Is Institutional Change in Forms of American Local Government Functional, Isomorphic, or Path Dependent?

Cheon Geun Choi and Bok-Tae Kim

International Review of Public Administration, 2009, vol. 14, issue 1, 51-66

Abstract: American cities are born, change, and, sometimes, disappear. What are the sources of institutional change? One conception of institutional change focuses on the functional process of social institutions. The other emphasizes the nonfunctional processes such as institutional isomorphism and path dependence. In this paper, we explore under what circumstances American cities change their form of government. The authors suggest seven hypotheses based upon functional and nonfunctional explanations, and test these hypotheses using the probit model with a decennial panel data set spanning 350 American cities from 1940 to 2000. Particularly, in order to test the hypothesis concerning institutional isomorphism, we measure the distance between cities using GIS techniques. Not surprisingly, all three explanations get empirical support from the study.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/12294659.2009.10805147 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rrpaxx:v:14:y:2009:i:1:p:51-66

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RRPA20

DOI: 10.1080/12294659.2009.10805147

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Public Administration is currently edited by Ralph Brower

More articles in International Review of Public Administration from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().