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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Recent worldwide financial crisis puts local governments under sever stress to change and reshaped their strategy, attitude and commitments to citizens in order to control spending patterns. Cutting-back services, breaking contracts, rethinking welfare and additional austerity measures are a worldwide path that local governments follow to handle financial adversities. In this trouble times, although keeping in mind the need to ensure the basic conditions for local government to perform its functions and the capacity to implement them, several actors struggle to reshape urban governance, according to their preferences (Pierre 1999). Political parties, unions and interest groups are joined by engaging citizens and aggressive media to build new forms of social ties (Clark 2000). The way in which rules, values and behaviors are established can alternate the equilibrium between the elements of urban governance forcing a change in kind and nature. Oscillations occur in a democracy-efficiency continuum promoting four alternative forms of urban governance: autocratic efficiency, democratic inefficiency, democratic efficiency and autocratic inefficiency (Waldo & Miller 1948; DiGaetano & Strom 2003; Norris 2012).
The goal of this paper is to analyze the different divers that constrain the settings of urban governance. The paper claims that urban governance is the grass root for a compatible combination among civic engagement, political responsiveness and efficient mechanisms of service delivery. The main hypothesis of the paper suggests an optimal level of democracy translated into an invert U-shape relation between democracy and efficiency.
Using a quantitative approach, the paper collects data from all Portuguese local government and builds two set of indexes to test the hypothesis. Findings confirm the supported argument and contribute to some clarification on the interaction between democratic procedures, and managerial initiatives to achieve higher standards of democracy.
Description
Keywords
Fiscal crisis
Citation
Rodrigues, Miguel (2013). Urban governance in times of fiscal stress: muddling through efficiency and democracy. In EGPA 2013 – Annual Conference. Edinburgh