Citizen Demands and Urban Services: The Distribution of Bureaucratic Response in Chicago and Houston

Citizen contacts with public authorities are a major form of political participation in American cities. Is this demand-response relationship politicized? Do public officials view their control over responsiveness to citizen grievances as a political resource that can be used to reward and punish, or is responsiveness accomplished according to routinized procedures institutionalized in a set of bureaucratic decision rules? Relying upon a variety of data, I analyzed responsiveness to citizen demands in a machine city and in a reformed one. Although the contacting process is more political in Chicago than in Houston, service outcomes are structured in a similar fashion in the two cities. Variations in responsiveness can best be understood in terms of the administrative procedures developed by individual bureaucracies to process citizen demands and in terms of the level of resources required to resolve the service grievance.