Abandonments of the Council-Manager Plan: A New Institutionalist Perspective

Abstract

The council-manager (CM) form of government has been on the scene for nearly 75 years. Since the first large city (Dayton, Ohio) adopted the council-manager form in 1914, it has become a well established feature of the local political landscape. Today, over 2,500 cities operate under the council-manager plan. ' Despite the spread of the council-manager form of government, the impetus behind the movement to reform local government seems to have lessened with time. During the 1960s, growth of the council-manager form began to slow down as many unreformed cities started hiring chief administrative officers (CAOs). In 1969, in recognition of this change, the International City Managers' Association changed its name to the International City Management Association.2 Also, after over seven decades of reform, the unreformed mayor-council (MC) form of government still constitutes a majority of all U.S. cities.3 Finally, every year a number of local referenda in reformed cities propose the abandonment of the council-manager plan. A survey of municipalities conducted in 1981 by the International City Management Association indicated that 3.5 percent of council-manager cities had abandoned the form of government during the previous 12 years.4 While this rate of abandonments of the councilmanager plan is roughly only one-third of that for cities abandoning the mayor-council plan, nagging questions remain. Why do elections proposing the abandonment of the council-manager plan continue to be a feature of politics in many reformed cities? To be sure, most of these elections result in retention of the plan, but why is the issue raised in the first place? And, most importantly, why do some communities choose to abandon reform? This article reconceptualizes the way in which abandonments of the council-manager plan have come to be portrayed. The first section reviews the prevailing theoretical framework used to explain abandonments. As in most contemporary theories of politics, abandonments have been depicted as a function of the exogenous political environment and social context. Empirical flaws in this contextual theory of abandonments are presented in light of both the 1981 ICMA survey data and data from a 1986 ICMA survey, supplemented by information from a 1987 survey by the author of cities that had abandoned the councilmanager plan in the previous ten years. This is followed