The purpose of this study is to investigate the differences in the changes in local government policy outputs when cities change their forms of government. Specifically, the differences in the comparative changes in policy outputs of the local government are examined for the short term and long term between cities with a change in form and cities without a change in form, and also between cities with the council-manager form and cities with the mayor-council form.
To explore the differences in changes, this research includes variables under the headings of personnel administration, fiscal administration, and developmental administration. To accomplish the objective, this research employs the concept of quasi-experimental design, which constructs an experimental group and a comparison group. Both factor and cluster analyses are used to find pair cities, a paired t-test is conducted to detect differences in changes of policy outputs. The data for this research are from various sources compiled by the U.S. Census, and the ICMA.
This study has found some indications of differences in changes when cities changed their forms of government, particularly in fiscal administration, and somewhat in developmental administration. There are three major findings: (1) When all of the test variables are considered, the number of significant differences between cities which changed form and cities which did not change form is about the same as the number of significant differences between cities with the Council-Manager form and cities with the mayor-council form; (2) The differences in the changes in policy outputs are likely to be present in the short term rather than in the long term when cities change their forms of government; (3) There seems to be no difference in the changes in policy outputs between cities with the council-manager form and cities with the mayor-council form. Overall, the observed significance level for many variables does not indicate statistically conclusive evidence of differences in the changes in policy outputs when cities change their forms of government.