A Theoretical Framework on the Determinants of Strategic Cities

Abstract

Strategic planning is a commonly used management technique, but most state and city studies on strategic planning are descriptive and have not developed a clear theory as to why cities use strategic planning. In this paper, we develop a framework for measuring cities’ use of strategic planning, that includes factors related to form of government, community wealth, and other community attributes as well as the more commonly examined factors related to internal city management capacity. Rather than using a dichotomous dependent variable of “use” or “not use,” we use an index of four strategic planning activities to represent the extent of strategic planning use. We test our multivariate model using ordered logit and data collected from a 2005 survey of Florida city managers, mayors and chief administrative officers. We find support for all four of the major theoretical factors in our model. More strategic cities are more likely to be council manager cities, heterogeneous in population, depend less on sales tax revenue, have risk-taking leadership, use more contracting out, and have staff who participate in professional networks.