James C. Clingermayer

• Murray State University

This article applies Immanuel Kant’s “publicity principle” to several issues that involve citizen participation in public affairs, including open records laws, campaign finance disclosure, and the confidentiality of private organization membership and donor lists. The Kantian principle is premised on the belief that informed people will rise up in...

Executive turnover can have profound effects on city policies, programs, and commitments such as contracting or issuing debt. This article identifies how political changes, reflected in the composition of the city council, and economic changes in the community influence city manager turnover. Analysis of manager turnover patterns in 143 large U.S....

Studies of budget execution focus either on the procedural aspects of internal controls and adjustments or the necessity of the changes made in the original budget. Adjustments made on an ongoing basis without undermining the integrity of the budget has been generally seen as a necessary means of creating flexibility while maintaining appropriate c...

Presidents and the Politics of Agency Design: Political Insulation in the United States Government Bureaucracy, 1946–1997.

This paper examines political and legal justifications for zoning and other land-use regulations that have exclusionary impacts. The paper argues that much exclusionary regulation is justified (and rationalised) by arguments that divert attention from the undesired incidence upon the poor and minorities by referring to other values (such as environ...

The question of whether private firms should contract out for products and services or provide them internally (i.e. become more vertically integrated) has been a topic that has concerned scholars for many years. This article argues that the transaction costs in local contracting choices are linked to the characteristics of political systems that i...

This article examines state government spending patterns for capital projects during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a function of some of the institutional arrangements and procedural characteristics of state legislatures. The analysis is informed by the literature on distributive policymaking, which argues that lawmakers seek to send targetable...

Books reviewed in this article: Glenn Beamer, Creative Politics: Taxes and Public Goods in a Federal System David Brunori, State Tax Policy: A Political Perspective Kurt M. Thurmaier and Katherine G. Willoughby, Policy and Politics in State Budgeting

Municipal service delivery decisions often generate considerable controversy and political turmoil. However, one aspect of political turmoil-turnover among leaders in city government-can also affect service delivery choices. Clingermayer and Feiock find that, in a number of local policy areas, turnover among mayors increases the probability of deli...

The author examines how quasi-judicial zoning requirements affect exclusionary zoning (i.e., land-use controls that exclude the poor and/or minorities from particular jurisdictions). Using a large sample of communities from nine major metropolitan areas, the analysis reveals that quasi-judicial constraints diminish the level of exclusionary zoning....

This research examines city council member views toward efforts to direct the benefits of local development policies to certain areas or interests within communities. Using a large national sample of council members, the analysis finds substantial support for the proposition that development should benefit needy areas within a community. Consistent...

We examine the determinants of change in state government indebtedness from 1961 through 1989 using a pooled time series cross-sectional analysis. The analysis reveals that debt is primarily a function of economic conditions reflecting both the need to borrow and the capacity of states to repay debt. However, political factors such as culture, part...

In this article we examine the claim that certain characteristics of a community's political environment and specific attributes of a citizen's social context may stimulate participation in local economic development policy-making. Using data from a national survey of city council members, we find that several contextual and institutional factors a...

This analysis examines two alternative explanations for the adoption of comprehensive zoning ordinances in the years immediately following its initial adoption in New York City. The market failure explanation predicts zoning adoption in cities where externality problems (represented by heavy incidence of manufacturing) exist. The distributive polic...

Scholars have offered different explanations for administrative procedures. One general approach stresses the importance of normative theory as a determinant of institutional choice, while two other perspectives emphasize the interests and political influence of pressure groups and legislators. To test these models, this study uses comparative stat...

This research attempts to account for the number of adoptions of four economic development policies in large American cities. Four explanations focusing upon fiscal stress, growth coalitions, government institutions, and competition among cities are examined in the light of a typology that classifies the polices on the basis of their visibility and...

This paper examines the adoption and retention of four new forms of administrative procedures by the American states. The analysis attempts to test a modified form of a constituency service argument developed by McCubbins (1985) and by McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast (1987; 1989). This argument claims that administrative procedures are employed by re...