Professional Cities: Accredited Agencies, Government Structure, and Rational Choice

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12806
• Author: Fabyan Estrada,Branco Ponomariov,Barbara Coyle McCabe
• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018

Professional Cities: Accredited Agencies, Government Structure, and Rational Choice 295

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 2, pp. 295–304. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12806.

Professional Cities:

Accredited Agencies, Government Structure,

and Rational Choice

Fabyan Estrada received his master

of public administration degree from the

University of Texas at San Antonio in 2014.

His career now focuses on compliance and

risk management in the finance industry.

E-mail : fabyanestrada01@gmail.com

Branco Ponomariov is associate

professor in the Department of Public

Administration at the University of Texas

at San Antonio. He received his doctorate

in public policy from Georgia Institute

of Technology and specializes in public

management and science and technology

policy.

E-mail : branco.ponomariov@utsa.edu

Barbara Coyle McCabe is associate

professor at the University of Texas at San

Antonio, where she teaches organization

theory and economics for public affairs. Her

research interests focus on urban policy and

management.

E-mail : barbara.mccabe@utsa.edu

Abstract : Accreditation, long used to signal quality among hospitals and universities, has been available to police, fire,

and public works departments since the late 1980s. For public service departments, accreditation is a voluntary process

that demands significant organizational resources without a guaranteed outcome. Why would city officials devote

scarce resources to such an endeavor? Two explanations are examined. First, accreditation may be a rational response to

a history of trouble or the potential for future crisis. Second, municipalities may use accreditation to build a reputation

for professional administration of public services. The authors use Poisson regression to test these explanations on a new

data set of midsize cities.

Evidence for Practice

• Faster-growing cities, larger cities with wealthier residents, and cities with greater economic disparities are

more likely to have accredited police, fire, or public works departments than other municipalities.

• Organizational capacity (e.g., number of full-time employees) has positive effects on accreditation, while

fiscal capacity (e.g., per capita tax collections) does not.

• Cities with the council-manager form of government are more likely to have one or more accredited

departments than other municipalities.

Barbara Coyle McCabe

Branco Ponomariov

Fabyan Estrada

University of Texas at San Antonio

F or the past two years, the deaths of African

Americans at the hands of city police have

sparked protests nationwide. Many called for

more highly trained police officers in response and

more police accountability, and specific legislative

steps were taken (Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-

Markel 2017 ; Eterno, Barrow, and Silverman 2017 ;

Nicholson-Crotty, Nicholson-Crotty, and Fernandez

2017 ; Santora 2014 ; Waldman 2014 ). Demand for

greater professionalism among public servants is a

common reaction to trouble in cities, whether that

trouble takes the form of natural disasters, violence, or

allegations of wrongdoing. It is a response with deep

roots in American public administration, dating from

Progressive Era reformers’ efforts to change municipal

governments to boost efficiency and eliminate

corruption, cronyism, and malfeasance (Banfield and

Wilson 1963 ; Clingermayer and Feiock 2001 ; Knott

and Miller 1987 ). Replacing politically appointed

city employees with a professional public service was

seen as fundamental to the rational government that

Progressive reformers sought. Professionalism remains

important to public administration academics and

practitioners alike (Nelson and Svara 2015 ), but

assessing and explaining municipal professionalism

as an empirical phenomenon has proved difficult

(Carr 2015 ).

National accreditation of public service departments,

available for departments of police, fire, and public

works, is a relatively new development that acts as a

proxy for municipal professionalism. Accreditation

is a voluntary process that demands organizational

resources without a guaranteed outcome. At a

time when municipalities face shrinking federal

support, heightened state restrictions on taxes, and

undiminished demand for public services, why

would the officials of some cities devote resources to

accreditation? Using a census of midsize U.S. cities

with populations of 25,000 to 250,000, we rely on the

political markets framework to address this question.

The political markets framework holds that

institutions (particularly those dealing with

representation and form of government) affect local

policy choices by either impeding or advancing

competing interests in a city and by shaping the

incentives of elected and appointed municipal officials

(Frant 1993 , 1996 ; Lubell, Feiock, and Ramirez

de la Cruz 2009 ). Institutions raise or lower the

transaction costs for various interest groups seeking

the attention and action of city officials (North

1990 ). For example, a city ’ s electoral scheme—at-large

versus district or ward elections—determines which

“public” council members represent: either the