City-County Managers, Representation and the Dynamics of Political Markets for Growth Management

This dissertation examines the influence that political institutions have had over Florida's growth-management policy process at two levels of government during dissimilar periods of environmental conditions. It is an advancement on extant public administration research in several ways. First, by modeling a local political market as an evolving system in which equilibrium policy output may be more an exception than the norm, I demonstrate that political institutions do moderate political exchange but the strength and direction of this effect may be conditional on interactions between form of government and environmental circumstances. Public administration researchers have been divided for years over whether the structural reform of council-manager government at the local level continues to have an influence over a range of social outcomes. I find evidence that specific to community planning and development, managerial form does matter, but largely at the margins. Secondly, by applying models of disproportionate information processing and multi-model approaches to capture emerging patterns of land-development policy change, I advance our understanding of the effectiveness of the policy of growth management and its implications for sustainable communities.