The question of what effect formal structures of neighborhood organizations have on member involvement has largely been ignored in the body of research on neighborhood politics. Yet mandatory and voluntary neighborhood organizations have proliferated in recent years, motivating this research to address the gap in the extant literature. Findings based upon 164 neighborhood organizations surveyed in Houston, Texas, indicate that mandatory organizations are stronger than voluntary organizations in terms of financial capability, bureaucratization, member size and percent of neighborhoods formally represented, while voluntary organization structures are more democratic. Furthermore, the analysis supports the contention that decentralized participation structures and change oriented purposes and incentive structures significantly increase the proportion of members involved in the activities of the neighborhood organizations surveyed.

A large proportion of the most important legislation considered by the U.S. House of Representatives is now referred to more than one committee. This study examines the impact that multiple referral has had on committee, party, and leadership relations in the House. Using spatial theory, legislative outcomes are compared under varying conditions including types of referrals, restrictions on floor amendments, and opportunities for obstruction and discharge. Central to the study is a consideration of the role of the majority party leadership. A model is developed that includes the Speaker who controls procedure. A number of empirical implications of the models are analyzed as well. These include a consideration of the relative obstructiveness of committees given referral conditions, the choice of restrictive versus non-restrictive amendment rules, and the choice of referral conditions by the Speaker.

This research examines the relationship between bureaucratic politics, incentive structures, and government growth. The basic assumption of this work is that actors behave in the fashion they determine will maximize their utility. What action maximizes an actor's utility depends on the organization of the country's political system. The structural and institutional constraints of a country's political system influence an actor's behavior by determining what options are available to him, and what benefit he receives from different types of activities. The organization of a country's political system influences the size of the government because it is this organization that determines whether or not bureaucrats will maximize their utility by producing services efficiently. This proposition about a relationship between the organization of a country's political system and the size of its government is tested through an examination of bureaucratic politics in Costa Rica. Case studies are presented of how the Agricultural and Health Sectors of the Costa Rican bureaucracy function. From this information, and from data gathered from interviews with deputies and interest group leaders, a mathematical model of Costa Rican bureaucratic politics is developed. The model includes six actors: the agency, the executive, the legislature, the in-power party, and two competing interest groups. Each actor tries to maximize its utility; however, its chances of doing so are affected by the behavior of other actors in the system. How actors can communicate is a product of the organization of the political system which determines how an actor can try to maximize his utility, and hence how other actors can communicate with him, by affecting his utility. Through simulation it becomes apparent that the Costa Rican system does not always induce agencies to produce services efficiently. If an agency has its own policy/service production goals, and they exceed the amount of service desired by the executive, then the agency is forced to produce efficiently in order to achieve its goals. However, if an agency does not set high service production goals for itself, then the organization of the Costa Rican system allows bureaucrats to maximize their utility by not producing services efficiently.

Should people listen to their neighbors' political advice? Many models of social influence cast the people in an individual's social environment as monitoring their opinions and enforcing conformity. However, it is not necessarily clear that these neighbors have an incentive to bear costs associated with the coercion of political deviants. I suggest social influence may be the result of individual decisions to pursue benefits associated with following the advice of actors who have provided useful information in the past. I use original public opinion data, survey-based experiments, and social experiments conducted in a behavioral research laboratory to examine the effects of an individual's social interactions and observations of others, social connectedness resulting from these experiences, and their willingness to trust social sources of information.

This dissertation examines the economic and policy relationships between center cities and their suburbs. It makes several contributions to the existing urban literature. First, this dissertation confirms previous research finding that center cities and their suburbs are economically linked. It confirms that the economic link exists over time (1970 to 1990) and that it endures even after controlling for the impact of the state economy. Second, it confirms the traditional expectation that metropolitan area government structure influences the direction of center city/suburb income disparity---but not in the way predicted by previous literature. Using an alternative conceptualization of local government fragmentation---the total number of local governments per square mile---it finds that the geographic density of local governments within a metropolitan area influences center city/suburb income disparities. The analysis suggests that geographic density of metropolitan area governments should be considered when examining the influence of fragmentation on local government policy decisions. Third, this dissertation finds mixed evidence regarding the impact of center city/suburb income disparity on metropolitan area economic health. Traditionally, it is thought that the center city is the regional economic engine, and that increasing income disparity favoring the suburbs undermines metropolitan area growth. Although this theory held true during the 1970s, the data unexpectedly reveals an opposite conclusion in the 1980s: increasing income disparity in favor of the suburbs was related to increasing metropolitan area economic health. If this finding proves stable using the 2000 Census data, it may signal a change in the nature of the metropolitan area economy that would be significant for future policy development. Finally, this dissertation examines the relationship between fragmentation and the incidence of local intergovernmental agreements. It finds that fragmented local governments can cooperate in the provision of certain goods and services. This cooperation is especially likely among geographically dense local governments providing capital-intensive goods and services that generate economies of scale. This finding reinforces the importance of density in future urban research and signals an opportunity to pursue new cooperative solutions that could achieve many of the benefits of consolidated government while preserving existing local governments.

