Suchergebnisse

Theorized is that the distribution of municipal services to definable demographic groups is influenced by the valuation of services & the efficiency of the producing organization. Service delivery data are assembled from 3 Detroit bureaucracies: the Environmental Enforcement Division of the Environmental Protection & Maintenance Dept, the Sanitation Division of the same Dept, & the Dept of Parks & Recreation. Supplemental data are taken from the US Census. The strategy is to elaborate on the political & economic approaches & then to "trace the distributional impacts of service rules in the 3 bureaucracies." Routine service delivery rules influence service distribution & each set of rules produces different service distribution patterns. 9 Tables, 3 Figures. D. Neville.

When citizens contact local government agencies, they generally attempt to influence service delivery decisions made by these bureaucracies. This paper examines the nature of citizen contacts, and the results of such contacts, with respect to the enforcement of environmental ordinances in Detroit, Michigan. We first examine the mechanisms responsible for the generation of citizen contacts. Assuming relations among citizen awareness, service need, and social well-being, we derive a downward-opening parabola as appropriate for describing the relationship between social well-being and propensity to contact a service agency. Using data on citizen contacts from City of Detroit agencies merged with census data, we find the expected relationship in evidence. We find that the Environmental Enforcement Division generally responds to citizen contacts, but the quality of the response varies with social characteristics of neighborhoods.