Raymond A. Rosenfeld - Böcker

In this seminal work, the authors argue that there are distinct local factors that shape the environment of economic development decision-making. These factors, taken together, constitute a community's local civic culture. Using survey and case study data from U.S. and Canadian cities, the authors make the case that different cultures will produce different types of economic development policies, and that local civic culture will effect the whole array of local policies. The focus on economic development policy provides a window on local decision-making and allows for the development of a theory, introduced by the authors, about the role of local civic culture in framing local decisions of all types. This ultimately provides a theoretical vehicle for categorizing cities and predicting policy outcomes. The book concludes with an overview of what is known about the economic development process and highlights the questions raised about that knowledge by the analyses used here and the focus on civic cultures. New research questions are posed and new directions raised for continued application of a local civic culture approach toward understanding urban policy processes.

The quest for a theoretical framework for understanding urban policy-making has been a recurring focus of research into local governments. Civic culture is a means for understanding how municipal policy-makers weigh the interests of different groups, govern the local community, frame local goals, engage in decision-making, and ultimately select and implement public policies. While it seems that culture 'matters' in local policy making, how to measure culture in a valid and replicable fashion presents a significant challenge which the authors address in this book. They present their findings of a large multi-city research project to explore the nature of civic culture in cities in the US and Canada. The focus of their analysis is on three overarching 'systems' of community power system, the community value system, and the community decision-making system. The authors address a number of questions around the nature of civic culture and the relationships between the three systemic elements of civic culture, to refine and apply a more sophisticated theory of urban policy-making.