Policymakers and scholars are increasingly looking to cities to address challenges including income inequality. No existing research, however, directly and systematically measures local political ...elites’ preferences for redistribution. We interview and survey 72 American mayors—including many from the nation’s largest cities—and collect public statements and policy programs to measure when and why mayors prioritize redistribution. While many of the mayors’ responses are consistent with being constrained by economic imperatives, a sizable minority prioritize redistributive programs. Moving beyond the question of whether mayors support redistribution, we find that partisanship explains much of the variation in a mayor’s propensity for redistribution. Moreover, the impact of partisanship very rarely varies with institutional and economic contexts. These findings suggest that national political debates may be shaping local priorities in ways contrary to conventional views, and that they may matter even more than other recent findings conclude.
Conventional forms of entrepreneurial urban governance are characterized by strong municipal urban governments, who have the autonomy to use and decide over innovative financing instruments and ...public-private partnerships, and whose decisions are not overly influenced by the national political interests of central government authorities. This article examines the extent to which this conceptualization applies in an African context, particularly Ghana. Drawing on a case study of Chinese funding of market infrastructural redevelopment in Cape Coast, we demonstrate that the existing conceptualization is inadequate to understand the framework and dynamics of entrepreneurial urban governance in Ghana, where mayors are appointed by Presidents, can "only" secure large-scale funding with the support of the central government, and are obliged to protect the political interests of the President and the ruling political party. Consequently, we argue that a new concept - hybrid entrepreneurial urban governance - is crucial to denote the Ghanaian variant of entrepreneurial urban governance and to analyze the multi-scalar mechanisms and local politics of urban governance in post-colonial Ghana. We argue that hybrid entrepreneurial urban governance thrives on a strong relationship between local and national politics. This article recommends that there is the need to strengthen multi-scalar collaborations not only in securing large-scale funding for capital infrastructure but also through to the subsequent stages of pricing and repayment.
We show that unexpected financial windfalls increase corruption in local government. Our analysis uses a new data set on flood-related transfers, and the associated spending infringements, which the ...Bulgarian central government distributed to municipalities following torrential rains in 2004 and 2005. Using information from the publicly available audit reports, we are able to build a unique objective index of corruption. We also exploit the quasi-random nature of the rainfall shock (conditional on controls for ground flood risk) to isolate exogenous variation in the amount of funds received by each municipality. Our results imply that a 10% increase in the per capita amount of disbursed funds leads to a 9.8% increase in corruption. We also present suggestive evidence that more corrupt mayors anticipated punishment by voters and dropped out of the next election race. Our results highlight the governance pitfalls of nontax transfers, such as disaster relief or assistance from international organizations, even in moderately strong democracies.
This paper deals with the influence of having council appointed mayors on local governments. Five elements of local government systems are considered: the electoral system and its influence on the ...political composition of the local government; the local government structure and the distribution of functions and powers between mayor and council; the role of political parties; scrutiny of the executive and accountability; and citizen participation. This analysis highlights the effect that a council appointed mayor system has in terms of accountability and legitimacy, transparency and efficiency.
The Covenant of Mayors promotes the Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP), aiming to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in line with the European Union’s 2030 and 2050 targets. The Covenant ...signatories could take enormous advantage from a digital platform that allows SEAP drafting also to no technically skilled users, like majority of them are. The Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA) has developed the PAES platform in order to provide digital support to public administrations (PA) adhering to the Covenant of Mayors. The platform exploits open data and it is fed by energetic data aggregated on a municipal level. The platform offers appropriate functionalities for baseline CO2 emissions inventory (BEI) filling out and a best practice (BP) simulation tool. The latter allows to contextualize each BP and to estimate its effects in terms of the main GHG emission. The BP showing the best estimation results can then be converted into concrete adaptation actions. So, this digital system facilitates local Italian municipalities in the strategic planning and monitoring of adaptation actions taken over time.
This study presents evidence on public innovation from the perspectives of politicians and public managers. Environmental antecedents are analysed with regard to their impact on innovation adoption. ...Data are drawn from a survey of over 600 mayors and managers in Austrian local government. Results show that they identify the same innovation types but indicate different antecedents of innovation adoption. Findings for managers are broadly in line with results from larger jurisdictions. Since there are crucial dissimilarities in the factors explaining the adoption of innovation, we suggest that politicians and managers both be included in future studies of local government innovation.
Background/Context:
Since the early 1990s, the United States has been witnessing reforms in large, high-visibility cities, with mayors granted the power to appoint school boards, superintendents, or ...both. This shift away from elected school board governance has been characterized as marginalizing traditional educators and ushering in reforms that traditional educators oppose. On the other hand, Japan’s experience with mayoral control of schools is nationwide and longer-lived. In 1956, mayors were given authority to appoint members of the school board, and in 2015 they were given further authority to appoint school superintendents.
Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study:
This study analyzes whether Japanese mayors appoint superintendents whose backgrounds make them likely to challenge the education establishment and introduce dramatic educational reforms. We provide some early evidence on how mayors have been using their new powers and how they interact with the superintendents they select.
Research Design:
We used data from nationwide surveys conducted by the Japanese government to map the broad pattern of superintendent characteristics over time as well as for a sampling framework to identify and select a smaller number of superintendents to be interviewed for obtaining in-depth information. Semistructured interviews of six superintendents were conducted to delve more deeply into the relationship between mayors and superintendents, and the communication between the superintendents and the school board members in Japan. To triangulate the interview data, transcripts of school board meetings, city council meetings, election bulletins (official campaign manifestos), demographic data, and national test scores of students were collected from 2015 to 2019.
Conclusions/Recommendations:
We identified important differences between the United States and Japan. Rather than aligning with the reform-oriented mayors against school boards and education bureaucracies, the Japanese mayor-appointed superintendents act as mediators between the mayors and the school boards. The difference may be that, in the United States, only mayors who sought mayoral control had the right to appoint school superintendents, whereas in Japan the national government gave all mayors the right to appoint superintendents, regardless of the political context.
Directly elected semi-executive model developed by Sansom - overview of Queensland local government and politics - examination of results of 2008 and 2012 local government elections - comparative ...results of mayoral and councillor elections - implications of adopting directly elected mayors across other Australian jurisdictions.
This paper shows that the body of appointed officials that a new democracy inherits from the previous regime is a key determinant of the extent of electoral fraud and clientelistic spending in new ...democracies. I develop a model that predicts that appointed officials have stronger incentives to influence voters during national level elections because of their career concerns. I test the implications of the model using data from Indonesia's transition to democracy. Both the pattern of alignment of electoral results between village and district levels and the pattern of subsequent turnover of appointed village heads corroborate the predictions of the model.
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