The Rise of Specialized Governance in American Federalism: Testing Links Between Local Government Autonomy and Formation of Special District Governments

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“Focusing on three dimensions of government autonomy—local government capacity, local government discretion, and local government importance—I find that the growth of certain types of special districts is in part a response to state laws constraining government autonomy of general-purpose governments. The findings also suggest that reliance on special districts by local general-purpose governments would decrease if they had stronger own-source revenue-raising capacities and more diversified tax revenue bases. In contrast with prior studies, the analysis provides limited evidence to support the notion that special districts are formed by general-purpose governments to circumvent fiscal restrictions, such as debt limits and tax and expenditure limitations.”

In this article, I investigate whether the growth of special districts in the fifty states from 1972 to 2002 can be explained by choices made by local general-purpose governments in response to different degrees of government autonomy in the fiscal, institutional, and political system.

Published in Publius-the Journal of Federalism | Yu Shi | 2017, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Rise-of-Specialized-Governance-in-American-and-Shi/f65d39c1cba8664f75fb49e00f1c4c8ebc25b812, https://consensus.app/details/focusing-three-dimensions-government-government-shi/a8be9624c7115ef0b4f6408b8e490aca/


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