Volunteerism as co-production in public service management: application to public safety in California

ABSTRACT

This study analyses volunteerism in public safety as a case of ‘participative coproduction’ that has the potential to improve administrative efficiency through substitution of labour but at the cost of administrative complexity. Coordination costs relate to the interdependent character of the public service relationship and the non-excludability of public safety benefits. The analysis considers the influence of fiscal and institutional factors on volunteerism through a two-stage empirical model where the first stage involves the presence of a volunteer programme, and the second stage the relative reliance on volunteer versus paid employees among such programmes. The findings demonstrate distinct differences across programme types in the factors associated with volunteerism in public safety. Volunteerism in policing appears more common in smaller cities with higher property crime rates and a more politically conservative population, while volunteerism in firefighting is associated with scale, fiscal capacity and organizational form.

KEYWORDS:

• Coproduction
• volunteerism
• public service management
• local government service
• public safety

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. California cities have been contracting for public safety since the City of Lakewood launched the municipal contracting movement with its Lakewood Plan in 1952 (Miller 1981; Musso 2001). Contracting accelerated in the 1980s following the passage of the property tax control measure Proposition 13, which provided fiscal incentives for small cities to capture fiscal advantages by incorporating and contracting with county governments for most services.

2. Because the number of cities that contract out and also report a volunteer policing or fire programme is quite small, the authors also explored modelling coproduction arrangements with a multinomial logistic model, with the base case paid provision, and choices between contracting and volunteer provision. Findings were generally robust to model specification and are available from the authors. The Heckman model was utilized because it permitted simultaneous modelling of choice to utilize volunteers and relative reliance on volunteers compared to paid employees.

3. The 2010 Census does not include employment and other economic data necessary for this analysis; the 5-year ACS data are used for this reason.

4. http://statewidedatabase.org/data.html.

5. The index is generated by calculating municipal tax revenue net of property and sales taxes. Next, a county tax share index is created by summing revenue for all municipalities within a given county and dividing that figure by the sum of all household income in the county as reported in the 2008–2012 American Community Survey (ACS). This is a ratio of total taxes (less property and sales taxes) for all cities in the ‘region’ relative to total city income. Finally, total household income for each city is multiplied by the county tax share index and divided by total city population to create the per-capita fiscal capacity index (FCI).

6. A direct measure of municipal government ideology is not possible; California requires non-partisan local government elections and many redistributive programmes are funded and operated by county and/or state agencies.

7. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr.

8. Also, the unbiased average marginal effects are identical to unbiased OLS coefficients.

9. A different model specification without the institutional variable for contracting found a negative and significant relationship between the probability of having a volunteer police programme and fiscal capacity.

10. Taking one minus the exponent of the coefficient and multiplying by 100 generates the estimated effect on the proportional reliance on volunteers.

11. We thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Judith and John Bedrosian Center for Governance and the Public Enterprise.

Notes on contributors

Juliet A. Musso

Juliet Musso is an associate professor at the Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California. She works in the area of governance with a particular focus on state and local institutional reform and performance.

Matthew M. Young

Matthew Young is an assistant professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research focuses on public innovation and technology, and he also conducts research on local government management and performance.

Michael Thom

Michael Thom is an associate professor at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. His research interests include public finance and regulation.