Reconsidering the Determinants of Public Authority Use

Abstract

This article investigates the causes of differences among states in the use of independent public authorities. Contrary to findings in previous work, I find that the evidence does not support the view that authorities are borrowing machines, created to provide better access to capital markets. Rather, the factors associated with use of authorities seem distinct from those associated with general obligation borrowing, which suggests that purely fiscal motivations are not primary determinants of the use of authorities. The existence of independent public authorities poses important theoretical challenges for students of public administration. What Doig (1983, 301) calls this peculiar animal looms large in the menagerie of public organizational forms. A recent study (Leigland 1994) that uses a fairly narrow definition of the term counts over seven thousand public authorities in the United States, with outstanding debt in 1981 of over $29 billion, about one-fifth as large as the total full-faith-and-credit debt of state and local governments at that time. Yet despite the importance of such organizations, and the many decades over which they have been on the public scene, they continue to fit uneasily into the public administration literature. Mitchell (1991, 429) has lamented that the education and training of public authority managers has been largely overlooked in the literature, curricula, and professions of public administration and public management. As Doig notes (1983, 296-97), many conventional generalizations about the difficulties of public management simply do not apply to these organizations: Goals are often clear, incremental performance results are regularly used in evaluating effectiveness, and the pressure to achieve immediate results is at times far less than it is in other public agencies and in many business corporations. . . . If we 571/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory I thank Christy Evans, Anna Gunnthorsdottir, and Rhonda Trautman for assis-