Title: Urban political economy
Description: Who governs? For years, attempts to answer that question, central to the study of urban politics, ended in impasse. In this work Ronald Vogel crosses the barriers erected by earlier researchers who were polarized on either side of an elite-pluralist debate. He approaches the subject by focusing on the relationship between the public and private sectors, synthesizing earlier viewpoints and refining the emerging theorem of political economy that recognizes both sectors' significance in community decision making. To explore further the dynamics of business and government relations, Vogel conducts his own study of leadership in a rapidly growing Sunbelt community. With a population of more than one million people, Broward County, whose largest city is Fort Lauderdale, was an ideal research site. Its power structure was in flux. Vogel discovers that local leaders have more autonomy than has been recognized in other recent studies. He shows that in Broward County they did more than just complain about the situation; they attempted to reorganize and centralize the decision-making structure into an efficient organization capable of providing services to the growing community. Based upon the case study, Vogel identifies four regime types--hyperpluralism, political elite, economic elite, and cooperative--that offer a typology of business and government relations in a modern community. For theoreticians in economics and political science as well as researchers in urban studies, Vogel puts to rest the elite-pluralist debate by combining methods of study of community power with research on urban political economy.
Subjects: Community power, Decision making, Economic policy, Politics and government
Places: Broward County, Broward County (Fla.), Florida