Who Participates? Local Economic Development: Decision-Making Coalitions and Policy Selection.

Over the years, several influential studies have provided extensive theories and analyses that examine community power and shed considerable light on the seminal question: "Who governs?" These studies have demonstrated that the decision-making coalitions directing development are composed of various public and private actors that possess different resources and interests, which makes the governance of local economic development more complex. The overall dissertation integrates urban regime theory with the policy process literature to develop a conceptual framework that explains the governance of local policymaking. It is theorized that the complexity of local economic development decision-making coalitions, including the actors and interests involved, as well as the size and density of the coalition, influence the policies that local governments choose to adopt. This paper focuses on understanding the independent variable of primary interests, structure of decision-making coalitions. Data provided by the International City/County Management Association's (ICMA) 1999, 2004, and 2009 Economic Development Surveys is examined. Two-step cluster analysis was performed to identify the distinct types of local economic development decision-making networks. Social network analysis was utilized to create a map of the actors involved in decision-making process, which provides a visualization of the characteristics for each governing network type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]