Urban Affairs Review

Endorsements have become a part of most election cycles. They come from a variety of sources (civic organizations, elected officials, newspapers, etc.) and are intended to signal voters that one candidate is preferential to another. Yet, there is still a lot that we do not know about endorsements. In this article, we provide insight into the process of how organizations and newspapers endorse candidates, provide evidence that demonstrates candidates believe these endorsements are important, and test the claim that voters are aware of these endorsements even when controlling for factors such as partisanship, ideology, and education. We also test the claim that issue positions explain vote choice better than endorsements. We rely on interview data and exit poll data to test our claims. Using data from an at-large municipal election, in which voters selected up to three candidates, we find that awareness of endorsements explains vote choice better than issues.

Local governments play a large, if understudied, role in the implementation of environmental policy in the United States. The major environmental statutes outline explicit responsibilities for the federal and state governments in enforcement under a cooperative federalism framework, and a literature on environmental federalism has developed looking at how variables at the state level affect implementation. Largely ignored by this literature is the important part local governments play in implementation. This study explores one way local politics may influence implementation, investigating the effect of citizen preferences on municipal compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The findings show that utilities in Democratic leaning areas violate the SDWA less frequently than those in Republican leaning areas. The results suggest that just as politics influence environmental policy implementation at the federal and state levels, the local role in environmental policy is inherently tied to the political incentives facing municipalities.

A growing number of states are using state-run school districts to take over and improve persistently underperforming schools. This article uses Georgia to examine the politics of state takeover. We analyze the supporting and opposing coalitions as well as the alignment between state takeover and charter schools in the campaign for the constitutional amendment to create a statewide turnaround district. Our findings show that corporate interests, the governor, and nonprofit organizations supported state takeover, whereas educators, parents, and community organizations opposed state takeover. There was bipartisan support across coalitions and a crisscrossing of interests regarding local control and the path to school improvement. There are divergent views on charter schools, with supporters of state takeover favoring charter schools.

Successful public transit systems increase the value of locations they serve. Capturing this location value to help fund transit is often sensible, but challenging. This article defines location value capture and synthesizes lessons learned from six European and North American transit agencies that have experience with location value capture funding. The opportunities for and barriers to implementing location value capture fall into three categories: agency institutional authority, agency organizational mission, and public support for transit. When any of these factors is incompatible with a location value capture strategy, implementation becomes difficult. In four of the cases studied, dramatic institutional change was critical for success. In five cases, acute crisis was a catalyst for institutional change, value capture implementation, or both. Using value capture strategies to fund transit requires practitioners to both understand agency organizational constraints and view transit agencies as institutions that can transform in response to changing situations.

Most research examining the impact of distressed properties on nearby property values has assumed that each additional distressed property has the same marginal effect on nearby property values as the prior distressed property had. Scholars have suggested that there could be threshold effects in the impact of distressed properties, yet no research has explored this issue. Therefore, this research explores the presence of threshold effects in the impact of housing abandonment on nearby property values in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1991 to 2010. This research finds that the magnitude of the impact of housing abandonment does not increase proportionally to the number of nearby abandoned properties. Specifically, it finds that the marginal impact on nearby property values increases significantly when the number of abandoned properties within 250 ft. increases by more than two. The research also finds that the marginal impact drops significantly when the number of abandoned properties within 250 ft. increases by more than 14.

Entrepreneurship could level the playing field between racial groups and decrease poverty through job creation. Growth in the U.S. professional services (PS) sector over the last several decades has increased high-wage employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. Although the number of Black-owned PS businesses has grown, their performance lags behind their counterparts of other races. Black entrepreneurs in highly skilled sectors, such as PS, tend to be more educated, better financed, and have more diverse customer bases than their counterparts in other sectors. Yet, these advancements have not translated into firm performance. This study examines factors influencing outcomes of Black PS entrepreneurs in Chicago using interview and focus group data. Results indicate that racialized barriers, current entrepreneurship culture, and the nature of the PS sector combine to contour a contentious business environment. Updating models of inclusion to address the contemporary entrepreneurial environment and incorporating accountability measures are necessary steps to realize the potential of this group.

Debates on the impact of size of subnational jurisdiction on the costs of public-service delivery have a very long tradition, but results are still far from conclusive. This article applies a quasi-experimental scheme of the synthetic control method for Polish municipal fragmentation to analyze the impact of territorial reform on administrative spending as well as on the operating surplus of the budget. Earlier studies using similar methods focused on amalgamation reforms, so the study of territorial fragmentation is an important new contribution to knowledge on scale effects. The analysis clearly confirms the existence of economy of scale in administrative services. The result for the operating surplus is less clear and more ambiguous. Results of the study are to a large extent a mirror of earlier analysis of territorial amalgamation consequences, which confirms the importance of scale for administrative costs, but not necessarily for costs of other local services.

As neighboring federal systems, Canada and the United States provide an opportunity to compare institutional collective action (ICA) by proximate local governments. After explaining the importance of understanding local governance in Canada and the United States in comparative context, the ICA framework is used to highlight propositions along two paths of inquiry. First, the ICA framework can be used to compare responses to ICA dilemmas in two distinct systems of local governance, focusing on the comparative instance of use and performance of ICA mechanisms. Second, the ICA framework can be used to analyze collaboration and paradiplomacy across the international border. Deploying the ICA framework for comparative research can improve our understanding of local governance and local government reform in both countries.

While Latin America is undergoing a process of metropolitanization, we argue that intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) arrangements may serve as a quality check of the region’s metropolitan governance. We also adhere to the notion that IMC in a metropolitan region is affected not only by constitutional variables embedded in federalist arrangements but also in different ways. We test this assumption by building on a series of hypotheses taken from the literature on IMC. We then compare results from Mexico and Brazil, both federal countries with metropolitan regions. In testing the same variables, we observe different outcomes and a different explanatory power of the theoretical premises underlying IMC. We assign these explanatory differences to features of federalism, an understudied variable. We conclude that, while municipal drivers constitute relevant factors in predicting IMC within a metropolitan region, federalist arrangements modify the weight attributed to these factors.

China’s provincial governments increasingly participate in interprovincial agreements (IPAs) to address regional policy problems. Nevertheless, limited research investigates the determinants of a province’s propensity to engage in bilateral agreements with another province. This article uses network data and employs network regressions to investigate this question in the context of China’s Pan Pearl River Delta (PPRD) regional network governance. We assess the factors that influence participation of bilateral IPAs among PPRD members. Our findings provide evidence that interprovincial participation in bilateral agreements spanning seven policy domains is driven by geographic proximity, economic and political statuses, institutional similarity, and cross-province leadership posting.

We examine how interorganizational networks evolved after a disaster with an integrated approach that combines both social network perspectives and emergency management perspectives. This research describes changes in organizations that play a bridging role in interorganizational collaboration and examines endogenous and exogenous factors that lead organizations to be isolated during a disaster. Building from the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework, we argue that organizations that play the bridging role between two other organizations may fail to sustain their ties after a disaster. Because the bridging strategy involves risks, organizations are more likely to forge direct ties to other organizations that have resources they need rather than rely on bridges that they created before the disaster. We apply a stochastic actor-oriented model to show the dynamics of emergency management networks during the 2013 Seoul floods. This study contributes to understanding how the bridging strategy can be emasculated by endogenous and exogenous factors.