Citizenship in the Empowered Locality: An Elaboration, a Critique, and a Partial Test

Although liberal and communitarian interpretations of citizenship differ profoundly, they nevertheless offer essentially similar prescriptions in support of empowered localities. The authors argue, instead, that the rejected alternative of consolidated government better promotes both interpretations of effective citizenship. They develop this argument by more fully specifying the behavioral implications of the two views of citizenship and theoretically linking those behaviors to fragmented and consolidated urban institutions using the Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect model introduced by Lyons and Lowery in 1986. They then test the central proposition derived from that analysis using a comparison group design.