Comparative Metropolitan Organization: Service Production and Governance Structures in St. Louis (MO) and Allegheny County (PA)

by

“We argue that these areas, with their many units of local government, “work” by means of integrating structures built by local governments together with county and state governments. Counties, in particular, are a useful focus for study of metropolitan relationships because they often provide the institutional frame within which integrating structures are built.”

For many observers, a large number of governments in a metropolitan area is thought to equate to “fragmentation,” and fragmentation, to ineffective organization and poor performance. Other observers find a large number of local governments to mean competition and consequent pressures for efficiency.

The number of local governments, however, is only one dimension of the structure of a metropolitan area. We identify and measure key structural characteristics of “fragmented” metropolitan areas, employing a comparative study of two metropolitan city-counties: St. Louis City and County, Missouri, and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania.

Published in Publius-the Journal of Federalism | R. Parks | 1993, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Comparative-Metropolitan-Organization%3A-Service-and-Parks-Oakerson/5c6f6944120cdb9373e0933e1903811952ec4f35, https://consensus.app/details/areas-units-government-work-means-integrating-structures-parks/66926c60ae175514b7fccec340bd31ca/

Related posts:

  1. Local Government Complexity: Consequences for County Property-Tax and Debt Policies “Consequently, reforms aimed at making the county the “local government of the future” would require perhaps insurmountable changes in state and local structures.” This article examines the consequences of local government complexity on county revenue decisions in fourteen Texas counties...
  2. The Impact of Local Decentralization on Economic Growth: Evidence from U.S. Counties “We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We...
  3. The Impact of Local Government Organization on Development and Disparities — A Comparative Perspective “Results of the comparative study presented in this paper suggests that local government organization influences land-use planning, and local development strategies and disparities. Local government reforms can, therefore, serve to modify spatial patterns of development and disparities.” Based on a...
  4. The Economic and Political Impacts of Top-Down Territorial Reforms: The Case of Sub-City Governments “Our findings indicate that higher levels of sub-city fragmentation lead to increased municipal government spending and transfers to sub-city governments, thus suggesting that the amalgamation of sub-city governments required by the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in 2011 by the...
  5. Local Level Decentralization in Ethiopia: Case Study of Tigray Regional State “Based on the literature on decentralization, this article investigates the institutional arrangement and autonomy of local governments in Tigray Regional state. It is based on two rounds of field work covering nine districts. At a formal level, local governments are...
  6. The Consolidation of Local Government Services: The Incidence and Practice of Service Delivery Consolidation in North Carolina “This research does suggest strong support from county managers concerning the potential for service consolidation to enhance service delivery, efficiency and accountability. This research confirms that practitioners view the potential of service consolidation as an enhancement to local government organizations....
  7. Community, Cooperation and Metropolitan Democracy “The discourse of local governance in Britain has placed heavy emphasis on the concept of community and the virtues of cooperation.  This paper looks at the origins of this discourse in the 19th century and the reasons for its revival...
  8. Evolutionary Alternatives for Metropolitan Areas: The Capital Region of British Columbia “It is common to examine the organisation of local government in terms of the functions different local governments are responsible for. Equally important, however, is at what level decisions on “who does what” are made and accommodations to change undertaken....
  9. Metropolitan restructuring (and more restructuring) in South Africa “The article argues that structural reform, territorial changes, development in local government and new forms of service delivery have seriously overburdened local government in the short term and have detracted from service delivery. These unitary metros have, however, been operating...
  10. The Great Defection: How New City Clusters Form to Escape County Governance “For 50 years, scholars have known that new cities often form in clusters. Prior research suggested these clusters form in response to aggressive annexation attempts by existing cities. By pairing statistics with four in-depth case studies, we find that contrary...