Procedural justice and local democracy

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY QUAR~~Y, Vol. 4, No. 4, October 1985,267-288

Procedural justice and local democracy

DAVIDR. REYNOLDS

Department of Geography, University of Iowa, Iowa City IA 52242, USA

AND

FRED M. SHELLEY

Department of Geography, University of Oklahoma, Norman OK 73019, USA

ABSTRACT. Contemporary research on American local government has generally emphasized its role in public service provision. However, evidence that the provision of services has become increasingly characterized by locational conflict has led many geographers and other social scientists to question theory. Critical equation of the theory of American local democracy illustrates inconsistency stemming from its failure to distinguish a theory of gov~ent from a theory of electoral process. Our critical examination of this theory suggests that local democratic institutions must be operated and implemented in a manner consistent with a concept of social justice that is derived from societal knowledge and conditions yet is immune from influence by state institutions. This view implies that the achievement of procedural justice is of paramount importance in the reform of local state institutions. It is argued that a methodology modified from the public choice theory of constitutions but not implying anap~io~i conception of social justice can contribute effectively to empirical knowledge of what constitutes justice in procedure. In the last half of the paper, this methodology is applied experimentally to the resolution of two local state conflicts of contemporary importance: urban school budget retrenchment and water rn~g~~t. The results confirm that achieving procedural justice is indeed of central importance in the resolution of these confhcts and suggest what might constitute appropriate standards of procedural justice in these contexts.

Recently, American local government has become increasingly embroiled in controversies of national as weil as local importance. Local governments have become arenas for the debate of conflicts as controversial and diverse as the nuclear freeze movement, the siting of hazardous and nuclear waste repositories, tradeoffs between economic growth and environmental protection, and statutory limitations on taxation and urban sprawl. Moreover, the incidence and intensity of conflicts over facihty siting, zoning, urban development, urban renewal and other locational ~plications of traditional local ~ve~~t activities continue to increase at an unprecedented rate.

0260-9827185104 0267-22 $03.00 0 1985 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd

268 Pmcedtsral just&e and locaL de~ac~ac~

The increased intensity of locational conflict has generated a renewed debate concerning the role of local institutions in changing the spatial organization of American society. This, in turn, has led to re-examination of the theory of democracy as applied to local governments in the United States. With few exceptions, however, this local state literature has failed to undertake a critical analysis of local democratic theory. This paper suggests that critical re- examination of democratic theory is a necessary precondition for any significant reform in

local state institutions. In doing so, it argues that such reform must be based on explicit analyses of the concept of social justice, and it adopts Clark and Dear’s (1984) contention that social justice must be defined within the context of American society yet independently of existing governmental institutions. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that adopting this view implies that procedural justice should be an explicit goal of local democratic reform, and that a methodolo~ derived from the theory of co~titutional choice can be an effective tool in determining the content of social justice concepts as applied to actual locational conflicts. The results of our empirical research applying this methodology to two local-scale conflicts provide support for this contention.

The state and the local state

Following Clark and Dear (1984), the local state can be defined as any governmental entity to which authority to raise revenues from and make expenditures on behalf of its constituents has been delegated by the state. Its jurisdiction is defined territorially and is less spatially extensive than that of the state. In the United States, each of the nearly 80000 active local states owes its legal existence and authority to one of the 50 state constitutions. Moreover, states can and invariably do constrain the authority of local states to raise revenues, adjust their boundaries, and otherwise to undertake independent decisions regarding service provision and taxation. Increasingly, changes in the spatial scale of capitalist economic organization have restricted the ability of the local state to control the economic base upon which it is dependent for tax revenues.

As Dear and Clark (1981) have argued, the autonomy of the local state is illusory; its authority and power are in fact greatly circumscribed by the central state. This fact has not gone unrecognized by neoclassical writers and is particularly evident in the literature on fiscal federalism (Musgrave, 1959; Olson, 1969; Oates, 1972). However, with its exclusive focus on the economics of the public sector, public finance develops a theory of the state in which politics and the nature of society are taken as given rather than derived. Such a view is also characteristic of much of the geographic~ literature focusing on the optimal size and scope of local jurisdictions and the optimal spatial arrangement of public goods and services (e.g. Massam, 1975; Lea, 1979).

While the economic function of the local state in the US is primarily as a provider of services, the local state is widely held to be a primary arena for the exercise of democratic self-government and as such is thought to be an important source of legitimacy for the state itself (Clark and Dear, 1984). That their smaller geographical scales and smaller populations render local states more responsive than states to public demands regarding service provision is commonly believed. Consequently, government in the local state is often regarded as inherently more democratic than that of the state. As we demonstrate below, these beliefs are inconsistent with liberal democatic theory.

American conceptions of local democracy

In modern democratic theory, representative democracy is typically defined as a set of electoral processes or procedures in which competition determines who is authorized to

DAVID R. REYNOLDS AND FRED M. SHELLEY 269

participate directly in the creation of public policy (Dahl, 1956, 1982). There is also a general consensus that, for an electoral process to be democratic: (1) all citizens must have the right to vote for candidates who would best represent their interests and preferences; (2)

votes must be equally weighted; (3) voting must be free from any form of coercion; (4) candidates must receive a majority of the votes cast to be elected; and (5) the rights of minorities must be protected (Clark, 1981; Dear and Clark, 1984). Excluded from such a definition is any consideration of procedural constraints to be met by representatives in their subsequent decision-making. Representatives are not formally constrained to demonstrate that they remain ‘representative’ subsequent to their election. That elected officials are required to face electorates at regular intervals is typically regarded as a sufficient constraint on their subsequent actions. Although some states and local states have provisions for the recall of elected officials, these are typically successful only in cases where the behavior of officials is grossly unrepresentative, unethical or criminal. Elected assemblies are not severely restricted, either constitutionally or by their constituents, in their choice of the procedural rules which constrain their subsequent policy-making. Article I of the US Constitution grants Congress the prerogative to set its own rules of order. This philosophy has generally been extended to the state and local state levels. In short, representative democracy is more a normative theory of elections than a normative theory of government.

If liberal democracy is indeed concerned with the appropriate means of resolving social conflict, it is myopic and inconsistent in its exclusive focus on electoral politics as the appropriate means. Particularly difficult to sustain is the tenet that candidates will be representative of the interest and preferences of all the voters. Why, for example, would a candidate attempt to articulate the interests of a minority if in so doing he would ensure his defeat at the polls? Voters holding minority preferences cannot always expect to be represented in the electoral process. There is also no assurance that the preferences of such voters will be represented in the subsequent decision-making process, even when some minority candidates are elected to office in certain constituencies. Both of these considerations create the potential for ‘majority tyranny’, as recognized by Madison (1941), and violate the democratic tenet guaranteeing the rights of minorities.

