an earlier era of empirical research when data was limited and concepts of causation much looser. Yet the fact that almost a half of this slim book is taken up with an extended analysis of regressions on the formation of new cities and special districts in 200 American counties, and then the book declares that the resulting correlations showed the impact of African-American populations, or developers, or manufacturers, on forming new cities, seems fairly questionable. If anything it seems like mere size of the population of a county had a powerful effect on new government formation, and its not even clear if population is controlled for in all of the other regressions. At the least, it does seem like ease of annexation laws led to the formation of more cities and fewer special districts, since homeowners used new cities to escape the grasp of large central cities, and therefore didn't need to rely on districts.

The first half of the book is just a collection of stories from some writers of urban history, such as Teaford, Jackson, Gelfand, and Monkonnen. Some of the stories are interesting, like how the preclearance or Section 5 part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 slowed incorporation, especially of special districts, in the South, because of the difficulty of securing DOJ approval, or how FDR encouraged governors in a 1934 letter to form more special districts and use more revenue bonds to get around debt limits, and how this helped spur a boom in such districts in the 1930s, especially of housing and social conservation districts. But such stories are found elsewhere. On the whole, this work did attempt a few new directions in research, but it has definitely been superseded.

[Kelsi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the book reads really well for it being a piece of research on local governments and special districts. I was interested in the aspects of society that allowed for racial discrimination in zoning practices in the 50s and 60s. There is one chapter based on data and her study, so this is definitely a scholarly piece of work that really will only be understood by statisticians and political scientists.

[Eliswiney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic so far...