ABSTRACT
Hardly more than a decade ago the literature on private residential governance was sparse, consisting mainly of government reports, trade association publications, journalistic accounts and some law review articles. Then, beginning in the early 1990s, a number of books appeared that began to create a social scientific context for the subject (Dilger 1992; McKenzie 1994; Barton and Silverman 1994; Blakely and Snyder 1997). Until very recently, nearly all of the available studies dealt mainly with the US. But during the last few years, the research base on private communities has expanded to include an increasing proportion of studies that deal with a wide range of nations on every continent.
