Frictions in Polycentric Administration with Noncongruent Borders: Evidence from Ohio School District Class Sizes

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ross, Justin M.; Hall, Joshua C.; Resh, William G.
• 署名单位: Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; Beloit College
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION RESEARCH AND THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1053-1858
• DOI: 10.1093/jopart/mus090
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 623-649
• 关键词: Public management; metropolitan-areas; UNITED-STATES; growth management; performance; GOVERNMENT; FRAGMENTATION; achievement; governance; education

摘要

Public managers who operate within cross-jurisdictional governance regimes face substantial difficulties in facilitating network collaboration. Scholars have long suggested that noncongruence of geographic borders can create coordination problems among the political communities within polycentric administrative units. A frequently reoccurring example of such coordination problems arises in cases where municipalities and school districts have noncongruent borders, creating fiscal externalities in residential development land use decisions. Using GIS data from 611 Ohio school districts and 1,585 municipalities in 2000, we calculate the degree of noncongruence between school district and municipal territory to test for evidence that noncongruence of municipal-school district borders influences school district class size. The results indicate that schools with noncongruent borders do experience substantively larger class sizes. Furthermore, these effects seem to increase with the degree of noncongruence. Our findings are robust to model specification and consistent across OLS and treatment effects regression estimates. Policy implications for state-encouraged consolidation of school districts are discussed as well as theoretical and empirical implications of noncongruent jurisdictional borders for governance studies more generally.