Water system decision makers navigate complex financial landscapes as they make necessary infrastructure investments, address ongoing operational needs, and meet stringent regulatory requirements. Despite their importance, these decisions have been given relatively little empirical examination. This study leverages the Municipal Drinking Water Database (MDWD) to examine patterns and trends in total expenditures, capital expenditures, and revenues for drinking water systems. Central to our analysis is capital intensity, measured as the capital expenditure to water utility revenue ratio, or capex ratio. We find a robust negative association between the capex ratio and per capita current expenditures, while overall spending increases, reflecting the direct relationship between capital expenditures, total expenditure and the capex ratio; alongside multiple independent covariates, this helps explain some of the within-municipality variation in spending outside of year-specific shocks. Capital spending is often critical for long-term resilience, but sustained spending may produce affordability challenges. This research provides new insight into the spending decisions of municipal water system managers and underscores the challenge of investing in infrastructure to both enhance resilience and ensure the affordability of drinking water services.
Securing intergovernmental grant funding during crises provides insight into the adaptive capacities of municipalities. This study explores the relationship between municipal administrative capacity and grant awards during the COVID-19 pandemic in Maine. We analyzed data on 484 municipal governments of varying sizes and interviewed twenty officials to assess access to the Keep Maine Healthy Program . Awards were positively associated with municipal administrative capacity and program need, and program characteristics influenced the administrative costs and required capacity of awards. This work encourages future research on the robustness of the administrative capacity-grant award relationship during crisis and non-crisis conditions, underscores the significance of program characteristics to grant access, and inspires further consideration of municipal government capacities as adaptive capacities.
More than half of American states have sharply limited or banned private donations to public entities for the purpose of supporting election administration. Such legislation is largely consistent with public opinion: Americans are more wary than supportive of such funding, with support for outright bans about as strong as support for regulation, leaving very few who endorse an unregulated, laissez-faire approach. There is, however, a good-sized pool of undecided individuals, who might be nudged into the pro- or anti-ban camps by persuasive arguments. Our evidence, however, is that neither the main pro- nor the main anti- argument vetted in debates to date moves opinion dramatically, though the anti-ban argument might be a little more effective.
Public servants face burnout due to increasing job demands and limited job resources. Drawing from data from a 2021 survey of local government employees in a large southwest US city, this article examines the role of instrumental leadership as a coping resource to reduce burnout while accounting for the presence of a coping mechanism (self-distraction) in an employee’s coping process. Results indicate that instrumental leadership is negatively associated with burnout and self-distraction; instrumental leadership also reduces the impact of self-distraction on burnout. This article identifies the importance of including both coping resources and coping mechanisms in future research.
Many American states have adopted No More Stringent (NMS) laws, which are intended to curb the ability of environmental protection agencies to issue strict rules regulating pollution. This study leverages variation in scope, restrictiveness, and duration of NMS laws to assess their efficacy in constraining the behavior of environmental regulators. Results from a set of panel data models indicate that NMS laws with broader scope and greater restrictiveness are associated with significantly lower environmental compliance costs. Thus, despite the possibility of strategic behavior by implementing agencies, these laws appear to effective in achieving their proponents’ aims of reducing the regulatory burdens imposed on industry.
This study examines the perspectives of Michigan county commissioners on the challenges they face, key skills for good governance, and the effectiveness of their boards. Based on findings from a statewide survey of county commissioners, findings highlight budget constraints, role complexity, and political dynamics as key challenges. Results showed links between proficiency in key skills and perceptions of overall board effectiveness. Proficiency in working with administrators and balancing long and short-term decision-making were closely linked to board effectiveness. These insights provide practical application for educational training and local efforts to strengthen governance capacity.
Public services across the United States, including local public libraries, were shut down or shifted to limited operations after a national emergency was declared in March 2020 due to the spread of COVID-19. How did this event and the varied responses to COVID across local communities shape recovery of in-person public library visits? Using monthly panel data on library visits starting in January 2019 from SafeGraph, a company that compiles data on cell phone locations to track “visits” aggregated to points of interest like libraries, this work focuses on local public library visits in the State of Michigan, a politically diverse state. The findings show that political partisanship is a significant predictor of library visits after the start of the pandemic, controlling for other factors. Republican-voting areas have had a swifter return to pre-COVID library visit levels since the start of the pandemic.
