Like most fields of knowledge, political science tends to progress incrementally. Typically, a political scientist develops a model about a prominent institution or common behavior and that model becomes the starting point for understanding all its other permutations. This is especially the case in studies of American state and local government, which tend to follow theories of national politics. Scholars of state legislatures typically begin their analysis by using studies of the U.S. Congress, analysts of local elections start with presidential vote models, and so on. But, as Elaine Sharp reminds us in Does Local Government Matter?, we should not be so quick to assume that models or theories about national-level politics translate easily to the local level. In fact, local politics may operate under logics all their own.

In this compact and thoughtful book, Sharp brings her ever-insightful attention to the civic consequences of local governmental policies. Political scientists have long recognized that policy is endogenous to the political process: When governments begin to direct resources to particular groups, they create strong incentives for beneficiaries to organize themselves in defense of their prerogatives. Recent scholars of American national politics, such as Andrea Campbell, Anne Schneider, Joe Soss, and Helen Ingram, have modified this assessment for mass politics. They find that the mass mobilization effects of policy depend on the type of government program in question. Universalistic programs, like Social Security and Medicare, encourage their beneficiaries to coalesce as powerful interest groups, whereas means-tested programs, like Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, seem to discourage political participation among their beneficiaries.

Sharp questions whether this “policy-centered theory,” developed largely around federal programs, is equally suited for local policies. At first glance, this seems like the right question to ask. In an era of increasing globalization, theorists like Benjamin Barber argue that local politics are the best venue for ordinary citizens to empower themselves, become civically active, and build “strong democracy.” If we expect citizens to “think globally and act locally,” then we need to identify whether government policies either facilitate or inhibit their local civic participation. In Chapter 1, Sharp does a nice job of synthesizing the various concepts and studies that comprise policy-centered theory and integrating them into a series of testable hypotheses.

For liberal advocates of strong democracy, Sharp's empirical tests in later chapters appear to bring bad news. Matching individual-level survey data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Study (SCCBS), county-level social spending patterns, and other sources, Sharp finds that county welfare spending levels and community policing programs correspond with lower levels of participation in neighborhood associations and other types of civic activities, especially among lower income groups. This contrasts with her case studies of local business elites who seem quite energized by local efforts to spur development. As she summarizes (p. 197), “At the local level, government social programs dampen participation of the have-nots while development programs reinforce the political involvement of already-privileged business interests.”

These findings must be kept in perspective, however. Most of us who study local civic participation are forced to appropriate data designed for other purposes, which often limit the type of inferences we can draw. And the same goes for the findings in Sharp's book. In this case, the SCCBS data she uses are not drawn from a representative sample of places (most them are much larger than the average American municipality) and the measures of civic participation are vague. For example, “neighborhood association” could include everything from a gang to a condo board. Without better specified measures of local participation, it is hard to pinpoint the specific demobilizing effects of government programs or to test for particular causal mechanisms. This is not the author's fault; she did not design the survey or collect the data, but they do greatly limit the types of inferences she can make.

The statistical analyses in the book also could have benefited from a better model specification. While statistics should generally be as transparent and simple as possible, the portion of the SCCBS data used by Sharp is a textbook example of the necessity for more sophisticated multilevel models. Because these data are comprised of a large number of cases clustered in only 29 places, the simple regression models that Sharp employs are likely to underestimate the standard errors of the coefficients, particularly for the variables measuring government programs. At the very least, these analyses would be more convincing if they controlled for state-level fixed effects, particularly because the welfare spending levels originate at the state level. Without such corrections, it is difficult to know whether many of the significant findings she reports are simply artifacts of weakly specified models.

Meanwhile, it is unclear where Sharp's interesting case studies of business elites fit into the hypotheses developed at the book's outset. If the question we are interested in concerns “the magnitude and effectiveness of ordinary citizens' political engagement” (p. 2), then why focus on the mobilizing power of business elites, especially since that is already the subject of an extensive literature on local growth machines? The more pertinent question seems to be whether communities that spend more on incentives for economic development demonstrate higher or lower levels of civic involvement among ordinary citizens.

This empirical disjuncture highlights the ill-suited nature of “policy-centered theory” for explaining local civic participation. Despite all of her initial groundwork, in later parts of the book Sharp either discards the policy-centered model for other paradigms, such as collective action theory, or questions its basic viability. In one of the book's most insightful moments, she notes that local governments typically provide collective benefits, whereas the federal government provides more individualistic ones: “Social Security checks and GI Bill benefits are delivered to individuals. By contrast, most of the benefits that a city government provides … are delivered to neighborhoods” (pp. 74–75). This, however, raises some essential questions: If local government services are primarily neighborhood centered, then why should an individualistic, policy-centered theory even be introduced? Should neighborhoods not be the central unit of theoretical and empirical analysis?

Curiously, Sharp also ignores the most historically prevalent example of the way in which local governments influence civic participation: political patronage. For decades, political machines, teachers' unions, and ethnic-based political organizations have used local jobs and municipal contracts to mobilize their own supporters and have employed other mechanisms, like scheduling elections at odd times, to demobilize opponents. Given that the bulk of local government spending is allocated for general service goods, it would seem that the first test for the effects of a local policy feedback mechanism would be to look at employment spending, civil service procedures, and contract awards, rather than at county-level welfare spending or even community policy programs.

Finally, it is unclear how much these theories or these empirical results would be altered by a more thorough appreciation of the great socioeconomic and institutional diversity of American localities. Sharp spends most of the book analyzing and theorizing about larger, central cities. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the SCCBS cities are over 200,000 in population. But most Americans now live in suburban places much smaller in size. Not only do these suburbs exhibit a wide variety in their social composition and land use, but they are also subject to a wide assortment of governmental forms. Although Sharp controls for a couple of contextual measures in her analyses, the tremendous variation on American localities is not factored into either the theory building or empirical tests of the book.

These concerns notwithstanding, Does Local Government Matter? raises a number of vital questions regarding the role of local government programs for shaping civic engagement. For scholars of civic participation and local politics, Sharp provides an important tool for helping us think about how public policies can (and cannot) improve civic vitality. It should also serve as an important caution about the unintended consequences that can arise from government action. For these and many other reasons, it deserves a reading from anyone concerned with local democracy.