2005 William Anderson Award

For the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted in 2003 or 2004 in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, or state and local politics.

Award Committee: Susan E. Clarke, University of Colorado, chair; Jonathan Rodden, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Jeff Talbert, University of Kentucky

Recipient: Dr. Michael C. Craw, Case Western Reserve University

Dissertation: "Bringing the City Back In: Municipal Governments in U.S. Redistributive Policy"

Dissertation chair: Dr. Ken Bickers, Colorado University

Citation:  Dr. Craw's dissertation asks an extremely important and often ignored set of questions about local government in the United States. Given the need to attract and retain investment, maintain property values, and generate revenue in a competitive environment, the scope for redistribution by local governments in the United States would appear to be particularly limited.  Compelling theoretical arguments and a handful of empirical studies have led scholars to assume that  redistributive policies within a federalist system are best provided at higher levels of government and least likely to occur at the local level. In contrast, Dr. Craw presents a "limited Leviathan" model in which local redistributive spending is variable across time and space.

This insightful dissertation challenges the conventional wisdom about the constraints facing local officials with thoughtful, careful empirical analysis of redistributive expenditures undertaken by U.S. local governments. Drawing on a unique data set constructed for all metropolitan areas in the U.S., Dr. Craw shows that there is substantial local spending on redistributive programs and considerable variation in local redistributive expenditures across localities. By employing both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze these policy patterns and decision processes, he makes a persuasive argument that these variations are driven by the extent to which racial and ethnic minorities and public employees are represented in the policy process, the intergovernmental context, and the ferocity of local competition for mobile revenue sources. Some local governments indeed act as “limited Leviathans” by spending more on redistributive policies than theoretical models would lead us to expect. His analysis elegantly demonstrates that local governments are variably but not decisively limited in the extent to which they can provide redistributive programs.

As in state-level studies or even cross-national studies, redistribution is shaped by the demands of voters, the ways in which these are aggregated through the institutions of representation, intergovernmental factors, and the constraints imposed by factor mobility in an open economy, all of which vary across space and time.  Dr. Craw sorts out the demands for redistributive policies and the constraints on local jurisdictions in responding to these demands by approaching them as a set of nested choices facing local officials. Interviews with local policymakers and advocacy groups inform and support his statistical analysis of these choice processes. Given the emphasis on a "race to the bottom" dynamic at the local level, Craw's superb study of local redistribution policy in complex federal and intergovernmental contexts is sure to refocus the academic literature. The policy implications are equally strong and compelling, suggesting that local governments can contribute to redistributive equity goals within their own communities.