Numerous scholars have concluded that bureaucratic decision rules best explain urban service distributions. These studies have led to a conventional wisdom in urban politics that professionalism dominates municipal agency routines to the extent that systematic bias is therefore unlikely to occur. In this study, the authors demonstrate that the unpatterned inequality thesis has led scholars to underestimate the importance of local politics in explaining service distribution. By examining the allocation of community development block grant and capital improvement plan funds in Chicago over nearly two decades, they conclude that electoral and regime politics also exercise a decisive impact on who gets what from city government.
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