ABSTRACT
In recent years, public affairs researchers have been concerned with the nature of civic society at the local level and its role in framing collective action and institutional structure. Civic culture, as conceptualized by Reese and Rosenfeld (2002), goes beyond analyses of culture and civil society, and incorporates systemic and structural components of communities, in particular: the community power system (including the nature of stakeholder inputs, procedural characteristics, and the division of decision-making authority); the community-value system (including political goals, styles of policy orientation, and capacity for conflict resolution); and the community decision-making system (including elements of rationality, resource bases, and relationships to external structures). These components, according to Reese and Rosenfeld, represent the power, value, and decision-making “bodies” or “parts” of a community taken as unified wholes.
