Institutional Analysis of Neighborhood Collective Action

• Author: Michael Craw
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12707
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

Institutional Analysis of Neighborhood Collective Action 707

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 5, pp. 707–717. © 2016 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12707.

Institutional Analysis of Neighborhood Collective Action

Michael Craw is associate professor of

public administration in the School of Public

Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little

Rock. His research focuses on institutions

of local public finance and governance and

issues of urban equality. His prior research

has appeared in journals such as

American

Journal of Political Science, Publius,

and

Urban Affairs Review.

E-mail: mccraw@ualr.edu

Abstract : Sublocal governance organizations may provide a way for some urban neighborhoods to stabilize and

improve property values. Recent advances in collective action theory, spatial statistical methods, and data availability

now make it possible to more directly evaluate the effects of these organizations. The analysis combines geocoded

assessor ’ s data and data from a survey of neighborhood and homeowner associations to analyze a model of prices

of single-family homes in Little Rock, Arkansas, from 2012 to 2016. The results show that neighborhood and

homeowner associations both have significant positive effects on neighborhood property values relative to unorganized

neighborhoods and that the effect of neighborhood associations is at least as large as that of homeowner associations.

Moreover, the results indicate that neighborhood association structure mediates the effect on property values, although

this is not the case for homeowner associations.

Practitioner Points

• Institutions matter at the neighborhood level. Both voluntary neighborhood and homeowner associations

have positive effects on neighborhood property values.

• In at least some communities, voluntary neighborhood associations may be as effective at responding to

quality-of-life issues as homeowner associations.

• Local officials should look for opportunities to foster grassroots organizing and organizational

professionalization and complexity at the neighborhood level.

• Neighborhood-level data projects and geographic information system tools are expanding the capacity for

local governments and neighborhood organizations to measure outcomes at the neighborhood level.

Michael Craw

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

O ur failures with city neighborhoods are,

ultimately, failures in localized self-government.

And our successes are successes at localized self-

government.

—Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American

Cities

The central tenet of new institutionalism is that

“institutions matter.” That is, policy outcomes

are unavoidably a function not just of the policy

preferences of the mass public but also of the rules

and process used to make and carry out collective

decisions (Arrow 1951 ; Shepsle 1979 ). This insight

has significantly influenced public administration ’ s

evolution as a discipline. For instance, Vincent

Ostrom ( 1972 ) argued that public administration

can be understood as the study of the institutional

arrangements that people create to solve collective

problems. This line of reasoning has produced an

abundant literature analyzing the implications of

institutional arrangements of local governance (Ostrom

and Ostrom 1971 ). Some examples include studies

of the form of local government (Carr 2015 ; Feiock,

Jeong, and Kim 2003 ; Trounstine 2008 ), metropolitan

organization (Hendrick, Jiminez, and Lal 2011 ;

Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961 ), and interlocal

agreements (Andrew and Carr 2013 ; Kwon and Feiock

2010 ; LeRoux, Brandenburger, and Pandey 2010 ).

As Jane Jacobs recognized, we can use institutional

analysis to evaluate outcomes at the neighborhood

level. Recent advances in collective action theory,

data gathering and analysis, and statistical methods

have significantly increased our discipline ’ s capacity

to apply institutional analysis to the sublocal level.

As neighborhood-level governance typically does not

correspond to a formal governmental unit, Elinor

Ostrom ’ s ( 1990 ) theory of self-governance provides

important insights into how governance emerges in

the absence of formal governmental authority. In

addition, a growing number of projects in major U.S.

cities have taken on the task of compiling data at the

neighborhood level.

1 Geographic information system

(GIS) tools make it possible to take advantage of these

data sets to directly analyze neighborhood outcomes.