Metropolitan Governance Structures from a Neoprogressive Perspective
David Lowery, Thomas J. Pearsall Professor
Department of Political Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599
(919) 962-0448 / dlowery@email.unc.edu
Metropolitan Governance Structures from a Neoprogressive Perspective
The debate on metropolitan reform differs in some ways in the United States and
Europe. Most notably, the demography of urban centers and their peripheries differ markedly
in the two settings (Keating 1995). Still, as in most of the world, America’s metropolitan areas
tend to be highly fragmented institutionally with sometimes hundreds of separate municipal
jurisdictions. There is, however, some variation across regions. The older metropolitan areas
of the northeast and midwest are especially fragmented while the newer metropolitan areas of
the south and west are less so given both a tradition of strong county government and more
tractable annexation laws. Still fragmentation is more the rule than the exception, and
relatively few formerly fragmented metropolitan areas have opted for consolidated government
in the post-War era (Rusk 1995). But whether in Europe or the United States, the theoretical
controversies surrounding consolidation are the same.
These are defined by what Elinor Ostrom (1972) has labeled the two traditions of
metropolitan reform. While they actually define the poles of a continuum between which in
variety of institutional arrangements might be envisioned (Savitch and Vogel 2001: 161-164),
they constitute two starkly different approaches toward metropolitan governance. The earliest
approach, associated with the progressive reform movement in the United States, argued that
metropolitan areas should be governmentally consolidated. While dominant for most of the
20th century, the newer public choice approach – based on Tiebout (1956) – both exposed the
limited theoretical underpinnings of the traditional consolidationist approach and offered an
alternative founded on a quasimarket interpretation of the virtues of governmental
fragmentation. Over the last 30 years, the public choice case for fragmentation has held the
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intellectual high ground. While many empirical challenges of the public choice approach have
appeared, they have had little cumulative effect. Simply put, once the theoretical
underpinnings of the older reform tradition – based on the assumed efficiency advantages of
service production by centralized bureaucracies – were exposed as having only limited
foundation, an accumulation of negative empirical findings could not in and of themselves
rebuilt a case for consolidation (Lowery 1999a). Rather, a new theoretical approach was
needed to revitalize the case for consolidation.
Such an approach clearly has emerged in recent years. While not part of a conscious
agenda, a number of scholars have developed and tested a range of theoretically grounded
hypotheses suggesting that consolidation merits renewed attention. I have labeled this
emerging approach the “neoprogressive” perspective (Lowery 1999a). Together, these
hypotheses constitute a new case for consolidated metropolitan government. At the same time,
they abandon the progressives often naïve faith in bureaucratic production in favor reliance on
modern social science methods and, quite often, many of the same theoretical tools employed
by public choice scholars. Still, the emerging neoprogressive case for consolidation is a
creation with many parts, most of which have yet to be fully integrated (Lowery 2000). Yet,
three main lines of inquiry are evident in the literature.
Local Democracy
The first of these considers the individual-level requisites for democratic politics. This
issue represents something new in the debate between consolidation and fragmentation.
Traditional progressives celebrated professional management over democratic politics, at best
reserving the public a right of final judgement via a short ballot. Similarly, public choice
scholars have – beyond rather unexamined homage to the New England town meeting – tend
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to see local governments narrowly as producers of services rather than as political entities.
More recently, at least two distinct arguments suggest that consolidated governments offer
important advantages over their fragmented counterparts in providing a foundation for local
democracy.
The first stresses the importance of information. For meaningful democratic control of
government, citizens must have valid information about what government is doing and how
well it is doing it. While a few public choice scholars have examined political behavior under
conditions of limited information (Teske, Schneider, Mintrom, and Best 1993), most simply
follow Tiebout (1956) in assuming full information. Comparisons of citizen information about
service provision in consolidated and fragmented settings, however, demonstrates that
respondents in the latter setting make many more errors in simply identifying the providers of
services they receive in a complex institutional setting (Lyons, Lowery, and DeHoog 1990).
Moreover, these errors were not random. It appears that local officials are quite adept at
shifting the blame for poor services to other levels of government while claiming credit for
good services they did not in fact provide. Such findings should not be viewed as alien to the
public choice tradition, which has long suggested that self-interest politicians have incentives to
manipulate institutions for their own advantage. But these findings also suggest that
fragmented institutions provide many more opportunities for such manipulation, thereby
weakening democratic accountability.
The second advantage concerns citizens’ responses when dissatisfied with local
government. Lyons and Lowery (1986; 1989a) have arrayed these responses on two
dimensions: an active-passive and a constructive-destructive dimension. Exit, the activedestructive response to dissatisfaction, is Tiebout’s (1956) voting with one’s feet. Voice, the
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active-constructive response, entails efforts to change the policies generating dissatisfaction.
Neglect is the passive-destructive response of despairing of change and withdrawing support
from the government while remaining within the jurisdiction. And loyalty, the passiveconstructive response, is expressed through continued support for the government while
expecting conditions to improve. Lowery, Lyons, and DeHoog (1992) report that local
government structure has a strong indirect effect on how citizens select among these responses.
That is, they found that psychological attachment to the community was much higher in
consolidated settings than in their fragmented counterparts. More to the point, they found
that attachment made the constructive responses to dissatisfaction of voice and loyalty more
likely and the destructive responses of exit and neglect less likely. They further suggest that
vital democratic government is more difficult when the primary responses of citizens to
inevitable episodes of dissatisfaction are flight or disaffection.