State and local governments increasingly rely on digital tools to deliver services, communicate with residents, and streamline administrative processes. However, these benefits depend on people actually being able to use online government tools effectively. While subnational governments have focused heavily on expanding broadband access, they have largely overlooked whether citizens can navigate these digital services once available. Our research sheds light on the limits of this approach. Analyzing survey and administrative data, we found that greater broadband availability is associated with lower perceived digital skills among residents, especially those with less formal education. This finding suggests that simply building digital infrastructure may reinforce existing inequalities, challenging the assumption that broadband expansion alone will democratize digital government access. For state and local governments seeking to modernize service delivery and advance digital equity, our findings highlight the need to pair broadband deployment with complementary education-sensitive strategies and targeted digital literacy initiatives.
Strategic design of direct public engagement methods is an important consideration for local government officials. We present a descriptive and exploratory investigation of correlations between local-level contextual factors and municipal public engagement practices. The article addresses two questions: (1) How heterogeneous are the public engagement mixes utilized by local governments in the United States? (2) What local-level variables are associated with increased heterogeneity of engagement mixes? Using data from the 2016 ICMA Innovation and Emerging Practices in Local Government Survey, we create an index to measure of number of direct public engagement tools and frequency of their use by municipalities. We find that local governments vary widely in combinations and frequency of use of direct public engagement tools, although, in general, increased capacity and resources are associated with more tools used. Municipal scale, home rule, democratic vote share, and demographics of the municipality are associated with increased variety of engagement tools.
Bureaucrats have increasingly assumed a central role in policymaking, heightening expectations that they respond to public preferences. While research in public administration has often focused on demographic congruence between bureaucrats and the public, less attention has been paid to whether they share substantive policy preferences and attitudes. This study addresses this gap by examining issue-specific congruence in the context of emergency information dissemination. Using matched survey data from three Southeastern U.S. states, we find that emergency managers frequently prioritize channels that do not reflect public preferences. Tenure in emergency management, rather than formal education, more reliably predicts accurate perceptions. Additionally, lower-level managers demonstrate greater alignment with public attitudes compared to directors. These results underscore the need to reassess training and communication strategies to enhance responsiveness and build public trust in crisis communication.
The lack of affordable housing throughout much of the United States is partly due to a disconnect between the benefits that states and regions gain from increased housing development and the costs, both real and perceived, that local areas face when allowing it. In this Field Note, we explore the potential of “Social Housing”—a policy innovation, broadly defined here as government-coordinated housing projects in which rents above operating costs for market-rate units help fund more affordable units within the same development—to address this issue. We chose California as a case study to examine how mixed-income developments could improve access to low-income housing, especially where it is most needed, by reducing local opposition and aligning state and local incentives to produce this type of housing more effectively. Recognizing the challenges, we suggest that well-designed Social Housing could serve as an effective policy tool for a state facing an affordable housing shortage.
With the increased amount of misinformation about local governments and a decline in public trust of political institutions, citizen academies are a tool for local governments to combat these trends. However, there is very little research in the public administration literature on these programs, specifically, how they operate and their goals for academy graduates. This study explores the purpose, program management, and government officials’ desired outcomes of citizen academies in the Cincinnati, Ohio region, through semi-structured interviews with organizers of the academies. Qualitative analysis was conducted and results from the interviews are presented with descriptive statistics. While transparency and better resident/government relations were the initial goal for setting up the academies, most local governments had the desired outcome of training residents to become advocates in the community in order to combat misinformation and distrust.
Women’s underrepresentation in leadership within public sector institutions remains a persistent governance and equity challenge, particularly in decentralised systems. Grounded in empowerment theory, this study uses a qualitative interpretive design to examine how gendered power relations shape women’s leadership progression within Ghana’s Local Government Service. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 83 women administrators across 13 Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in the Greater Accra Region and analysed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal three interrelated categories of barriers: socio-cultural, institutional, and individual. These barriers interact to reproduce women’s underrepresentation in local administrative leadership.
On April 4, 2023, the U.S. federal government ended its emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years into the pandemic, what experiences do local governments in South Texas have? What lessons have they learned? Through an inductive inquiry of local governments in South Texas and leveraging public values governance theory, this study utilized a qualitative approach to analyze interview data gathered from local government leaders in South Texas. We present a retrospective analysis to capture the policy experiences and extract lessons learned from the responses of these localities. Findings show that, in this crisis, these localities adopted participatory and collaborative governance, enabling them to share knowledge and optimize the use of scarce resources. We found that, to take effective and legitimate action, managers adopted pragmatic approaches that helped them address problems and learn from their experiences. The implications of the findings for theory, research, and practice are discussed.
