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Rural Policy

Who Controls Local Economic Development Policy? Civic Society and Business Interests across U.S. Communities Paige Kelly*, Paige Kelly, Linda Lobao,

Sociologists have long been concerned with how power is distributed in communities. In this paper, we question the role of civic society and business in influencing local economic development policy. We draw from two competing perspectives on these groups.  The first perspective highlights civil society’s engagement and communities’ broader social capital in driving local policy-making.  It argues that multiple, competing political actors participate and dictate local policy-making.  The second perspective, growth-machine theory conceptualizes elite, local business actors, such as real estate or business owners, as the drivers of local policy. Few studies incorporate both perspectives simultaneously into analyses of local policy-making and those that do are mainly case studies.  We examine the respective influence of civic society and business on communities across the U.S. for three types of economic development policies, business recruitment, self-development, and progressive economic development strategies.  We draw on unique, primary data collected in 2018 from a national survey of over 1,000 county governments across the United States.  Counties are particularly relevant to studying local policy-making processes, as they cover both metropolitan and non-metropolitan communities, and past policy-related research rarely includes large samples of rural counties.  We find that (1) counties’ economic development policies are related to local political actors’ engagement in policy-making processes, net of common determinants of these policies such as fiscal stress and competition for business among neighboring counties; and (2) the influence of local political actors varies by policy type—business elites are the main actors promoting external business recruitment, both business and civil society influence self-development strategies, and civil society is main influence on the use of progressive development strategies.