Christine Kelleher Palus

A Century of Municipal Reform in the United States A Legacy of Success, Adaptation, and the Impulse to Improve

In this article, we examine the legacy of four progressive reforms intended to secure “good” government—the model city charter, the council-manager plan, city management professionalism, and bureaucratic service delivery. Our analysis integrates research by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and public administration scholars, and provides a unique multidisciplinary perspective on the legacy of success and adaptation of the municipal reform movement. We use Hofstadter’s concept of a reform “impulse” in American political culture to frame our analysis. We conclude with four observations on the future of municipal reform, ultimately arguing that the impulse to “reform” continues to be a dominant driver across both local government management and institutions.

A Profile of Villanova University’s Partnership with Local Government Managers

In this case study, we describe and assess how the Villanova University Master of Public Administration (MPA) program involves practitioners in local government management education. We present student and faculty views on the effectiveness and quality of the university’s one-credit courses on different topics taught by local government managers and the three-credit course on effective city management team-taught by three township managers. We also review the contributions of municipal internships to Villanova MPA students’ education and career trajectories. Finally, we explain the curriculum featured in the university’s Graduate Certificate in City Management program and stress the advantage of offering the certificate to pre-master’s and post-master’s students, as well as to MPA students choosing to specialize in city management. Data from a 2009 survey of program directors from National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) member schools indicate that the combination of Villanova’s practices is unique. Because the students and faculty believe this approach is an effective one, we offer the university’s model as one way for full-time faculty to partner with local government professionals to help recruit and educate the next generation of city and county managers.

Oversight as Constraint or Catalyst? Explaining Agency Influence on State Policy Decision Making

Do agency officials hold influence over the policy decisions made by state legislators and governors? For years, scholars have asserted the important informational role that bureaucrats play within the U.S. policy-making process. However, we have only limited knowledge of the theoretical mechanisms that may allow for this influence, or ultimately, whether this influence matters to public policy outcomes. We theorize that the political oversight of the bureaucracy by elected officials not only constrains the bureaucracy but also provides a pathway for agency officials to advance their preferences by communicating their policy expertise. We assess this argument with survey data from almost 600 state agency heads, drawn from the 50 states and across all agency types. Using a multilevel model, we find that the “oversight mechanism” is a key driver of agency influence over gubernatorial policy decisions; however, it does a poor job explaining agency policy influence within state legislatures. These results suggest that oversight allows agency leaders greater success in lobbying governors than more diffuse and diverse state legislatures.

Tribulations, Triumphs, and Tentative Trajectories in the Study of Local Political Participation

Scholars of political science often lament the difficulties associated with finding the most appropriate data to test theories about how the political world works. The study of local political participation and, more broadly, elections is certainly no stranger to this quandary. However, considering that the nearly 90,000 units of local government generally hold regular elections for a wide array of political offices, this field of study should offer an embarrassment of riches; we should never be at a loss for a way to examine the questions that are central to the functioning of democracy. Ironically, though, these lines of research are instead plagued by a paucity of large-N studies, attributable not to a lack of quantity of data, but rather to a dearth of quality data. The greatest frustration of this endeavor is not whether appropriate data exist, but how to gain access to them in a useful format. In this article, I briefly reflect on my personal experiences with a major data collection effort on local elections. I then address how a centralized dataset on local elections would afford researchers multiple avenues of inquiry to more fully investigate the relationships between jurisdiction size, politivariable were obtained from a number of different sources— county and city websites, county and state boards of elections, local newspapers, and direct contact with municipalities. Collecting this information was an exercise in patience, fortitude, and perseverance that took nearly a full year to complete. Despite countless efforts to obtain full information for our sample, many difficulties precluded the securing of the necessary legislative election returns for all of the municipalities on which we intended to focus. Our final dataset included returns from 72% of our initial goal, for a variety of reasons discussed in the following paragraphs. First, election data in select places has a very short shelf life. Despite targeting the most recent elections in the localities studied, in many instances, records had already been purged and data were simply no longer available. A second, related obstacle was the level of detail and aggregation that existed for data that did “stand the test of time.” In other words, although some information was available, it had not been preserved at the level of detail needed for our particular investigation. For example, although we were able to obtain official turnout figures for the election as a whole, we could not sep-