In this field note, we partnered with the Association of Idaho Cities (AIC) to conduct an original survey of 119 mayors and city councilors across the State to assess their perceptions of – and experiences with – state preemption. We find that local officials across Idaho, Democrat and Republican alike, are strongly opposed to preemption and overwhelmingly believe that it negatively affects local affairs. We also find that, despite their limited autonomy, local officials express a desire to resist state preemption through various mechanisms, ranging from advocacy efforts and local ordinances to legal action and defiance. Our qualitative data corroborates our quantitative data, illustrating local officials’ negative sentiments about state preemption.
This comparative study of Virginia and Florida (2000–2025) examines how contrasting state governance structures shape local digital transformation. Findings from Digital Counties and Digital States Survey rankings, practitioner interviews, and policy analysis show that Virginia’s centralized Dillon’s Rule framework, supported by sustained state funding, produced equitable digital capacity across urban and rural counties. Florida’s traditionally decentralized Home Rule approach fostered urban innovation but constrained rural diffusion—a limitation its new broadband trust fund now addresses. Integrating multi-level governance and policy feedback perspectives, the study proposes a sequenced hybrid heuristic: states first mandate affordability and build foundational infrastructure to close persistent rural employment and tradable-sector gaps, then empower local collaborative networks to drive inclusive innovation and economic revitalization. This framework transcends the centralization–decentralization dichotomy and offers federated systems a replicable pathway from infrastructure deployment to equitable rural prosperity.
This study examines social equity in budgeting, focusing on the process and access dimensions of equity through public engagement. Using data from surveys of finance directors and interviews with public managers in a sample of California cities, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach. The quantitative analysis shows that the level and diversity of public engagement in budgeting in the sample cities are low and associated with the overall level and diversity of engagement in the policy making, suggesting process inequality. In addition, the qualitative analysis identifies significant access barriers to budgeting, indicating access inequality, and highlights the efforts by the sample cities to address these inequities.
Local governments face transboundary collective action dilemmas requiring collaboration across both internal functional and external jurisdictional boundaries. However, limited research addresses how these two collaborative levels interact. Using a national survey of U.S. municipal sustainability efforts, we find strong evidence that the internal organization of local governments significantly impacts their external collaborative networks. Our findings suggest local governments must carefully consider not only whether to dedicate staffing to sustainability, but also where such personnel are housed. This study begins to provide a more holistic theoretical treatment of the internal and external collective action dilemmas inherent to complex transboundary issues.
This study investigates the extent to which individuals exhibit consistency in their preferences during sequential budget simulation exercises, as well as the factors that shape these preferences. Grounded in behavioral and citizen participation frameworks, the analysis demonstrates that the simultaneous use of priority-setting and budget-balancing modules encourages participants to allocate resources in ways that reflect their previously articulated priorities. While instances of inconsistency remain common, preference consistency is associated with participants’ sustained support for their favored programs, their commitment to ensuring adequate resource allocation, and, to some extent, their willingness to finance these programs. The findings suggest that the integrated use of simulation modules effectively promotes the consistent preferences between public priorities and budgetary allocations. This study should encourage practitioners to utilize simulation modules not merely for surface-level assessments of citizen preferences, but as tools for fostering consensus by illustrating how citizens translate their stated priorities into concrete fiscal decisions.
Disclosing risks and the financial impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk factors is a growing concern for organizations around the world. In the United States, climate-related financial risk disclosure has historically been state-specific; however, federal policies that impact state and local governments are changing that dynamic. Specifically, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), the municipal bond market regulator, has considered additional rules for ESG disclosure in the tax-exempt municipal market, which would affect all state and local government borrowers. In this paper, we review fifty-four public comment letters on ESG practices in the municipal securities market that were submitted during the MSRB’s ninety-day comment period (December 2021–March 2022) to identify the major themes that encompass the opinions of issuers, investors, and other market participants. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we analyze these public comments, which enables us to better understand the challenges facing state and local governments, as well as regulators, in dealing with ESG risks. Results show that respondents’ primary concern is the disclosure criteria for ESG-related information. The analysis highlights the diverse set of stakeholders that participate in the regulatory process and how their concerns differ from those of the issuers. We find the role of financial intermediaries and data providers to be significant in the formulation of ESG policy.