It has been argued by a number of authors that the American solution to this dilemma has been a spatial one: democratic electoral processes are spatially decentralized through the creation of local states. This is, of course, the Tieboutian solution for the local public provision of services (Tiebout, 1956). However, this partial reformulation of democratic theory has been widely criticized on a number of grounds. Perhaps the most perceptive and devastating is that recently developed by Clark and Dear (1984). They argue that local democracy is founded largely on a principle of ‘tacit consent’: residence in a local state is sufficient evidence that the policies pursued by the local government are representative of those desired by local citizens because voters are presumed free to exit by relocating in alternative local states.

If tacit consent is assumed to be an essential element of local democracy, then how is it also possible to conceive of local democracy as a set of electoral procedures? If tacit consent is to be taken seriously as a fundament of local democracy, and if the Tiebout model is to be taken as a solution to the problem of minority representation, then either electoral politics at the local scale is largely irrelevant or conceptions of democracy at the local scale differ from those at ‘higher’ scales. Tacit consent can only be taken as fundamental to democracy if geographical mobility is costless and is motivated exclusively for the purpose of achieving personally optimal levels of political representation. That these conditions are unrealistic is obvious. However, even if these conditions could be met, the minority representation problem would still remain unless some democratic electoral mechanism at the national

270 Procedural j&ice and local democracy

level ensured the existence of a wide range of jurisdictions pursuing divergent policies. It is difficult to identify any such mechanism that is also consistent with majority rule. The result is that American conceptions of democracy that ascribe an important role to exit and tacit consent, despite their ideological vitality, are logically inconsistent (i.e. are undemocratic in the liberal sense) and, hence, impossible of realization.

The dual dependency of the local state on higher levels of the polity and economy has resulted in a situation in which the ideals of electoral politics fall even further short of

fulfillment. First, the preferences and interests of voters as they pertain to the local delivery of services can be even less realistically treated as freely arrived at or uncoerced because local policy options have become more circumscribed. Second, insofar as dual dependency induces more homogeneity in policy outcomes across local states, the option of exiting to an alternative jurisdiction so as to achieve majority status becomes even more assailable as a viable means for citizens to achieve political efficacy than under the assumption of local state autonomy, These two conditions imply that the electoral process within the local state must be less democratic than that of the state (i.e. for a parallel argument see Clark and Dear, 1984: 168-170).

The implications of this are far-reaching. Contrary to popular belief, the electoral process

itself forms a weak basis for the legitimacy of the local state. Instead, the local state must attempt to derive legitimacy on other grounds. Typically these include achieving ‘success’ in such activities as attracting investments either from external private or public sources,

lowering local levels of taxation, or improving the allocative efficiency of local service delivery. Since the local state is already charged by the state with responsibility for delivering specific services, a predation with the issues of efficiency in a capitalist economy is rather easily rationalized anyway. In the absence of a well-develo~d and popularly supported theory of local democracy, this predilection may be the only potentially realizable source of legitimacy. This contention is consistent with the observation that the most persistent arguments for American local government reform throughout the 20th century have focused on means of depoliticizing local state activities through the creation of local bureaucracies pursuing technocratic norms of administrative and allocative efficiency. Although reformers expected that such change would reduce or at least dampen the extent of social conflict in the local state, recent research on the geography of locational conflict has documented that conflicts over service provision, facility location and taxation in the local state continue to increase in number, scope, intensity and duration (Janelle and Millward, 1976; Ley and Mercer, 1980; Cox, 1983). Although locational conflicts have become an increasingly irn~~~t feature of local politics, the ‘reformed’ governments of local states find themselves in the paradoxical position of having to justify their decisions on administrative or efficiency grounds. This has the effect of further distancing local

governments from their constituents.

Locational conflict and social justice

The recent trend toward the intensification of locational conflict has paralleled a shift in the geographic literature from concern with allocative efficiency to more explicit concern with questions of equality and social welfare. These questions involve the resolution of complex philosophical and political issues not considered in analyses of allocative efficiency, which focus exclusively on technical considerations (Harvey, 1973; Papag~r~ou, 1977). Many geographers turned their attention to the role of the state in promoting ~st~butional objectives. Much of this literature, which is reviewed by Coates et al. (1977) and Johnston (1982), has dealt directly or indirectly with the concept of social justice and has uncritically


associated justice with notions of equality and social welfare. However, social justice as a

social concept transcends simple definitions. Perhaps the most comprehensive attempt at

definition is provided by Rawls (197 1: 4) who viewed justice as the primary benchmark by which the legitimacy and acceptability of any institution can be evaluated.

An adequate concept of justice would include both distributive and procedural components. A distributive component is necessary if the outcomes of social processes are to be evaluated, while a procedural component is essential if an acceptable standard of justice is to be achieved. Pirie (1983) has recently investigated the relationships between these two components of an adequate conception of justice and, in a preliminary analysis, has explored their spatial implications. Liberal theories of democracy focus exclusively on the procedural component of justice, while liberal moral p~l~ophy is centrally concerned with the justi~cation of departures from ~s~bution~ equality. In short, liberal social theory is fundamentally inconsistent in its treatment of justice. Rawls (1971) sought to rectify this inconsistency by developing principles of justice that would be independent of society. He did so by arguing that just principles would be those chosen by persons in an original position whose participants are devoid of knowledge of societal conditions. This original position or ‘veil of ignorance’ ensures that the principles chosen are applicable regardless of specific societal circumstances. In this hypothetical situation he argued that individuals would agree to abide by principles of distributive justice that specify equal opportunity and favored treatment for the worst-off members of society. Just institutions would therefore be those developed in order to attain these distributional objectives.

The only procedural component of Rawls’ theory is that embodied in the original position. However, Nozick (1974) has argued that strict adherence to principles of distributive justice would be impossible without continuous governmental interference. Such interference would not be tolerated by the individuals comprising Nozick’s conception of society (Clark and Dear, 1984). In his comments on education in American society, Coleman (1974) provides an illustration. Evidence that the overwhelming determinant of a child’s educational attainment is the home environment implies that all children should be reared in identical home environments if the distributional objective of equal educational quality is to be attained. The level of state interference with the institution of the family required to achieve this objective would, according to Coleman, be viewed as entirely unjust. This illustrates that procedural considerations are important even if social justice could be defined independently of society.

The empirical content of social justice has varied markedly between places and over time. Thus Rawls’ contention that principles of social justice are cadet of societal context appears valid only under extremely abstract and unrealistic conditions. In contrast, Clark and Dear (1984: 192) argue that social justice should be derived from society yet be independent of the state: Appeals to state institutions to adjudicate conflicting inter- pretations of justice will only perpetuate the state’s role in defining society in its own interests’. On answering the question of how social justice could or should be derived from society, Clark and Dear are largely silent. However, they, like most writers, nonetheless look to the state and its apparatus as somehow having the potential of being appropriate agents of society in such a derivation. They fail to point out, however, that the only way to ensure that the state does not define society in its own interests is to constrain it procedurally so that its agenda is determined by society. In this view, considerations ofprocedtlral justice assume critical importance. Procedures are the means of a~ega~ng isolation on societal perceptions of ~s~bution~ outcomes and translating them into public policy. Yet, the procedures themselves do not determine the justice of distributions: society does. Just procedures must therefore be embodied within genuinely democratic institutions of the

272 Procedural justice and local democracy

state, including the local state. A call for procedural justice in this sense is a call for the elaboration of a critical theory of democratic practice.

