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

合作研究：市立法机关的赞助和政治交流网络：纽约市非营利组织的可自由支配支出

• 批准号: 1547139
• 负责人: Nicole Marwell
• 金额: $ 6.33万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2016-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1547139&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Patronage; Political; Exchange

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.

来自各种学科的学者越来越同意，当代经济和政治生活的治理是通过复杂而不断变化的组织关系网络运作的。 这种复杂性通常掩盖了决策的源头，从而引发了对公民和各种利益群体的关键问题。公共政策治理系统提供了重要的机会来了解这些动态及其后果，因为自然界的公共政策试图在竞争利益之间裁定以产生某种形式的公共利益。 该项目研究了立法者决定将公共资金分配给在大城市提供社会服务的私人非营利组织。 随着公共支持的福利服务的私人提供的比例，非营利组织越来越多地调解了当地立法者及其选区之间的关系。反过来，非营利组织越来越依赖政府合同，留下了公民经历的公共服务的数量和质量，这些公共服务受到非营利组织的地理位置和吸引资金的能力的影响。立法者如何向非营利组织分配酌情公共资金，揭示了社会福利治理的两个关键动态：立法者，其选区与地方非营利组织之间的惠顾关系；和立法者之间的政治交流关系。赞助涉及向分配给立法者地区的公共资源提供和声称信贷。据推测，成功赞助的奖励是由一个人的选民连任。 政治交流涉及在立法者之间削减的交易，从而导致公共资源分配给立法者地区和/或对立法的特定投票。该项目的重点关注该治理体系所产生的网络结构及其对特定公民选区的后果，该项目问：（1）市政立法者及其地区选区之间的赞助关系的结构是什么？它与市政立法者的连任前景，非营利组织的增长以及公民的需求有何关系？ （2）市议员之间政治交流关系的结构是什么？而立法者的个人和地区特征是什么，使他们更有可能发起和回报交流模式？ （3）政治交流的结构与后果立法提案是否通过？智力优点：该项目有助于三种不同的文献：（1）通过社交网络方法研究社会学过程，它提供了当代对社区层面的赞助模式的情况，可以评估立法者和非计划组织的互相依赖，并评估公民和评估的后果和评估。 （2）公共管理学者关注的是管理最佳实践和国家行政管理的分配权益的相对平衡。这是第一个研究光顾如何适应更大的基于绩效公共服务合同系统的研究。 （3）该项目还通过解开地方一级的赞助和交流机制来提高政治科学对分配政治的理解。BRODER的影响：与先前的NSF资助的工作结合使用，该项目将允许将公共资源分配的3种机制比较：Patronage，政治交流和竞争。项目结果将通过书面政策简介和政府，非营利部门和媒体的观众进行介绍。该项目产生的数据集将为学者，从业人员和政府官员提供重要的资源。它还提供了一组模型，用于为具有类似的公共资源分配形式的其他城市或州构建数据集。