Policy Maps of City Councils and Policy Outcomes: A Developmental Analysis

Abstract

In spite of common challenges stemming from the common environment shared by all cities in a metropolitan region, continued and even increasing social and economic differentiation among and within cities rather than ho-mogenization and integration are the most significant features of the contemporary metropolitan scene.1 Cities within the same metropolitan region are not only maintaining but also developing distinct and unique “public life styles.” Urban sociology and urban geography have raised a multitude of questions and given a multitude of answers in seeking to account for the fact that cities facing basically similar challenges from the environment react so differently to these challenges. Most relevant research deals with the problem of differentiation and its effects on the development of cities in terms of historical settlement patterns, economic location and growth, or geographical space distribution.3But differences in municipal life styles may also be the result of differences in public policies deliberately pursued by local governments in the metropolitan area. If this is so, the common pressures from the environment are evidently interpreted differently in the process of public decision-making that seeks to cope with them. It would seem, then, that metropolitan cities are in different stages of policy development. Leaving aside momentarily the meaning of “stages of policy development,” we can ask a number of questions that may shed light on the relationship between environmental pressures and public policies designed to meet these pressures.