Our recent research has attempted to shed light on the complex question of procedural justice through a critical reformulation and empirical analyses of constitutional choice processes. While the individualistic assumptions of the public choice theory of constitutions preclude its direct application, constitutional choice analysis can be developed into an effective methodology by which a societal conception of procedural justice can be identified.

Constitutional choice and social justice

Public choice theory applies the behavioral assumptions of neoclassical economics to non- market decision situations (Mueller, 1979). In this context, constitutional choice theory addresses the specific question of which decision-making procedures would be instituted by utility-maximizing individuals who recognize that their long-term welfare is advanced

through societal cooperation. A constitution is defined as a set of procedures and structures through which collective decisions are undertaken and social policy goals are formulated and articulated. Buchanan and Tullock (1962) argue that such persons would agree upon the constitutional objective of minimizing the decision-making and external costs associated with social interdependence. Similarly, Rae (1969) argued that majority rule would be the procedure chosen because it maximizes the joint probability that proposals favored by a

given voter will be adopted while those opposed by her will be rejected. For public choice theorists, social justice is not a motivating consideration in

constitutional choice. Instead, the public choice theory of constitutions suggests that decision-makers should evaluate constitutions by comparing the expected benefits and costs accruing from each under conditions approaching total uncertainty. This is tantamount to seeking agreement on a generalized social objective function. However, parties to actual conflicts, although they may agree on broad societal goals, behave as if characterized by partial uncertainty. Although they are ignorant of future events and conflicts, they are knowledgeable about their own preferences and socio-economic relationships. Under these conditions, constitutional agreement based on expected or actual distributions of costs and benefits is extremely unlikely under most circumstances typifying real conflicts (Reynolds, 1981). Therefore, if social consensus on a constitution is to be reached or approached, decision-makers must be motivated by general social concerns that transcend individual utility maximization.

In contrast, Rawlsian approaches to constitutional choice are concerned explicitly with institutions that promote conceptions of distributional justice. Rawls (197 1) advocated majority rule and other familiar tenets of liberal democratic institutions on the presumption

that they most adequately enable distributional objectives to be achieved. However, Rawls’ theory of constitutions fails to distinguish the objectives of distributional justice from the justice of institutions. In contrast, adopting the view that social justice principles lack meaning outside of societal contexts implies that the justice of institutions is a critical determinant of social justice in the state (and local state). Legitimate constitutional decisions would result in procedures whose justice derives from their ability to promote social justice concepts that are derived directly from society without state manipulation of society.

A constitutional choice perspective seeks to identify the nature of the rules that all members of a social grouf will select to constrain the behavior of their state. The rules selected are interpreted as a constitution. Such rules can be either procedural or distributional and those selected are interpreted as a constitution. It is expected that groups with divergent objectives will select quite different constitutions. From the perspective of

DAVID R. ~YNOLRS AND FRED M. %ELLEY 273

democratic theory, the ~~~~t questions to ask of the constitutions selected are: (a) whether they consist primarily of procedural rules; (b) whether they vary widely across

differing social choice contexts; and (c)whether they are to any significant extent similar to the governmental institutions of actual local states. From the standpoint of justice, the important question is whether the rules selected were chosen to achieve particular or general conceptions of justice in distribution and/or procedure.

Actual state institutions are rarely, if ever, developed through explicit constitutional decision-making. In practice, most institutions develop in a piecemeal fashion. Actual constitutional decisions, when they do occur, are responses to specific historical conditions and, at the level of the local state, are influenced by restrictions imposed by the central state. Yet, a constitutions perspective can inform justice in procedure by inducing persons to abstract from conflicts over ~stributive outcomes and offer less myopic evaluations of procedural justice in the context of local state institutions. Hence, the primary contribution of constitutional choice analysis to knowledge of local state institutions is not theoretical.

Rather, it is methodological. People’s stated evaluations of the justice of an institution undoubtedly are intIuenced by

their expectations of its performance in terms of ‘who gets what’. For example, few Americans would question the abstract statement that everyone has a right to adequate food, clothing and shelter. Yet when confronted with evidence of worldwide hunger and poverty, most would be loath to agree to the extensive income redistribution actually required to achieve this objective. Likewise, a member of the majority in a jurisdiction comprising two competing interest groups might defend majority rule on the grounds of procedural justice. However, we cannot ~stinguish whether such a person is expressing an actual belief in the justice of majority rule or is merely voicing self-interest. What is needed is a methodology that enables people’s evaluations of procedural justice to be separated from the known or expected distributional consequences of the application of just procedures. Such a methodology must also be flexible enough to apply to different social conflict situations. A focus on the appropriate means of resolving different social conflicts permits understanding of the extent to which procedural conceptions of justice vary across social contexts. This enables one to examine how procedural conceptions of justice can be derived from society yet independently of existing state institutions.

It must be recognized that the application of constitutional choice methodology to procedural justice in the local state is restricted to cases in which certain fundamental SO&~ rights and responsibilities of the local state are taken as given. This is in contrast to Nozick (1974) whose ar~ment for a min~~ist state was predicated on the acceptance of certain in~iv~~[ rights as naturally determined. For rights to be defined socially, agreement on procedural justice is logically prior to definitions of both individual rights and distributive social justice.

This conclusion implies that a constitutional approach to analyzing procedural justice has important implications for the reform of local democracy. The provision of public services and the management of common property resources have traditionally been undertaken by local states. Such activities involve the management of collectively held resources in which there is a strong presumption that all legal residents of a jurisdiction have an equal social right to services. Therefore, we would expect those managing these resources to advocate as just those procedures which can be construed as ensuring that all citizens of the local state have an approximately equal influence in the d~sion-making process. Procedures with identifiable electoral, legislative or administrative biases would be viewed as unjust procedurally even though, as we argued earlier, they may be supported on other grounds. Precisely how equal influence is operationalized is, then, a central question of local


democracy. In the United States, such equality has typically been construed to include only the right to vote rather than equality of influence in the policy decision-making processes of the local state. However, as argued earlier, a reconsideration of democracy is necessary. Gaining a better, more critical understanding of social conceptions of procedural justice is the necessary first step.

This argument raises a variety of substantive empirical issues. How can the concept of procedural justice be examined empirically, and how might empirical knowledge of what constitutes justice in procedure be applied to the reform of American local democracy? Further, how might research intended to determine individual and group evaluations of procedural justice independently of their known or expected distributional consequences be designed? Treating constitutional choice as a methodology, rather than as a theory, and

adapting it to fit the wide range of conflict types characteristically addressed by local governments can lead to identification of just procedures and the impacts of these procedures on local government decision-making.

