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

来自各个学科的学者越来越多地同意，当代经济和政治生活的治理是通过复杂和不断变化的组织关系网络来运作的。 这种复杂性往往掩盖了决策的轨迹，提出了对公民和各种利益集团负责的关键问题。公共政策治理体系为理解这些动态及其后果提供了重要机会，因为公共政策的本质是试图在相互竞争的利益之间做出裁决，以产生某种形式的公共利益。 本项目研究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。 随着由私人提供的公共支持的福利服务的比例增加，非营利组织越来越多地调解地方立法者和他们的选区之间的关系。反过来，非营利组织越来越依赖政府合同，导致公民体验的公共服务的数量和质量受到非营利组织的极大影响？地点和吸引资金的能力。立法者如何分配可自由支配的公共资金，以非营利组织揭示了社会福利治理的两个关键动态：立法者，他们的选区，和当地的非营利组织之间的赞助关系;和立法者之间的政治交换关系。赞助涉及提供和要求信贷的公共资源分配给立法者？s区。据推测，成功赞助的奖励是连任？的选民。 政治交换涉及立法者之间达成的交易，导致公共资源分配给立法者？的地区，和/或对立法的具体表决。本研究以这种治理体系所产生的网络结构及其对特定公民选区的影响为重点，提出以下问题：（1）市议员与其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、非营利组织的发展和公民有何关系？需求？(2)市议员之间的政治交换关系结构如何？什么是立法者？个人和地区的特点，使他们更有可能发起和互惠的交换模式？(3)政治交流的结构与相应的立法提案是否通过有何关系？智力优势：该项目贡献了三个不同的文献：（1）通过研究社会学过程，通过社会网络的方法，它提供了一个在社区层面的赞助模式的当代图片，评估立法者和非营利组织的相互依赖性，并评估公民的分配后果？福利(2)公共行政学者关注的是国家行政中管理最佳实践和分配公平的相对平衡。这是第一项研究，探讨如何赞助适合一个更大的系统，基于绩效的公共服务合同。(3)这个项目也推进了政治科学？更广泛的影响：在与以前的NSF资助的工作相结合，这个项目将允许比较公共资源分配的3种机制，以非营利组织：赞助，政治交流和竞争。项目结果将通过书面政策简报和演示文稿传达给政府，非营利部门和媒体的受众。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。它还提供了一套模型程序，用于为其他具有类似公共资源分配自由裁量形式的城市或州构建数据集。

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.