This thesis explores the relationship between federal program recipients and interest groups. It is argued here that interest groups attempt to claim credit for federal program benefits. Claiming credit efforts are the activities interest group leaders engage in that are designed to call attention to the group and generate program recipient support of the group. More directly, credit claiming for program benefits is offered as another means for an interest group to solve its collective action problem. Here, instead of interest group leaders having to produce and provide selective benefits, they are expected to take advantage of their involvement with particular federal programs to resolve their maintenance problems. It is further argued that effective credit claiming must have affective, evaluative, and behavioral impacts on program recipients. The credit claiming model is explored at both the macro-level and micro-levels. Interest group leaders were surveyed to determine whether they engaged in credit claiming for particular programs. Recipients of these same programs were also surveyed in order to determine their relationship with the groups that speak on behalf of their program(s). Key determinants of the relationship between interest groups and program recipients are found to be: the nature of the federal program benefit (particularistic versus collective); the presence of other interest groups; and the credit claiming activities of the interest group.

An explanation of leadership within a particular class of institutions is developed. The institutions of interest are non-hierarchical, endow their leaders with few formal powers, and are hampered by principal-agent problems. The explanation proceeds in two stages. First, game-theoretic models of leaders and followers engaged in two social dilemmas are developed. The models define leaders as the set of actors who can send cheap-talk signals to a group of followers. Leadership occurs when followers, recognizing that their chances of success without a leader are slim, choose to voluntarily accept a leader's advice. The models highlight the importance of the underlying social dilemma, either a coordination or collective action problem, as well as the leader's reputation for motive and competence. Second, hypotheses are derived from the models and are tested under laboratory and field conditions. The experimental results demonstrate that leaders are remarkably adept at solving simple coordination problems, provided that followers have sufficient confidence in the leaders' reputation for motive and competence. The effectiveness of leadership decreases, however, in collective action problems. In these settings, followers are often unwilling to take the risk that is inherent in following a leader's advice. Roll call data from the U.S. Senate are used to check if the experimental findings extend to a real-life setting. The data suggest that the models and laboratory evidence possess considerable levels of external validity.

Assertions of the value of "traditional districting principles" are tested using survey data and contextual variables describing Congressional districts' geographic characteristics. Electoral district geography is found to have systematic relationships with citizen political behavior. District conformity to media market boundaries is found to affect citizen attentiveness to political campaigns as well as voter turnout. Some evidence is found to support the argument that district compactness matters for political behavior as well. These findings demonstrate that district shape matters in the political lives of citizens, and provides a better understanding of the particular implications district characteristics have for voters.

If devoting more staff and more resources to constituency service in the district brings members of the U.S. House no electoral benefits, why has the performance of these activities and members' interest in them increased in recent decades? Studies with misspecified models and inappropriate tests previously have failed to uncover the causal link between constituency service and electoral fortunes. Using individual-level 1994 American National Election Studies data, I find that knowledge of constituency service impacts vote choice only through its effect on citizens' impressions of incumbent candidates' personal characteristics.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the committee systems of U.S. state legislatures have undergone major transformations in their structure and procedure. The purpose of this dissertation will be to assess these changes using three well-known theories concerning the role of the committee system in the U.S. Congress. These theories are the distributive (Shepsle 1986; Weingast and Marshall 1988; Baron and Ferejohn 1989), informational (Maas 1983; Gilligan and Krehbiel 1987, 1989, 1990; Krehbiel 1991) and partisan theories (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Cox and McCubbins 1993). Specifically, this dissertation delineates and empirically tests expectations about the adoption of and changes in committee system procedures based upon the distributive, informational and partisan theories of legislative organization. The analysis concludes that none of the theories are able to account generally for the adoption of committee related state legislative rules of procedure nor can they account generally for changes in them.