Citizen Satisfaction
The neoprogressive argument for consolidation, while emphasizing the political role of
local government, does not reject the public choice emphasis on service production. Still, this
part of the debate has been rather narrowly framed by comparisons of the efficiency of
production processes in different settings. But the ultimate issue is one of citizen satisfaction
with services provided and those not provided. Importantly, simple comparisons of satisfaction
levels in matched neighborhoods in consolidated and fragmented settings have failed to find
the mean differences hypothesized by either traditional progressives or public choice scholars
(DeHoog, Lyons, and Lowery 1990). Overall citizen satisfaction did not vary systematically
across the two types of governmental settings. Still, there were two ways in which citizens in
the consolidated settings were found to have a satisfaction advantage.
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First, while government structure had no direct impact on satisfaction, it had two
powerful indirect effects. DeHoog, Lyons, and Lowery (1990) examined a range of
hypothesized determinants of citizen satisfaction, including individual-level, jurisdictional-level,
and city specific variables. Only four variables were found to influence service satisfaction –
the individual-level variables of political efficacy and psychological attachment to the
community and the jurisdiction-level variables of number and quality of services provided.
And two of these – attachment and number of services – are related to local government
structure. Psychological attachment, which was positively related to satisfaction, was higher in
consolidated settings. Citizens were also more satisfied when they receive – and pay for – more
services, and more services are provided by consolidated governments. Thus, if indirectly,
citizens are more satisfied with services under consolidated government.
Second, while the structure of metropolitan government has little direct effect on mean
levels of service satisfaction, it does have a direct effect on its variance. In comparisons of
survey data on overall satisfaction (Lyons and Lowery 1989b) and satisfaction with an array of
specific services (Kelleher and Lowery 2001) in matched neighborhoods in the two settings, the
variance of satisfaction was substantially greater under fragmented government. This runs
counter to the public choice assumption that, by allowing citizens with varied tastes to match
their preferences to a menu of tax-service packages offered in fragmented settings, most citizens
should be equally satisfied. Instead, Kelleher and Lowery (2001) suggest that preferences for
services do not vary much across citizens. Rather, it is access to wealthy and poor jurisdictions
that varies across citizens in fragmented settings. Thus, fragmentation works to ensure that
some will be much more satisfied with local services than others.
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Metropolitan Problems
Despite this attention to individual-level traits, the bulk of work within the
neoprogressive perspective focuses on metropolitan-wide policy issues. That is, many critics
have raised concerns about the capacity of fragmented local institutions to meet metropolitanwide problems. This argument, of course, is not new to the case for consolidation. It, along
with attention to service efficiency, has been part of the consolidationist argument for decades.
Still, the argument has been revitalized in recent years via analyses of both old and new
problems in America’s metropolitan areas.
Two problems, especially, have attracted attention. First, the social stratificationgovernment inequality (SSGI) thesis first developed by Hill (1974) and Neiman (1976) suggests
that fragmented institutions perpetuate income inequality within metropolitan areas by
systematically mismatching resources and needs. Indeed, many proponents of this view suggest
that fragmented institutions are designed to do just that. While the SSGI thesis has been
revised in many ways over time (Massey and Denton 1993; Lowery 1999b; Kelleher and Lowery
2001), it both remains a major challenge to the public choice case for fragmentation and is a
central part of the neoprogressive case for consolidation. Similarly, many scholars, often
working under the rubric of “the new regionalism” have argued that fragmented local
governments are poorly positioned to address the housing, environmental, and transportation
problems associated with urban sprawl (Rusk 1995; Downs 1994; Savitch and Vogel 2000).
Indeed, they suggest that not only does fragmentation preclude concerted responses to the
problems of sprawl, it is a major source of the problem.
Public choice scholars do not usually deny these problems. Rather, this portion of the
debate addresses the efficacy of their preferred “solutions.” The consistent response of public
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choice scholars to the metropolitan-wide problems of income distribution and sprawl has been
a call for inter-jurisdictional agreements and higher levels of government to step in and fill the
void (Ostrom 1972; Parks and Oakerson 2000). But neoprogressives have used the economic
tools of public choice theory to argue that at least the former solutions are unlikely to work.
The higher transactions costs, conflicts of interests, and framing and even distortion of
preferences associated with adopting coordinated policy responses in fragmented setting
ensures that a tragedy of commons is far more likely than effective polycentric government
(Lowery 1998; 2000; Downs 1994). There is still the possibility of higher levels of government
stepping in. But given the long-term devolution of U.S. social policy and continued inaction
by most states (Fleischmann 2000), consolidationists place little faith in these solutions. Public
choice scholars have, in turn denied the efficacy of consolidation as a solution (Ostrom 1972;
Parks and Oakerson 2000). But while consolidation is hardly a complete solution, substantial
evidence suggests that the problems of sprawl and income redistribution are less severe when
local government is consolidated (Rusk 1995; Down 1994).
Conclusion
The debate between the poles of consolidation and fragmentation has changed
markedly in recent years with the emergence of neoprogressive arguments for the former.
Several of these have been reviewed here. Two final issues merit comment. First, these new
issues are often far more difficult to explore empirically than traditional comparisons of service
efficiency. Valid comparisons of citizens’ service satisfaction, democratic political behaviors,
and metro-wide policies and their consequences require ambitious and well-crafted research
designs. Far more research is required, but is likely to be slow in coming given the demands
inherent in doing this kind of research. Still, enough research has been conducted to date to
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suggest that such investments are likely to generate substantial returns. Second, public choice
scholars have hardly recognized the new arguments raised by neoprogressive research. Indeed,
the responses offered in 1972 by Ostrom are nearly identical to those of Parks and Oakerson in
2000. So, the debate has been a bit one-sided of late. To the extent that truth emerges only
from a rigorous testing of ideas by opponents, this is unfortunate.
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