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Abstract
The goal of this research is to evaluate the role of political institutions--parties and urban governing regimes--in the turbulent history of local democracy in the twentieth century, and to show, from a methodological standpoint of view, how we can combine fragmented research on urban politics into a coherent framework. This dissertation tried to demonstrate how political institutions responded to changing urban environments and how they were related to governmental performance. Governmental performance was measured by per capita deflated levels of departmental expenditures. Expenditure measures were empirically tested by the time-series analysis and alternative method.
In other words, this study examined the historical and empirical relationships between governing regimes and policy orientations. By taking cues from the new institutionalistic urban regime theory and from reading urban history of political machines, this dissertation developed three types of urban governing regimes according to historical sequence: regimes of "contending factional leadership," "cohesive organizational coordination," and "unstable democratic fragmentation." These different types of governing regimes were differentiated from each other in terms of historical time frame, party dominance, party organization, leadership style, and their policy orientations. By comparing different regime types and their policy connections, this study attempted to link theoretical discussions of urban regimes to empirical examination of public policies.
According to my time series analysis on a metropolitan city (Chicago from 1910 to 1992), socio-demographic and economic variables had still significant effects on policies. Generally, political-institutional variables were not significant. However, as the strong party organization theory implied, machine-dominated regime of cohesive organizational coordination showed very fiscally conservative spending patterns. My second analysis examined means of annual percentage increases in departmental expenditures by governing regime types. Comparison of those scores also visually depicted that the cohesive organizational coordination regime which had dominated from 1930 to 1978 drove down governmental spending level, though the pictures were more complex when viewed policy types. This study argued that governing regimes matter in local policymaking.
