Do Political Boundaries Generate an Inequitable Distribution of Public Goods?

• In Event: Civic Learning on Campus: Bringing Political Science In Mini-Conference III: Local Political Institutions and Citizen Engagement across Cases

Abstract

In his influential 2000 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory paper, David Lowery argued that the fragmentation of political authority among myriad local governments thwarts the equitable and efficient provision of public goods and policies across metropolitan regions. These government boundaries, already seen as reinforcing racial and economic segregation, also exacerbate political inequities because communities most in need of public goods and services lack a shared political venue with resource-rich communities, separating problems from the resources needed to solve them. This division of problems from the resources needed to solve them also increases the cost for underprivileged communities to acquire needed public goods and policies because they must turn to either regional organizations or intergovernmental agreements to meet their political needs.
Lowery (2000) asserted that these factors transform region-wide allocation problems into inter-community redistribution problems, which are politically difficult for communities to address. Given that the challenges faced by low resource communities generate negative region-wide externalities, he proposed there is an inefficient supply and allocation of policies that facilitate economic development and regulate land use. Regional consolidation, he argued, was the solution to this undersupply of public policies and services by reframing distribution problems into more readily resolved problems of misallocation. Moreover, consolidation would reduce transaction costs because there would be a region-wide political forum where all communities’ voices could be heard.
Lowery’s (2000) claims have intuitive appeal but have not been empirically verified. We address this gap by analyzing patterns of the allocation of public policies and services, specifically land use and development regulation, in Cook County, Illinois. Cook County provides an excellent to examine Lowery’s propositions because it is bifurcated into the City of Chicago and over 100 suburban municipalities.
To evaluate Lowery’s (2000) assertion that land-use and economic development policies are undersupplied in fragmented political regions, we evaluate how Chicago and its surrounding suburban communities utilize land-use and development policy tools. While these policies, such as provision of property tax incentives for economic development or property classification decisions for taxing purposes, are available to all municipalities in the county, they are adopted at the municipal level by municipal governments and only administered by the county. Based on census data, we then calculate the optimal distribution and use of these policies, such as tax incentives, and subsequently evaluate whether Chicago—a unified municipality—better achieves this optimal distribution than the fragmented municipalities that govern the remaining half the population of Cook County. Our results provide important evidence about the effect of political fragmentation or consolidation on the efficient supply of public services and policies.

Authors

• Jered B. Carr, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Michael Van Hulle, University of Illinois Chicago