An experimental constitutional choice approach

There appear to be no epistemological grounds for assuming that conceptions of procedural justice are universal in any meaningful sense. Instead, they must be derived from concrete situations of social conflict. A conception of procedural justice is clearly derived in the absence of social conflict or struggle. Social customs and, hence, procedures may be followed in non-conflictual situations but there appear to be no grounds for assuming that these will be imbued with a conception of justice. More broadly, we assume that social conflict precedes and produces any conception of justice-whether it be primarily procedural, primary distributive or some combination of both. Our objective is to employ an experimental constitutional choice approach: (1) to simulate resolutions to real social conflicts; (2) examine whether our hypothesis about the primacy of conceptions of procedural justice in lay citizens’ evaluations of the behavior of the local state in conflict resolutions is or is not well founded; and (3) to assess the sensitivity of such resolutions to variations in the nature of social conflict.

The approach we adopt has the following characteristics. First, persons with conflicting preferences regarding policy in the local state are brought together in small groups. Second, subjects in the experimental groups are selected so as to permit the simulation of salient social aspects of the particular conflict of local concern. Since our concern is with the hypothetical resolution of real con5icts rather than the resolution of hypothetical conflicts, the approach differs considerably from public choice experiments employed recently in economics (e.g. Smith, 1976; Plott, 1979). Third, the groups are charged with resolving

the con5ict by choosing a precedent-setting implementation strategy that differs from the expected behavior of the existing local state and yet can be agreed to by all members of the group. Insisting on unanimity of choice in this context ensures that no subset of the group can impose its will on the rest of the group, fosters mutual respect for divergent views in the group, and stimulates constructive argument amongst group members. No agreement reached in this manner should be construed as unjust by any member of the group. It is in this manner that subjects are induced to behave justly and as a society rather than as individuals.

By embedding the choice problem in a context of a real con5ict of concern to all subjects, our experimental findings are also more likely to be transferable to the resolution of these and related conflicts, hence, enhancing the empirical relevance of our findings as they pertain to ‘societal conceptions’ of justice. Finally, the adoption of an experimental approach


in which various levels of factors depict salient features of conflict permits at least a crude determination of the extent to which the choice of resolution strategies (or constitutions) is sensitive to societal conditions of conflict. The extent to which any conceptions of procedural justice contained within the resolution strategies attempted and/or chosen are generalizable to other conflict situations in the same society is an important research question-one for which an experimental approach is a useful exploratory device.

Study contexts and exflerimental design

Two conflicts of contemporary importance in many local states-budgetary retrenchment and school closings in an urban school district and water-supply management in a metropolitan area-were selected for analysis. Budgetary retrenchment in a school district, particularly when it involves school closures, typifies locational conflict over proposals to locate noxious facilities. In recent years, many urban school districts in the US have faced the necessity of making significant retrenchment decisions as a result of declining birthrates, continued outmigration and tax-base erosion. The locational incidence of school closures in large urban districts has tended to duplicate that described in the noxious-facility siting literature (Wolpert, 1976): closures are concentrated in those neighborhoods lacking sufficient political and economic clout to deflect them elsewhere. Like a noxious-facility siting, the closure of a neighborhood school imposes significant costs on local residents while imparting potential benefits, such as scale economies, in other areas of the district.

Reynolds (1984) has identified three broad patterns of conflict surrounding school closure. Parents in minority and working-class neighborhoods tend to view the closure of a neighborhood school as a devastating blow to the integrity of the neighborhood as a social unit, eroding parental involvement in education even further (Valencia, 1980). The pattern of conflict that tends to emerge is class-based and not easily mollified through policy palliatives. Since past closures have primarily affected low-income neighborhoods, parents in such areas are often opposed in principle to school closure as a suitable retrenchment option. In contrast, conflict over proposals to close schools in middle-class neighborhoods is more clearly locational. Middle-class parents tend not to be opposed to school closure in principle, but only to the closure of their particular neighborhood schools. Finally, as the percentage of eligible voters with school-age children continues to decline, it becomes increasingly difficult for school districts to muster popular support for the school tax increases that would render retrenchment policies unnecessary. Taxpayers without children often prefer a reallocation of local expenditures to public services other than traditional educational. They tend to be supporters of school closings but only if they are also accompanied by significant cuts in programs and personnel. This third pattern of conflict tends to pit the general taxpayer against school officials and other local government officials.

While school-closing conflicts tend to typify conflict over noxious-facility siting in that the costs of conflict resolution are concentrated in specific locations, water supply management conflicts typify the N-person prisoner’s dilemma in that failure to resolve conflicts affects all concerned parties regardless of residence. In recent years, many areas have experienced intense conflict concerning the allocation and utilization of increasingly scarce water supplies, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. In West Texas, for example, intense conflict has resulted from attempts to force local farmers to institute measures to curb the continued depletion of groundwater reserves (Shelley, 1983; Templer, 1983). The N-person prisoners’ dilemma illustrates the divergence between individual and collective utility maximization @helling, 1973), in that each participant has the choice between a defecting strategy that maximizes individual utility and a cooperative strategy that


maximizes group outputs while sacrificing individual utility maximization. In the case of water supply management, the cooperative strategy is represented by the adoption of potentially costly water conservation measures.

The simulations involving school budget retrenchment were conducted in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa Community School District during January through March 1983, while those involving water supply management during periods of drought were conducted in the

Oklahoma City-Norman metropolitan area during November 1983 and January 1984. Each of these locales has had a recent history of community conflict over such issues, respectively.

In Cedar Rapids, community conflict over school district reorganization and the closure of elementary and junior high schools was particularly intense during the period of study. Enrollment in the district had declined by 26 per cent between 1970 and 1983. The first several years of decline had been welcomed as a relief to the overcrowding the district had experienced throughout most of the 1960s but by 1976 enrollment decline was beginning to be perceived as a continuing problem. The issues as framed by school district administrators and school board members were excess classroom space and the need to reduce expenditures. The solutions implemented were gradually to peg teacher reductions to district-wide enrollment declines and to close elementary schools, primarily in neighborhoods with the greater actual and projected declines in student populations. By 1982-1983, the number of regular classroom teachers had been reduced by 22 per cent, and 10 elementary schools had been closed, each with increasing acrimony. In the winter of 1983, when a junior high school was proposed for closure in an area of the city that had already lost four elementary schools in the last decade, school district officials faced a genuine legitimacy crisis (Reynolds, 1984).

In the Oklahoma City-Norman area, conflicts over appropriate methods of managing metropolitan water supplies during periods of drought were no less real than those experienced over school retrenchment policy in Cedar Rapids. Oklahoma, like much of the Southern Plains region of the United States, has recently been faced with considerable conflict over water management and policy (see, e.g., Shelley, 1983; Schoolmaster, 1984; Shelley and Wijeyawickrema, 1984). Many municipalities in central Oklahoma have adopted voluntary or mandatory water conservation measures during hot dry summers. However, during the period over which our experiments were conducted, the area was not experiencing drought; hence water management was at that time not a highly salient political issue.

