This article investigates how communications advances affect citizens’ ability to participate in coproduction of government services. The authors analyze service requests made to the City of Boston during a one‐year period from 2010 to 2011 and, using geospatial analysis and negative binomial regression, investigate possible disparities by race, education, and income in making service requests. The findings reveal little concern that 311 systems (nonemergency call centers) may benefit one racial group over another; however, there is some indication that Hispanics may use these systems less as requests move from call centers to the Internet and smartphones. Consistent with prior research, the findings show that poorer neighborhoods are less likely to take advantage of 311 service, with the notable exception of smartphone utilization. The implications for citizen participation in coproduction and bridging the digital divide are discussed.

Understanding the financial condition of local governments is important for public managers and elected officials as they work to align revenues with p ublic demands for services, while maintaining financial solvency. This task becomes even more important when the economic and financial environment, over which local officials have little to no control, is collapsing around them. This article seeks to expand the literature of measuring financial condition of local governments by testing the validity and reliability of the Financial Condition Index (FCI). The FCI is a framework for evaluating financial condition that was initially developed by Groves, Godsey, and Shulman and later applied in US state‐level studies by a number of scholars. The results from this article cast serious doubt on the applicability of using the FCI, and the four associated solvency dimensions, as an appropriate methodology for evaluating local government financial condition.

We examine the flow of federal grants-in-aid

SCI's Urbanism Next initiative focuses on how advances in technology such as the advent of autonomous vehicles (AV's), the rise of E-commerce, and the proliferation of the sharing economy are having profound effects not only on how we live, move, and spend our time in cities, but also increasingly on urban form and development itself. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this research initiative gathers the latest thinking on the state and trajectories of these technologies, analyzes the potential implications for urban form and development, and projects how these changes should affect current design, planning, and development decisions. While substantial research on the technological aspects of autonomous vehicles and systems themselves exists, the Urbanism Next Research Initiative is focused on addressing the shortage of systematic exploration on their secondary effects on city development, form, and design, with implications for sustainability, resiliency, equity, cost, and general livability.

Citizen participation in government can provide a broad range of benefits to governments and citizens alike. Advances in information technologies have enabled new types of citizen participation with governments. However, we currently lack an understanding of how these new types of participation, particularly those that generate information on community needs, influence resource allocations. This article focuses on one of these new technologies, 311 systems, and how citizen requests might influence departmental budget allocations. We track budget allocation in the cities of Boston and San Francisco for 106 departments or subunits from FY2005 to FY2013. Our findings indicate that there is no significant resource benefit for departments using 311 versus those that do not. While departments using 311 do have larger budget allocations than those that do not, those departments had larger budget allocations prior to the implementation of 311. And while data generated in the 311-enabled citizen participation are increasingly used to measure departmental performance, the findings of this study show that this information has little to no effect on the allocated share of the budget for departments.