Urban Political Economy: Broward County, Florida.

• Author: MacManus, Susan A.

This book is aimed at scholars more than practitioners. Its focus is on theory-building and refinement rather than on fiscal analyses of outcomes or outputs. The practitioner will not find in this monograph data-based details outlining the interaction of the political and economic sectors of Broward County, Florida, nor information on the revenues, expenditures and borrowing patterns of one of the nation's fastest growing counties in the 1980s and on the political and economic factors driving them. There are no tips here on what fiscal devices and incentives were used to formulate the county's economic development activities.

The author's major goals are to reexamine the old community power studies, identify their theoretical and methodological flaws, and devise a "new paradigm." The old community power studies of the 1960s and early 1970s tended to classify communities as governed by either an elite or plural power structure. In most of these studies, a community's classification was the product of the methodology used by the researcher, which itself was largely a function of his/her academic discipline. Sociologists tended to use the reputational, or positional, method of determining "who ran a community" whereas political scientists focused on analyzing who participated in making decisions on a variety of public issues. The former approach yielded conclusions of an elite power structure, whereas the latter led to the finding of a more plural power structure. Vogel argues for a more inclusive theory which recognizes the validity and utility of both methodologies. Urban political economy is his answer.

Urban political economy is defined by Vogel as "the study of the interaction of the polity and the economy at the local level and its consequences for public policy." His test site is Broward County, Florida, where he specifically focuses on the interaction of the business and government sectors. He mostly examines the interaction during the 1970s and early 1980s, relying heavily on secondary materials, especially newspaper accounts. He makes the argument that, when confronted with rapid growth and a much more socioeconomically and politically diverse populace, the governmental and business communities of Broward County quickly realized that the highly decentralized, fragmented (pluralistic) nature of each sector was not optimal to either...