The Adapted Cities Framework: On Enhancing Its Use in Empirical Research

Analysts are calling attention to a new era of municipal reform and to the convergence of the mayor-council and council-manager forms of government. H. George Frederickson, Gary Johnson, and Curtis Wood have proposed a new framework that explains the nature and extent of this convergence. The authors think this “adapted cities” framework is a potentially important advance in the understanding of municipal structure but note that empirical scholars have largely ignored the framework. This stems from the lack of a process for coding cities into this framework and from difficulties in operationalizing its categories. The authors contribute to this important topic by presenting a general process for coding cities on council-manager and mayor-council platforms into the adapted cities framework.