In his careful and generous review of my book, Henrik Selin asks why I selected responsiveness and intergovernmental coordination as dependent variables for my analysis, therefore setting aside other policy effects that special district governance might produce. This is an important question: the delegation of policy authority to autonomous, specialized governments is a significant departure from the normal politics that takes place in a multidimensional legislature and could have a variety of consequences. To the extent that special districts have received any scholarly attention, it has focused mostly on estimating how specialization affects the level of public spending. My interest lies more in the quality of governance. What do we want from representative government? Central among our goals should be policy outcomes that are responsive both to public preferences and to public problems.
Political scientists have dedicated considerable attention to investigating the role of institutions in channeling popular will into government action; I sought to extend that line of inquiry to special districts. In the book, I show that under normal conditions, specialized governance can produce outcomes that are more congruent with what the majority would prefer than would be the case with decisions made by a multidimensional legislature. Put simply, specialization can increase policy responsiveness. This result has important implications for governance at multiple levels. It counters the popular perception that special districts are captured by local special interests, and furthermore, it suggests that findings in other work showing higher spending levels by special districts may be attributable to constituent preferences rather than to special interest domination. Beyond the setting of local politics, my findings about the responsiveness of special districts can inform our evaluation of other specialized institutions, such as independent regulatory agencies and international organizations. Importantly, however, I also show that the effect of institutional design is conditional—policy differences between specialized and non-specialized venues are minimal for functions that are highly salient.
In addition to democratic responsiveness, I also consider how specialization affects the problem-solving capacity of the public sector by examining how localities coordinate policy activities across jurisdictional lines. Intergovernmental coordination is a vital concern in complex metropolitan settings, especially with respect to environmental issues that often crosscut political boundaries or impose significant externalities. Coordination may involve formal interlocal agreements to share or transfer resources, or it may refer to the myriad ways in which a local government's policy activities can complement rather than interfere with the activities of its neighbors. I examine both formal and informal coordination in the book, and find that functionally specialized governance makes coordination both more necessary and more costly.
In the specific case of water, questions about responsiveness and intergovernmental coordination are critical as water governance becomes increasingly localized. Communities throughout the nation are facing serious and escalating challenges in securing an adequate water supply and protecting the quality of their drinking water. Local governments will face difficult decisions as they attempt to balance competing demands from different user groups and manage the externalities from their policy choices. The lesson of my book is that the design of governing institutions helps shape the decisions that local governments make, and that there is no institutional fix that guarantees both responsiveness and coordination under all circumstances. Ultimately, our evaluation of specialized governance must depend on the specific policy context and the goals we have for representative government.
