Community Structure, Decision-Making, Budget Expenditures, and Urban Renewal in 51 American Communities

Abstract

A BODY OF PROPOSITIONS RELATING COMMUNITY STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS TO DECISION-MAKING PATTERNS AND TO BUDGET AND URBAN RENEWAL EXPENDITURES WAS TESTED USING DATA COLLECTED IN 51 AMERICAN COMMUNITIES. FROM 22 DIFFERENT STATES, THE COMMUNITIES RANGED IN POPULATION SIZE FROM 50,000 TO 750,000. DECISION-MAKING WAS INVESTIGATED THROUGH QUESTIONNAIRES ADMINISTERED TO A STANDARD PANEL OF COMMUNITY INFORMANTS. AN 'ERSATZ DECISIONAL METHOD' WAS USED TO IDENTIFY ACTORS INITIATING, SUPPORTING, OPPOSING, AND NEGOTIATING IN FOUR DIFFERENT ISSUE AREAS. THE DEGREE TO WHICH ACTORS OVERLAPPED FROM ONE ISSUE AREA TO THE NEXT AND THE TOTAL NUMBER OF ACTORS ACROSS ALL ISSUE AREAS WERE COMBINED IN A MEASURE OF CENTRALIZATION OF DECISION-MAKING. AS PREDICTED, LARGER, MORE ECONOMICALLY DIVERSIFIED COMMUNITIES WITH GOVERNMENTAL STRUCTURES FAVORING CITIZEN PARTICIPATION HAD MORE DECENTRALIZED PATTERNS OF DECISION- MAKING. A DECENTRALIZED DECISION-MAKING STRUCTURE, IN TURN, LED TO A HIGHER LEVEL OF COMMUNITY BUDGET EXPENDITURES, AND AND A LARGER URBAN RENEWAL PROGRAM. THESE FINDINGS GENERALLY SUPPORTED THE THEORY OF THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COMMUNITY STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS AND DECISION-MAKING PATTERNS, BUT CONTRADICTED THE HYPOTHESES REGARDING OUTPUTS. /AUTHOR/

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 184 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.