Urban Affairs Review

This article analyzes the relationship between social capital and neighborhood-oriented forms of participation within the context of an innovative Dutch neighborhood improvement program. On the basis of a survey among 307 residents, the author studies the link between three dimensions of social capital (neighborliness, trust in neighbors, and sense of duty) and three neighborhood oriented forms of participation: informal governance, the conversion of specific neighborhood problems into action, and participation in the program. Neighborliness and a sense of duty are positively related to the various forms of participation, whereas the impact of trust is somewhat more ambiguous. A subsequent analysis of the residents’ proposals shows that although some of them explicitly refer to the importance of social capital, the bulk of their plans simply demand resources (money, personnel, or policies) to address concrete issues. The author concludes that social capital is an important facilitator of people’s capacity to prevent and solve such problems themselves but that at the same time a whole range of problems still needs to be addressed through direct governmental action.

The term rent-seeking refers to special interest group efforts to seek special benefits at little or no cost to themselves. Because government spending has the potential to create both costs and benefits for taxpayers, fiscal policy is commonly viewed as a primary arena of rent-seeking activity. At least five different theories of nineteenth-century American urban development fit this general rubric. Each theory predicts different winners and losers as well as different underlying strategies and distributions of interests incumbent upon municipal decision making. This study uses two-wave panel data on special interest group representation and municipal social spending to examine the validity of these different theories of rent-seeking. Though all such theories share in commonan emphasis on self-seeking, this study points to the role of competition between different sectors of the local economy as a motivating force for the formation and mobilization of special interest group organizations. This finding contrasts with those rent-seeking theories that predict widespread cooperation among communities and/or classes in pursuit of common goals. Suggestions for future research on this topic are offered as well.

In urban governance, some responsibility for services and planning may lie with private entities. Residents challenging public policies may find recourse not from elected officials but from quasi-public agencies. This article examines contestation over a hospital expansion plan in Athens, Georgia. Using archival accounts and interviews, the author investigates the responses of the local state and the hospital to neighborhood-based activism and the success of residents in restructuring the hospital’s decision-making process. The scale of contestation and negotiation differed from that of the city government. This case illustrates newstructures and scales of negotiation and accountability in quasi-public urban governance.

Although racial differences in satisfaction with urban services have been observed for decades, perhaps the most consistent finding in the literature on citizen satisfaction and urban service delivery, little systematic effort has been directed at explaining this gap. Using two years of survey data from New York City, the authors find that socioeconomic status (SES) and neighborhood of residence explain only a small part of the gap in satisfaction across a range of urban services. Residents’ trust of government appears to account for a fairly large proportion of the race gap. Still, significant differences in satisfaction remain between Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics for a number of services even after controlling for SES, neighborhood, and trust.

The author studies the influence of city context on urban regimes across 14 cities in the United States by surveying published case studies and applying qualitative comparative analysis. To explain variation in a regime typology, the author tests components of market conditions (a city’s fiscal resource base and mobility of local capital) and democratic conditions (local civic participation and ward-style representation). The results indicate that not one of these components is necessary or sufficient for supporting the emergence of a more progressive, as opposed to a developmental or caretaker, regime. Instead, three interactions between the components of market and democratic conditions explain the presence of progressive regimes. The author discusses the implications of the results for both studying and understanding U.S. regimes.