Civic community in small-town America: how civic welfare is influenced by local capitalism and civic engagement.

摘要

The aims of this paper are: to gain a fuller understanding of factors that foster community cohesion and contribute to the residents' social and economic wellbeing; and to move beyond previous research that used larger spatial units such as states,counties, or aggregates of counties and to focus instead on American small towns (population 2500-20000). The data on small towns are drawn from public-use files and from confidential microdata from various economic censuses. From these sources we construct measures of locally oriented firms, self-employment, business establishments that serve as gathering places, and associations. The local capitalism and civic engagement variables generally perform as hypothesized; in some cases they are related quitestrongly to civic welfare outcomes such as income levels, poverty rates, and nonmigration rates. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of working with place-level data and suggest some strategies for subsequent work on small towns and other incorporated places.