This work examines the roles of mayors, council members and administrators in the American urban governmental process and seeks to identify ways to improve the performance of these key figures.

The burden of addressing the problems of urban society fall increasingly on cities as the federal government cuts back domestic spending. This book examines the roles of mayors, councils, and administrators in governing and managing their cities. Positing that the internal dynamics of city governments are largely shaped by their structures, the author shows how council-manager governmental structures often foster more cooperation than do mayor-council structures. Svara provides contrasting models of interaction among officials in the two forms and shows how conflict and cooperation affect the performance of officials in the two structures; he contends that proper understanding of the roles and behavior appropriate to each will lead to equal effectiveness between the two.

The main argument of this book is that cooperation as well as conflict can be found in the local governmental process, and that structural features of a city, particularly the form of government by which it operates, tend to cause a city to follow one pattern or the other--conflict or cooperation. Svara puts forth a new and different segmentation of municipal decision-making, arguing that it occurs in four major dimensions mission, policy, administration, and management and then proceeds to analyze the responsibilities of elected officials and administrators for each of these dimensions. This book is a significant addition to the world of urban research. It would certainly be one of a small core of books that would be on my list whenever I offered a course in urban government, public administration, municipal management and similar areas.