A Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analysis of State and Local Effects on Community Involvement in Municipal Land Use Governance

Land use regulation is an important area of public policy in which responsibility is largely devolved to municipalities by the states. Since its inception, these local regulatory processes were intended to be both democratic and public. Volumes have been written on the shortcomings of citizen participation within such systems, but little literature exists on the nature of interaction between the community and decision makers involved in land use governance. There is also reason to suspect that governance structures may affect the behavior exhibited by those participating in these deliberative processes.;State statutory frameworks often enable or restrain municipalities from exercising certain aspects of authority in regulation land use. To adequately assess the state of community involvement in American municipal land use governance, the contexts the states provide must be examined as well. In doing so, a better of understanding of how differences in community involvement arise between municipalities will emerge.;By introducing the factor of constraints to state and local government, this work also seeks to extend the degree of knowledge as to what affects the actors, processes and outcomes of municipal land use governance. This dissertation examines these factors with an emphasis on the administrative and democratic components of local planning. The theoretical premises tested within this study are in part derived from literature within the fields of public administration, political science, urban planning, organizational theory and economics.;The Wharton Residential Land Use Regulation Index (Gyourko et al. 2008) is used as the foundation for the study's composite dataset. This data is based on a survey of planning directors and executive administrators (N = 2,729) which are members of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). Data analysis consists primarily of a hierarchical linear modeling analysis, which assesses the impact of state­level "fixed effects" on a local "random effects" model, with community involvement as the study's dependent variable.;The study has several notable findings. First, there does not appear to be a significant state level influence on community involvement in municipal land use governance processes. This suggests that this degree of involvement is highly contingent on the context of local processes. Second, there is a notable relationship between community involvement, and the involvement of local boards and managers. I hypothesize that this finding is caused by the formation of reciprocal ad hoc power-sharing relationships between these groups. Finally, the demographic characteristics of a population may help create a regulatory context that enables greater degrees of community involvement and influence in local processes. This helps confirm previous research that finds that the degree of formal education held by citizens is a significant factor in predicting the degree community involvement in local governance processes.