Collaborative Research: Patronage and Political Exchange Networks in a Municipal Legislature: Discretionary Spending on Nonprofit Organizations in New York City

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines increasingly agree that the governance of contemporary economic and political life operates through complex and shifting webs of organizational relations. This complexity often hides the locus of decision making, raising key problems of accountability for citizens and interest groups of all kinds. Public policy governance systems offer important opportunities to understand these dynamics and their consequences, because public policy by nature attempts to adjudicate among competing interests to produce some form of public good. This project examines legislators' decisions to allocate public funds to private nonprofit organizations that provide social services in a large city. As the proportion of publicly-supported welfare services privately provided has grown, nonprofit organizations increasingly mediate the relationship between local legislators and their constituencies. In turn, nonprofits have become increasingly dependent on government contracts, leaving the amount and quality of public services that citizens experience greatly affected by nonprofits' location and capacity to attract funding. How legislators allocate discretionary public funds to nonprofits reveals two key dynamics of social welfare governance: patronage relationships between legislators, their constituencies, and local nonprofits; and political exchange relationships between legislators. Patronage involves delivering and claiming credit for public resources allocated to a legislator's district. Presumably, the reward for successful patronage is re-election by one's constituents. Political exchange involves deals cut among legislators that lead to the allocation of public resources to a legislator's district, and/or to specific votes on legislation. Focusing on the network structure produced by this governance system and its consequences for specific citizen constituencies, this project asks: (1) What is the structure of patronage relationships between municipal legislators and their district constituencies? And how does it relate to the re-election prospects of municipal legislators, the growth of nonprofit organizations, and citizens' needs? (2) What is the structure of political exchange relationships among municipal legislators? And what are legislators' individual and district characteristics that make them more likely to initiate and reciprocate exchange patterns? (3) How does the structure of political exchange relate to whether consequential legislative proposals are passed? Intellectual Merit: This project contributes to three distinct literatures: (1) By studying sociological processes through a social network approach, it provides a contemporary picture of patronage patterns at the community level, assesses the mutual dependence of legislators and nonprofit organizations, and evaluates the distributive consequences for citizens' welfare. (2) Public administration scholars are concerned with the relative balance of managerial best practices and distributional equity in state administration. This is the first study that examines how patronage fits into a larger system of merit-based public service contracting. (3) This project also advances political science's understanding of distributive politics by disentangling mechanisms of patronage and exchange at the local level. Broader Impacts: In conjunction with prior NSF-funded work, this project will allow comparison of 3 mechanisms of public resource allocation to nonprofit organizations: patronage, political exchange, and competition. Project results will be communicated via a written policy brief and presentations to audiences in government, the nonprofit sector, and the media. The dataset resulted from the project will offer an important resource to scholars, practitioners, and government officials. It also provides a model set of procedures for constructing datasets for other cities or states that have similar discretionary forms of public resource allocation.