Mayoral perceptions of developmental and redistributive policies - A cross-national perspective

The validity of Peterson's policy typology, outlined in City Limits (1981), is dependent on the assumption that local government decision makers under stand and order public policies in specific ways. Using confirmatory factor analysis of international Purvey data on mayoral public policy spending pr eferences from the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation Project, the autho rs find that the categories of redistributive and developmental policies ar e more than creations of deductive reasoning. The spending preferences of m ayors in selected industrial democracies conform to the structure and order as specified in Peterson's theory.