Fiscal Stress and Urban Regimes: Straining the Capacity to Govern

Abstract

Traditional approaches to the question of how urban governments respond to fiscal stress have emphasized either the exogenous economic determinants of a city's fiscal environment, or the constraints imposed on elected officials by the demands of maintaining successful electoral or governing coalitions. Some writers have sought to define a space in which local governments can make their own choices, at least partially independent of economic or political constraints. Their efforts are not convincing, in part, because they ignore the additional constraint of the U.S. federalist structure. This paper asserts that the U.S. federalist structure plays a major part in the ongoing fiscal strains that cities continue to face in the 1990s.