Over the past several decades, special districts have proliferated and become the most rapidly growing type of local governments in the U.S. This study provides an exploratory investigation of special district finance reliance from two aspects, including expenditure reliance of general–purpose governments on special districts’ service delivery and financing mode of special districts. Using financial data collected from the Bureau of Census, this study provides detailed descriptive analyses on temporal trends and geographical patterns of expenditure reliance and revenue financing mode for four service functions. From the perspective of expenditure reliance, this study shows that special districts have replaced the role of general–purpose governments. In terms of revenue modes, special districts tend to rely on user fees, equating payers and beneficiaries of services. Moreover, this study shows that on which revenue sources the districts rely the most vary by service function and geography.

Background The flexible boundaries of special districts allow for overlaps with each other that generate various specialized service bundles on a territorial basis. The combined overlapping boundaries may reveal willingness to have more services at additional costs as the special districts generally provide services selectively to those who reside within their boundaries. Objective This study aims to investigate whether overlapping special districts sort citizens by income level as reflected by the Tiebout model. Methods This study utilizes a cross‐sectional block group data of Ventura County in California, taking numbers of vertices of special districts as independent variable and household income as dependent variable. Results Estimation result demonstrates that a greater number of specialized services is associated with higher income levels and varies by service type. Conclusion Findings of this study imply that income segregation could be predetermined by jurisdictional boundary, and that other subjects of urban segregation may have similar pattern.

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The existing literature on participatory budgeting – as one means of citizen participation in local governance – tends to focus on how to stimulate citizen participation in the budget process, and primarily aims to descriptively explain the magnitude of participation or the adoption of specific policy approaches. We investigate participatory budgeting from an institutional perspective and empirically evaluate the choices that local governments make in adopting a specific set of rules for including citizens in the budget process. We suggest that the choice of the type of participatory budgeting policy is predicated on the partisanship of policymakers, the administrative capacity of local government, and citizen’s experience with other forms of direct democracy. To test these hypotheses, we collect information on 224 local governments in South Korea from 2004 to 2013. For each city, we identify the type of participatory budgeting policy they adopt and evaluate that choice in an empirical model. The results provide evidence that the partisanship of local policymakers and the administrative capacity of the local government are associated with different choices about the inclusion of citizens in the budget process.