Through past newspaper coverage, the minutes of school board meetings and public hearings, and other locally accessible research reports pertaining to enrollment decline and facility utilization, it was possible to develop a set of simulation experiments that very closely mirrored local reality in Cedar Rapids in all important respects. All data utilized in the experiments-enrollment projections, facility utilization information and budgetary allocations-were obtained through the cooperation of the school district and local teachers’ union. The fact that school retrenchment/closing conflicts were of such intense concern in Cedar Rapids during the study period made the identification of potential subjects for the school budget retrenchment experiments a relatively easy task. To form the subject pool, a list of lay school and community activists thought most likely to be knowledgeable about school-closing controversies in the district was developed. Four hundred and fifty individuals were randomly selected from this list and mailed questionnaires eliciting information on their budget-cutting priorities and viewpoints on the appropriate role of school closures vis- li-vir other possible responses to enrollment decline. A random sample of 50 teachers was also included in the survey. One teacher was included as a subject in each experiment to help

DAVEI R. REYNOLDS AND FRED M. SHELLEY 277

ensure that groups would not lose sight of the possible educations consequences of their

actions in the exper5ment.l Nine persons with school-closing policy preferences appropriate for simulating the two

levels of polarization we wished to examine (see below) were recruited as subjects for each of 12 experiments. In practice, the actual number of subjects who participated varied from five to nine. Each experiment was restricted to a two-hour time limit and was facilitated by a graduate assistant especially trained for the task. Each experiment was tape-recorded; subjects were paid $10. An experiment was judged a valid one if the subjects who actually participated met the stipulated preference polarization conditions required. Only one of the 12 experiments was invalidated on these grounds.

In each experiment, subjects were first engaged in structured discussions designed to sensitize them to their ~~vidu~ differences regarding expectations of future conflicts over budgetary retrenchment and their evaluations of a district’s past and present patterns of decision-making with respect to enrollment decline. Subjects were then presented with a hypothetical, yet highly plausible, scenario concerning expected enrollment declines over the next five years, along with projected revenue losses. They were provided with quite detailed information on the district’s present budget allocations and asked to indicate (on a worksheet) how they individually would phase in budget cuts of sufficient magnitude to offset the revenue loss. This information was shared across subjects so as to make it clear that they were indeed in conflict with one another. The group was then prompted to discuss the expected policy responses of the school board and informed that these could be avoided only if they could reach a group consensus by following one of three strategies. These included: (1) agreeing on an alternative package of budget cuts (an unlikely possibility given

their conflicting preferences); (2) agreeing on a set of objective criteria or formulae to be followed by the district in making its budget retrenchment decisions; and (3) agreeing on changes in the overall structure and process of decision-making employed by the district in making significant retrenchment decisions. This last strategy represented the hypothesis that procedural agreement would dominate the constitutional choice process. If the group failed to achieve consensus by following one of these strategies, they were to assume that the (generally undesirable) expected policy response of the school board would then be implemented.

The school budget retrenchment experiments were undertaken within three experimental conditions. The first involved the degree of conflict resulting from the magnitude of the necessary budget reduction. Under the high-conic condition, subjects were confronted with a iarge expected enrollment decline resulting in a budgetary shortfall of $4.6 million, while subjects in low-conflict experiments were faced with expected enrollment declines necessitating a $2.3 million reduction. Both sets of figures fell within the range of ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ estimates that had been publicized within the school district. The second factor varied was the degree of conflict polarization. Under the high-polarization condition, an experimental group consisted of subjects who were sharply polarized into two groups-one strongly supporting school closures as the preferred response to enrollment decline, and the others strongly opposed to school closures except as a ‘last resort’. Under the low-polarization condition, an experimental group consisted of subjects with less sharply polarized views on the timing of school closures in the retrenchment process. Finally, each experiment was conducted under one of two threat conditions. Under the ~gh-treat condition, subjects were to assume that specific schools in the district would be closed if they, as a group, failed to reach a consensus. The schools slated for closure in the threat were selected so that each subject would lose a school in his/her neighborhood. Under the low-threat condition, subjects were to assume that only a specified


number of schools at various levels would be closed if they failed to achieve a group

consensus. The water management experiments were designed to replicate these conditions as closely

as possible, within the constraints of differences between the conflict contexts. Unlike the Cedar Rapids experiments, subjects were recruited simply on the basis of their interest in the conflict and knowledge of the problem rather than on the basis of their particular policy preferences. Instead, policy preference differences were induced by the experimental design. In each experiment, a group of five to nine subjects was assembled and instructed initially to discuss the problem of water rationing in the state’s cities and towns. In a manner similar to that of the Cedar Rapids experiments, subjects were then instructed to attain consensus on a solution to conflict by following one ‘of three strategies. These strategies included: (1) agreeing on a set of priorities according to which different water uses would be restricted during periods of drought; (2) agreeing on a set of objective criteria to be used in determining water rationing policy; and (3) agreeing on the creation of a set of decision-making structures and processes to be utilized in determining overall water management and policy in periods of water scarcity.

As in the Cedar Rapids case, the water management experiments were conducted under three experimental conditions. However, the nature of water management conflict forced slight differences in the factors that were varied in this context. Because the impacts of water management decisions are less variable geographically, subjects were not pre-screened regarding their policy preferences. The degree or level of conflict was simulated by presenting subjects with scenarios regarding expected rainfall levels over upcoming years. Under the high-conflict condition, subjects were to assume that expected annual rainfall was to decline dramatically, resulting in greater drought frequency. Under the low-conflict condition, they were to assume that rainfall levels could be expected to be a simple extrapolation of present trends, with drought frequency being the same as in recent years. Geographic differentials in threat conditions were simulated by asking some subjects to

assume that they represented one of two sub-areas in the metropolitan area. Under the high- threat condition, it was assumed that drought conditions most affected one of the sub-areas because of low water pressure while the other was relatively unaffected; while the low-threat condition (one of high drought) implied that both areas were affected equally. Finally, the polarization condition of the school budget retrenchment experiments was replaced by an additional conflict dimension. Under the high-conflict condition of this dimension, subjects played the roles of occupations involving high individual demands for water. Under the low- conflict condition, these instructions were not issued. (For the sake of clarity, this second dimension of conflict is referred to below as ‘polarization’, even though the two polarization dimensions are not strictly analogous.)

Finally, it should be noted that the expected outcome should a group of subjects fail to achieve agreement varied between the two sets of experiments. In the school budget retrenchment case, a highly plausible policy outcome could be identified under the assumption that future policy could be expected to be a simple extrapolation of the school district’s past behavior. However, the water management experiments lacked such likely outcomes because institutions charged with the determination of these outcomes analogous to the school board do not exist in the Oklahoma City-Norman area. Consequently, subjects in the water management experiments had more incentive to reach some form of agreement than did those in the school budget retrenchment experiments. This prediction was borne out by the experimental results, in which all of the water management groups achieved some agreement while four of the 11 school budget retrenchement groups did not

do so.

