Increasingly, local governments are crafting policy to tackle climate change. This article examines why cities develop and implement climate change programs. The authors consider the impact of interest group pressure, political institutions, and problem severity on a city’s decision to develop and implement climate protection programs. Their results suggest that organized interests influence both adoption and implementation of climate mitigation programs. This effect, however, is contingent on political institutions. In general, organized interests are more effective in mayoral as opposed to city manager forms of governments. Interestingly, while financially strapped cities may adopt climate mitigation programs to advance cobenefits or cost savings, fiscal stress also impedes program implementation.

The thesis of this essay is that efforts to improve urban services and public sector accountability have been based upon an inadequate vision of the nature of urban administration and of the citizen's role in local government. Many strategies for improving urban service delivery, and most current approaches to &dquo;citizen participation&dquo; are, I argue, reflections of a dominant model of the citizen-local government relationship -a model that ignores significant aspects of citizenship and therefore diverts attention from some potentially important means of improving urban service delivery and citizen participation.

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Objectives. This article analyzes competing explanations for variation in the relative size of contemporary police forces in larger U.S. cities. The featured explanation is conflict theory, which previously provided much evidence for a racial threat thesis but limited evidence that racial insurgency affected police mobilization in the 1960s and 1970s. Methods. The study sample consists of the 66 cities with a population of at least 250,000 in 2000. Aggregate data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Congressional Quarterly's America Votes, and the U.S. Census Bureau are combined with a content analysis using the Lexis‐Nexis regional news database to generate the data set. OLS regression modeling is applied to the analysis of this cross‐sectional data set. Results. This analysis shows that the size of contemporary police forces is substantially shaped not only by the legacy of the 1960–1970 wave of racial unrest in the United States, but also by reaction to racial disorders in the 1980s and 1990s and by the prevalence of racial minorities in the current population. Conclusions. Police departments' relative force size in 2000 is not only a result of incremental growth from the size attained by 1980, but also is dramatically shaped by whether the city experienced a race riot from 1980–2000 and, to a lesser extent, the size of the minority population and the violent crime rate. City wealth is a less robust indicator; and there is no evidence that either community ideology or the degree of uptake of community policing matters.

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