Metropolitan Governance: Institutional Roles and Interjurisdictional Cooperation

Abstract

Theories of metropolitan governance tend to underemphasize the salience of jurisdictional politics and jurisdictional institutions. This paper uses a one-shot prisoner's dilemma experiment, embedded within a questionnaire that was administered to local government officials in a metropolitan region, to evaluate how jurisdictionally based institutional roles (i.e., mayors, city-council members, executive-level administrators, department directors) affect the willingness of government officials to participate in metropolitan governance. Even though the incentives of one-shot prisoner's dilemma games favor defection, we find government officials to be generally inclined toward participating in our proposed metropolitan governance scenario. Contrary to common views that metropolitan cooperation is an unnatural and uncomfortable environment for elected officials, we find elected executives to be particularly supportive of the proposed project. We also find that local government officials are likely to consider the expected benefits to the residents of other jurisdictions when deciding whether their government will participate in an interjurisdictional project.Politics and administration in American metropolitan areas are played out in the context of high jurisdictional fragmentation. There is no single formalized polity in American metropolitan areas. The people of the city of Atlanta may have a mayor and engage in mayoral politics and administration, but the people of the Atlanta metropolitan area do not. Instead, metropolitan areas have other forms of politics and administration-so called metropolitan governancewhere diverse sets of public and private actors make and administer policies that directly affect the distribution of public goods and economic resources in jurisdictions where they are neither elected nor appointed.Attempts to explain the politics and administration of metropolitan areas often emphasize pluralist competition among political and business elites. Perhaps the best-known approach is the study of community power. In the classic community-power perspective, the community,

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