DAVID R. REYNOLDS AND FRED M. SHELLEY

Results: The likelihood of procedural agreement

279

Our hypotheses concerning the extent to which considerations of procedural justice would predominate in the initiation of local democratic reform were evaluated by examining and

comparing the nature and content of agreement in the two conflict situations across the varying experimental conditions. In the school budget retrenchment case, five of the 11 experiment groups achieved procedural agreement (Table I), four failed to achieve any agreement, while the two remaining groups reached non-procedural agreements. The level of threat was most critical in determining whether agreement would be reached, and whether this agreement would be procedural. Under the low-threat condition, four

TABLE 1. Frequencies of agreement types by factorsa

Type of agreement

Procedural Non-procedural Non-agreement

Level of conflict LOW 2 131 1 PI 2 High 3 131 1 [41 2

Polarization LOW 2 PI 1 [41 3 High 3 [51 1 PI 1

Threat LOW 4 151 0 PI 3 High 1 PI 2 [31 1

Totals 5 WI 2 [51 4

a Water management experiments in brackets.

procedural agreements and three failures occurred, while only one of the four groups participating under the high-threat condition achieved procedural agreement. This suggests that procedural justice was most dominant in the negotiation processLwhen conflict was relatively moderate; as conflict escalated, it became more difficult to avoid disagreement over short-run costs and benefits.

In contrast, low polarization was somewhat of an obstacle to conflict resolution. More- over, procedurally based agreements predominated under a combination of high polarization and low threat; all three groups that participated under these conditions achieved procedural agreement. In contrast, discussion among those polarized groups confronted with the threat of having their schools closed attempted consensus on objective criteria, and were successful in doing so in two of the four such cases.

In the water management experiments, results indicated that both conflict and threat affected the experimental outcomes. The results under the threat conditon paralleled the school retrenchment results: five of the seven experiments conducted under a low-threat condition achieved procedural agreement. Again, expectations that the conflict would soon escalate appeared to be a barrier to conflict resolution. Differences between high- and low- threat conditions were equally striking. Five of six groups participating under conditions of high threat reached procedural agreement, and the one that did not rejected procedural agreement on the grounds that a distributional taxation system was more just. A combination of low threat and polarization with high conflict was most conducive to procedural


agreement, suggesting that the most fruitful time to implement such reforms in local democracy would be prior to the appearance of specific conflicts.

Comparison of the two contexts reveals that procedural agreement was most likely to occur under some conditions than others (see Table 2). Increased threat appeared a barrier to conflict resolution through procedural agreement, while increased conflict appeared to enhance the possibility of procedural agreement. This suggests that persons are most concerned about the resolution of conflicts through procedural means when conflict is severe yet the expected temporal and spatial dimensions of future conflicts remain uncertain. When these dimensions are known, individuals act to protect their own interests and are less likely to consider procedural choices.

TABLE 2. Types of agreement reached under the experimental conditionsa

ConfliGt level

High Low -

Polarization High threat Low threat High threat Low threat

High n.a. 3;3 1 and 2 3 [2;31

LOW

[3?3, 3;n.a. n.a.;n.a.

P;3;31 ,1::;3, [II

d Water management experiments in brackets.

Key. I= agreement on priorities; 2 = agreement on objective criteria and formulas to be utilized in decision-making: 3 = agreement on changes in decision-making procedures; n.a. = non-agreement.

Results: The content of procedural agreements

The results of empirical research indicate clearly that the general form of constitutional agreement is consistent with our conflict-induced conception of procedural justice. We now turn to examining the particular conceptions of justice characterizing those agreements classified as procedural in each set of experiments. This is accomplished through a content analysis of the transcripts of the 11 experiments in which procedural agreements were reached. Each of these agreements or constitutions can be characterized into seven components: the method of electing representatives, voting rules or procedures, agenda- setting procedures, data collection and planning procedures, additional avenues of citizen access to the decision-making process, and the role of existing governmental actors in decision-making (see Tables 3 and 4).

All 11 agreements specified the organization of ad hoc or standing advisory committees that would be charged with formulating policy and/or identifying public opinion on highly controversial topics. The school-closing groups specified that the members of the citizens’ advisory boards were to be appointed by the school board, which was charged with ensuring that the advisory board’s membership was broadly representative of all areas and major interest groups. Interestingly, the water management groups all require that some or all of the members of the citizens’ advisory board be elected directly by the public. This difference can be attributed to the current absence of elected officials charged directly with water management concerns analogous to boards of education; electing citizens’ advisory board members fulfills a role analogous to the already institutionalized procedure of electing school


TABLE 3. Description of procedural agreements: Cedar Rapids Experiments

281

1.

2.

3.

4.

1.

2.

3.

4.

High conflict/low threat/High pohization Exfleriments

Experiment 32-08

Method of electing school board members: By districts. Voting rule : Five-eighths of vote of board (including one vote for citizen’s advisory committee). Agenda setting: Determined by advisory committee on highly conflictual issues (see 4 below). Datu collection and planning: (a) Standing citizen adv!sory committee, representative of all relevant community interests appointed by board. (b) Three-year terms for members; corn- mittee to have its own research and planning staff.

5.

6.

(c) Committee to submit proposals on conflictual issues to the board and to public; board must act on these proposals. (d) Committee decisions taken by majority vote. (e) Committee to have one vote in board meetings involving committee’s proposals. Q No detailed discussion of how to ensure ‘representativeness’ of committee members. Additional avenues of citizen access: None discussed. Role of central administration: No specific charge on highly conflictual issues.

Ex@eriment 39-08

Method of elections: No change. Voting rule : Referendum on highly conflictual issues. Age& setting: By president of the board in consultation with the superintendent; except that any issue brought to the president by a citizen’s group of at least 15 eligible voters or by at least two board members to be automatically placed on the agenda. Data collection and planning: (a) Ad hoc citizens’ advisory committee chosen by board with members from all school attendance areas. (b) Additional members added to committee if they obtain signatures of at least

5.

6.

200 eligible voters (signatures of voters who sign more than one petition to be invalidated). (c) Committee members to be selected from amongst lay citizens and teachers. (d) Board to appoint such committee for each issue thought to be polemic. (e) Committee to have the administration’s research staff at its disposal for data collection and analysis. Additional avenues of citizen access: None discussed. Role of central administration: Prohibited from formulating any ‘official’ policy position on any highly conflictual issue unless directed to do so by majority vote of the board.

Low conflict/Low that/High pokkzation Experiments

Experiment 32-01

Method of elections: No change.

Voting rule : If an issue does not receive a fivesevenths vote of the board it should be referred to the public in the form of a referendum.

Agenda setting: No change.

Data collection mdplanning: (a) Standing citizens’ advisory committee broadly representative of all relevant com-

5.

