ABSTRACT
The introduction of the city manager model was an effort to change that not only by concentrating executive power but by transferring it to a manager rather than a political leader. By now it must be recognized that this effort substantially failed in the cities in which it was tried without a concomitant consolidation of governments, something that has been rejected in community after community, it would have in any case. In essence, the "story" of governance in the Cities of the Prairie is the story of the development, transformation, and expansion of democratic and republican institutions and their constitutional basis since their founding and, for our purposes, most particularly since World War II. The processes of integration were reflections of extension of democracy in the Cities of the Prairie, but to be successful they had to be embodied in the local constitutional arrangements; rarely, if ever, in so many words, but in application of different techniques of republican governing.
