The Restructuring of Municipal Services: A Canada—United States Comparison
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine how cities and towns provide services in the United States and Canada. Comparative analysis focuses on the role of the private sector in service delivery and the factors that affect city managers' decisions to contract out services. Study of the selection of the most effective form of service delivery is particularly instructive at the local level of government because that is where change occurred first and where most research has been focused. Research shows that Canadians have a more coordinated market economy, greater faith in government, and more communitarian values. Thus we hypothesize that Canadian municipalities will offer more services overall but fewer through the private sector than their American counterparts. We provide a comparative view of the forces that motivate city managers to change service-delivery modes. Our data come from the first survey of municipal service delivery in Canadian cities conducted in 2004. We replicated an earlier US survey conducted by the International Cities/Counties Management Association in 2002–03. Privatization plays an important role in the provision of municipal services in both countries. We found support for a view of a more pragmatic city manager than that envisioned in the public choice theory. City managers implement adjustment policies to facilitate restructuring; integrate community voices into the process to accommodate diverse views; and privatize only when contract-monitoring problems can be managed. As expected, Canadian municipalities provided more services than their American counterparts. Contrary to expectations, however, Canadian local governments had higher rates of privatized services and greater numbers of privatization plans. Because of the devolution of services by Canadian provinces to the cities without the necessary funding, it is conceivable that Canadian managers may have been under more pressure to restructure than their American counterparts. There was evidence, for example, that Ontario and Alberta, where pressures have been the highest during the Klein and Harris governments, had significantly higher privatization rates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".