Decision Rules, Gatekeepers, and the Delivery of Municipal Services

For decades, a critical issue among urban scholars and public managers has been who decides where municipal services will be allocated. Conventional wisdom holds that one will have a clear understanding of the city's priorities merely by focusing on the agenda-setting process of the municipal budget. Or, as Wildavsky (1964, p. 4) writes, If one looks at politics as a process by which the government mobilizes resources to meet pressing problems, then the budget is the focus of these efforts. Much of the early research on urban service delivery focused on how municipal service priorities were made and who was dominant in the policy agenda setting process. Although this research has helped us to understand how the urban policy process operates, especially in regard to coalition building, it has its limitations. In the 1970s, a different research focus emerged. Its premise was that a city's budget document may not truly represent the city's values or priorities, since budgets rarely specify which clients or ethnic groups are to receive allocation benefits. Instead, this body of literature believed that bureaucratic service delivery rules should be the area of inquiry, because these rules have distributional consequences as a result of which some groups gain and others lose. While decision rules may reduce uncertainty by ensuring compliance with the goals that have been agreed upon, urban service delivery rules are not devoid of political considerations. Indeed, there is evidence that bureaucracies are frequently motivated to devise rules that support their own maintenance objectives and enhance their own ability to expand their boundaries of discretion. Or, as Lineberry (1977, p. 154) comments, There are two remarkable things about decision rules in bureaucratic allocation of public services. The first is how low in the bureaucratic hierarchy decision rules are formulated and implemented. The second is how insulated the rule makers are from external constraints.