6.

munity interests and areas to be appointed by the board. (b) Three-year terms for members. (c) Members to be selected from citizen volunteers. (d) Issues referred to the committee by the board to be determined by majority vote of board. Additional avenues of citizen access: Did not discuss (ran out of time). Role of central administration: Did not discuss (ran out of time).


TABLE 3 (continued)

Low con&‘ict/Higb threat/Low polarization Experiments

Experiment 314-08

Method of elections: additional policy alternatives relevant to the No change. issue under consideration. Voting rule: 4. Data collection and planning: Referendum (explicitly argued for on (a) Standing citizens’ advisory committee grounds of ‘fairness’). broadly representative of all community Agend? setting: interests and areas to be appointed by board. (a) By president of the board in consulta- (b) Three-year terms for members. tion with the superintendent, except that (c) Committee authorized to contract with any issue brought to the president by a ‘outside independent bodies’ for data collec citizens’ group of at least 50 eligible voters tion and research (contracting argued for on or by at least two board members to be auto- the grounds of ‘fairness’ rather than on matically placed on agenda. rationalist planning grounds). (b) At the request of any two board 5. Additional avenues of citizen access: members an item can be deleted from the No additional changes. published agenda until such time as the 6. Role of central administration: standing advisory committee has identified No additional changes.

High con&t/Low threat/Low polarization Experiments

ExQeriment 29-01

Method of elections: basis by majority of the board. No change (but considerable discussion). 5. Additional avenues of citizen access: Voting rule : (a) Board shall adopt and publicize widely No change. its rules of practice in deciding classes of Agenda setting: controversial issues setting forth the nature No change. and requirements of all formal and informal Data collection and planning: procedures available to the public for (a) Standing citizens’ advisory committee expressing its arguments and opinions. broadly representative of all relevant com- (b) Classes of issues requiring special rules munity interests and areas appointed by of practice include, but are not limited to, board. school closings, program eliminations and (b) Three-year terms for members. school reorganization. (c) Committee to have its own data coller- 6. Role of central administration: tion and planning staff. The administration should identify at least (d) Issues referred to the committee to be two viable policy alternatives on all highly determined by the board on a case-by-case controversial issues.

board members. The functions of the committees, however, varied widely. Some were

charged with initiating policy planning, others were restricted to hearing appeals, and still

others were merely required to initiate citizen discussion of controversial issues and policies.

Nevertheless, in each case the roles of outside experts, consultants or other researchers were

constrained specifically by the advisory hoards. Much of the discussion concerning electoral

and legislative constraints hinged on the activities and responsibilities of these boards.

Our critique of the theory of local democracy suggested that existing theories paid

considerable attention to election procedures while neglecting the procedures employed in

actual local decision-making processes within local governments. Thus, we expected that

subjects in the experimental contexts would not place primary emphases on electoral

procedures in reaching their constitutional decisions. This hypothesis was borne out by our


TABLE 4. Description of procedural agreements: Oklahoma City Experiments

283

1.

2.

3.

4.

I.

2.

3.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Method of elections: Not discussed. Voting rule: Not discussed (out of time). Agenda setting: Citizens’ committee charged with oversee- ing the agenda; control of the citizens’ committee is invoked if and only if drought reaches severe levels; the levels of severity are to be prespecified by law. Data coUection a~~~n~~ng; (a) Performed by the city planning department. (b) Citizens’ committee must approve of

hperiment 2

Method of elections: No change. Voting ride : No change, but referendum required on rationing plans as specified below. Age& setting: Elected board of citizens charged with developing five alternative water rationing plans when drought conditions occur; these five plans are submitted directly to the electorate, which ranks them l-5, and the plan receiving the highest number of

4.

5.

6.

engineer’s data collection methods. (c) Citizens’ committee required to follow a priority system that specifies the order in which various water uses are curtailed. Additional avenues of citizen access: Citizens’ committee establishes fines for violations; drought restrictions may not be imposed without approval of the committee and then only under specified drought conditions. Role of central ~mi~istration~ Citizens’ committee is independent of city government; otherwise not discussed.

points (analogous to the AP and UP1 sports polls) is enacted. Da& collection and planning: City engineer is charged with determining existence of drought conditions, but must use formulas approved by the citizens’ board. A~~io~~ avenUes of citizen access: None, other than through the election of board members and voting in referenda. Role of central administration: Not discussed.

High co~~i~t/Hig~ t~~~Low pokzrization Experiments

Experiment 3

Method of elections: Not discussed. Voting rule: Not discussed, but referendum as described below. Agerzah setting: (a) All policy changes that result in increased taxes and/or changes in water consumption policy must be ratified by referendum.

6.

(b) Citizens’ board charged with develop ing policy alternatives. (c) Quotas on water use can be set by city council, with fines for those who violate quotas. Data collection andplanning: Performed by city engineer according to previously established formulas. A~itio~~ avenues of citizea access:

Any major change involving taxation and/ or changes in consumption patterns must be ratified in the referendum process. Indi- viduals and businesses have the right of due process and may protest their quotas an&or fines. Role of central administration: (a) Considerable discussion as to whether the board was to be appointed by the city council or elected by the public; eventually decided that some members should be appointed and others elected. (b) City treasurer required to use any money collected through fines to upgrade the water system in the city. (c) City water board also required to sponsor educational programs to restrict water use.


TABLE 4 (continued)

1.

2.

3.

4.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Experiment I

Method of elections: Water board members elected by districts. Voting rule : Not discussed. Age& setting:

5.

Not discussed specifically. Data collection and planning: Handled by experts retained by the board.

6.

Additional avenues of citizen access: Decisions are made according to a priority system; the board’s function is to review and revise these priorities at specified three year intervals. Role of central administration: No change.

Low conflict/High threat/Low pohrization Experiments

Experiment 6

Method of elections: By districts of equal population. Voting rule : Not discussed. Agenda setting: Citizens can place items on the committee agenda.

5.

6.

Data collection and planning: Experts retained by the board collect data

and formulate tentative plans; however, they serve only in an advisory capacity. Additional avenues of citizen access: Not discussed. Role of central administration: The board must ratify any decisions of the city government concerning water supply allocation.

results, which indicated that only three of the 11 procedural agreements paid any attention to methods of electing representatives, although all 11 specified the roles of elected officials in decision-making processes. All three groups that specified election methods opted for territorially based representation, suggesting that while these electoral procedures are not critical components of fair decision-making procedures, territorial representation, which implies geographical accountability between a representative and her constituency, is regarded generally as a just electoral procedure.

