Clifford Kaufman

Bureaucratic Response to Citizen-Initiated Contacts: Environmental Enforcement in Detroit

When citizens contact local government agencies, they generally attempt to influence service delivery decisions made by these bureaucracies. This paper examines the nature of citizen contacts, and the results of such contacts, with respect to the enforcement of environmental ordinances in Detroit, Michigan. We first examine the mechanisms responsible for the generation of citizen contacts. Assuming relations among citizen awareness, service need, and social well-being, we derive a downward-opening parabola as appropriate for describing the relationship between social well-being and propensity to contact a service agency. Using data on citizen contacts from City of Detroit agencies merged with census data, we find the expected relationship in evidence. We find that the Environmental Enforcement Division generally responds to citizen contacts, but the quality of the response varies with social characteristics of neighborhoods.

The Distribution of Urban Public Services A Preliminary Model

One of the major thrusts of modern political science has centered on distributional aspects of public policy. Harold Lasswell (1936) once defined the science of politics as the study of &dquo;who gets what, when, and how.&dquo; Distribution, then, concerns what kinds of people enjoy the benefits of governmental activity, and what kinds suffer deprivation because of that activity. Nevertheless, we have few studies of the distributional aspects of urban public services, and we know even less about the causes of existing patterns of distribution. As Crecine (1970: 515) has commented, &dquo;Seldom specified is how goods and services get distributed to population groups.&dquo; Distribution of urban public services is generally accomplished by two methods. Many services, such as garbage collection, building inspection, police patrolling, and fire service are delivered directly to households or neighborhoods. Other services, including libraries, hospitals, and schools,

Service Delivery Rules and the Distribution of Local Government Services: Three Detroit Bureaucracies

I N THE DECENTRALIZED TRADITION of American government structures, autonomous local jurisdictions have responsibility for the provision of a wide range of services essential for the well-being of the public. Such services include both those which are universally accepted to be in the domain of state power (e.g., law enforcement) as well as those which could in principle be provided privately, but for historical or other reasons are often not (e.g., education, sanitation. ) One may isolate two general approaches to the study of municipal public services. In the first, government is viewed as a productive organization, producing public services from resources in the same manner that a private factory transforms raw materials into consumer goods. The removal of municipal services from the mar-

Political Urbanism: Urban Spatial Organization, Policy, and Politics

One objective of urban study is the evaluation of explanations for variations in urbanism and urban policy. A current need in comparative urban study is universal conceptualization of these complex concepts. Empirical confirmation of explanations for these concepts requires, at minimum, their valid, comparative measurement in differing regional and national contexts. Universal dimensions of these concepts guide the development of systematic, cumulative inquiry in the field of comparative urban politics. Most work in urban politics is toward explanation for urban policy.’ In this regard, typically, we include urban socioeconomic characteristics and such political variables as demandmaking and conflict, decision-making and power structure, and intergovernmental relations. Curiously, the concept of urban policy is essentially undeveloped.’ Consequently, it is difficult to evaluate comparative research findings on urban policy variations even within the relatively homogeneous United States,

Latin American Urban Inquiry: Some Substantive and Methodological Commentary

In regard to the characteristics and consequences of urban growth, Latin American urban research has, in this author’s view, matured sufficiently that it now requires systematic evaluation. Though Morse (1965) and Mangin (1967) have enriched the field of Latin American urban research through excellent reviews of the literature on housing and through well-founded justification for selected topics in urban inquiry, we unfortunately lack a general statement which includes (1) the current topics in urban research and (2) some of the methodological problems of such research. Consistent with the need for such a statement, the following discussion attempts to review comprehensively the current variety of urban research topics concerned with Latin America, and to evaluate such research in regard to some of the methodological problems in constructing theories relevant to questions of urban and other forms of development.

Urban Conflict as a Constraint On Mayoral Leadership: Lessons From Gary and Cleveland

The study of executive leadership includes the common distinction between headship and leadership. The former involves merely occupying an elected or appointive position, while the latter involves the exercise of influence in the pursuit of goals. Guiding innovations through the successful expansion of formal authority and the exercise of informal influence have often been considered a measure of effective executive performance. The process of expanding political roles has frequently been interpreted in terms of political integration and coalition formation. This has been particularly the case in studies of mayoral leadership, where effective executive performance has been equated with a mayor’s ability to create an integrative convergence of power by building an executivecentered coalition (for examples of this literature, see Dahl,

Urban Structure and Urban Politics in Latin America

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am grateful to Peter Cleaves, Karen Lindenberg, John Miller, Joan Nelson, and Francis Violich for helpful advice and criticism. All errors and omissions are, of course, my responsibility. This paper is basically an attempt to specify some priorities for the study of Latin American urban structure and politics. As argued elsewhere (see Kaufman, 1970), Latin American research can benefit through conceptualizing and explaining variations in internal urban structure and through evaluating the extent to which urban structural variations are related to the development and form of urban politics. In this discussion, there is an attempt to be sensitive to aspects of urban &dquo;theory-building&dquo; in Latin America. In contemporary research the urban unit, curiously, is used typically as an &dquo;independent&dquo; variable or predictor for varieties of political phenomena. Indeed, two major traditions in research dominate the selection of urban topics in Latin America. First, scholars interested mainly in national