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Pick Your Poison: The Exercise of Local Discretion on Special District Governance
Author(s) -
BAUROTH NICHOLAS
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
politics and policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.259
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1747-1346
pISSN - 1555-5623
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-1346.2008.00166.x
Subject(s) - discretion , corporate governance , obligation , revenue , politics , public administration , state (computer science) , debt , local government , business , government (linguistics) , law , economics , political science , public economics , finance , linguistics , philosophy , algorithm , computer science
For a sizeable minority of special districts, the form of district governance is not fully determined by state law. Many states allow the groups who instigate incorporation to decide whether a new district is managed by appointed or elected officials. Such discretion raises the question: why do these actors opt for one form of governance over another? This study uses logistic regression to examine these decisions for a full set of cases and subsets divided by whether a special district incorporated in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. Drawing upon Burns, it tests whether decisions on district governance were determined by the institutional powers of the individual district or if the economic and political circumstances surrounding that district played some role. The study finds that the powers to tax property and issue general obligation bonds were the most important predictors, but local government revenues and debt were also relevant.