Despite the fact that the public choice literature pays considerable attention to the selection of a voting rule, or specified proportion of the voting population that must approve a proposal prior to its enactment (e.g. Buchanan and Tullock, 1962; Rae, 1969; Barton, 1973), in neither context did subjects question the institution of majority rule when it applied to voters. In one of the school budget retrenchment experiments it was agreed to establish an additional vote on the school board to be cast by a citizens’ advisory committee,

consequently requiring a 518 vote, rather than a 417 vote to approve a policy. In another, subjects agreed that significant retrenchement decisions not garnering a T/7 vote from the school board should be submitted directly to the public in a referendum. However, neither of these instances appears fundamentally to challenge the justice of majority rule. In the latter case, for instance, a 5/7 voting rule was argued for on the grounds that the present school board did not represent the majority will of voters in Cedar Rapids on the issues of school closure and district reorganization.

Considerably more attention was paid to various methods of direct democracy in decision- making. Two school-closing groups and three water management groups specifically required that some or all major policy issues be submitted to the electorate for approval prior to implementation. For example, one water management group required that under drought conditions a series of five plans be submitted to the voters, who were to rank each with the


adopted plan ranked highest overall. Another required a referendum on any proposal that involved either increased taxes or changes in water allocation policy. The referendum process, of course, affords voters an opportunity to voice their approval or disapproval of legislative activities above and beyond the normal electoral process. That referenda were so frequently discussed and adopted illustrates the subjects’ concern forprocedgral constraints on the legislative decision process.

It is well known that control of access to an agenda is critical to the adoption or rejection of legislative proposals in majority voting systems (McKelvey, 1981). Consequently, it is not surprising that nearly all the procedural agreements reached in both contexts involved specific constraints on agenda access. Most groups specifically delegated agenda access to an elected citizens’ advisory committee, the public or both. Two groups in the school budget retrenchment experiments specified that a citizens’ petition signed by a designated number of eligible voters would force an item to be placed on the agenda. In both contexts, subjects specified that the agenda could not be manipulated by either the existing school board, the city governments or other interest groups. This implies that subjects associate open and unrestricted access to the agenda with procedural fairness.

Considerable discussion in both contexts was devoted to data collection and planning procedures. In both cases, existing structures for data collection (such as planning agencies, engineers and consulting ‘experts’) were regarded skeptically as a result of perceived bias. Thus, many of the groups specified in their procedual agreements that data collection and planning must be done under the close supervision of elected, accountable public officials. In no case were these experts given wide latitude to determine policies; their roles were restricted to gathering evidence under the specific direction of elected agencies and officials in far more political terms than is commonly assumed. That school closing, like other aspects of public education, is becoming increasingly politicized despite decades of efforts by educational professionals and reformers to depoliticize educational policy decisions is well documented (Reynolds, 1984); even the supposedly non-partisan issue of water supply management appears potentially subject to political as opposed to purely technical and professional management.

Several of the groups discussed additional avenues of citizen access to the decision-making process, although the most significant and most frequently discussed were referenda, the establishment of citizens’ advisory committees and boards, and constraints on access to the agenda. One group in the school budget retrenchment experiments required the school board to publicize widely its rules of practice in deciding all types of issues and to specify all procedural requirements and options available to the public. In two of the water management experiments, the constitution chosen specified the right of the citizens’ group to fine violaters, while a third specified that citizens had the right to appeal decisions to the elected board. Clearly, all these additional constraints are consistent with the view that procedural justice encompasses open agenda access, fair (i.e. broadly equal) representation and unbiased constraints on the legislative as well as the electoral decision process.

Finally, in several of the experiments, groups discussed in some detail the decision- making role of existing city governmental and school administration bodies. One of the school-closing groups required the administration to propose at least two different viable policy options on controversial issues. Another prevented the school district’s administration from formulating an official policy on controversial issues without the majority consent of the school board. In the water m~ag~ent groups, more attention was paid to how the citizens’ advisory boards would retain ind~nd~ce from the city government. Again, much of the discussion centred on citizen access to and participation in the decision-making process.

286

Conclusions

Proceiiwaf jt&ce apui local abnocracy

The theory of local democracy purporting to underlie local governmental practice in the United States has generated a voluminous literature on the ideal operation of various local state institutions. In spite of the theory’s ideological vitality, it appears to provide little real guidance in the reform of local governmental institutions in those instances when reform is actually contemplated. The theory’s essential failure in this regard can be traced to its generally uncritical treatment of democratic decision-making processes and in particular to its inability to distinguish a normative theory of democratic government from a normative theory of electoral procedures. Voting procedures are undoubtedly a necessary condition for democratic government but they are not a sufficient condition. Adopting a more critical approach to the modem theory of local democracy leads to the conclusion that concepts of social justice are essential for maintaining the longer-run legitimacy of the state and local states, and that social-justice concepts and standards used in evaluating local institutions must be derived from considerations of society yet immune from manipulation by state institutions. Achieving this objective requires explicit consideration of justice in procedure and an explicit concern for fairness in legislative as well as electoral decisions.

The results of our conflict resolution simulation experiments for two quite different types of local conflicts have shown quite conclusively that parties to actual conflicts are unwilling to entrust the local state’s resolution of conflicts over service provision to the unconstrained decision-making of representatives elected through majority voting. If, as we have argued, the agreements reached by those participating in our experiments can be interpreted as procedurally just, then our results suggest that procedural constraints on the decisions taken by representatives would appear to be central to a social conception of justice in the collective-decision contexts investigated. In all the experiments in which a procedural agreement was reached, discussion eventually converged on a line of argument grounded in expectations of greater equality of access to and influence in the decision-making process for all lay parties to the conflict. This does not imply that considerations of distributive justice are unimportant in an individual’s evaluation of the decisions taken by the local state. Indeed, they may well be. This is simply not a question we have investigated here. What our results do show is that when there is a distributional conflict and lack of consensus on an appropriate standard of distributive justice, there may still be a basis for consensus on a standard of procedural justice. The likelihood of a social consensus on such a standard would appear to be sensitive to the level of anticipated conflict (measured in terms of the numbers of people directly affected), the extent of community pola~zation into opposing factions, and the locational specificity of the conflict in terms of likely winners and losers. We suggest that the examination of such standards of procedural justice is an appropriate point of departure in developing any empirically relevant, yet still normative, theory of local democracy.

Our empirical results suggest that some common elements in a standard of procedural justice in settling contentious public issues of local concern may include the clearer specification of channels of legitimate access between elected officials and voters, less delegation of agenda-setting authority to non-elected professionals, and a more widespread planning and oversight role for representative citizen advisory committees. Our approach has been largely exploratory with the result that our empirical findings can only be suggestive of broad directions for local governmental reform. However, the general methodology adopted-a refo~ulation of the co~titutional choice approach-word appear to have considerable potential as a vehicie both for suggesting sets of just procedures to be employed in the resolution of highly conflictual kxal issues and for producing the empirical basis necessary for the further elaboration of a new theory of local democracy.

DAV~R.~OL~A~~D~.S~LEY 287

Acknowledgements

The financial support of the National Science Foundation under Grant SES 8120749 is gratefully acknowledged.

Note

1. For more details on the survey and pretesting of the experimental design, see Reynolds (1984).

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Procedural justice and local democracy