The impact of Wisconsin’s Act 10 on municipal management in smaller municipalities: Views from local elected officials
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076716683763 |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Public Policy and Administration
2018, Vol. 33(2) 170–189
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076716683763
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Article
The impact of
Wisconsin’s Act 10 on
municipal management
in smaller municipalities:
Views from local
elected officials
Michael R Ford
Department of Public Administration, University of Wisconsin,
Oshkosh, WI, USA
Douglas M Ihrke
Department of Public and Nonprofit Administration, University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA
Abstract
This article examines elected officials’ opinions on Wisconsin’s controversial 2011 col-
lective bargaining reform. Survey results from elected officials serving on city councils
and village boards with less than 10,000 residents demonstrate that Act 10 is still
viewed through a partisan lens, making its overall impact on municipal
governance unsettled. We also find that officials who first came to office prior to Act
10 generally think the law has had a positive fiscal impact. Overall, the authors conclude
that Act 10 cannot yet be viewed as a successful governance reform because it is still
viewed by local policymakers through a narrow fiscal and partisan lens.
Keywords
Collective bargaining, public administration, public management, public sector reform,
Wisconsin’s Act 10
Terry Moe (2009) bemoaned the paucity of literature discussing the nexus of col-
lective bargaining and public performance. In this article, we use the 2011 curtail-
ing of collective bargaining in the US state of Wisconsin as a case study to help
Corresponding author:
Michael R Ford, Department of Public Administration, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh Clow Faculty 422,
Oshkosh, WI 54901, USA.
Email: fordm@uwosh.edu
fill the research gap identified by Moe. Wisconsin is particularly significant for
several reasons, including the fact that Wisconsin was, in 1959, the first US state
to enact a public state employee collective bargaining law (Stein and Marley, 2013).
That action further cemented Wisconsin’s position as a leader in the broader
organized labor movement (Rickman and Colburn, 2012). However, five decades
later the power of organized labor in Wisconsin was drastically limited with the
passage of Wisconsin Act 10. The legislation spurred dramatic social protests in
Wisconsin’s state capitol, political high-drama culminating in the attempted recall
of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and competing claims regarding the long-
term impacts of the near elimination of public-sector collective bargaining in
Wisconsin.
In this article, we argue that the immediate fiscal impacts of Act 10, while easy to
understand, are only a small part of the reform’s legacy. Rather, the long-term
efficacy of Act 10 will be determined by the extent to which local and state govern-
ment officials translate the redefined relationship between public employee and
manager into increased public-sector innovation and performance. Previous
research by the author (2015) demonstrates the potential for collective bargaining
changes to increase public performance. But performance gains can only occur if
Wisconsin’s public governing boards are willing to move past the partisan divisions
that defined the passage of Act 10 (Stein and Marley, 2013). Thus, the basic con-
ceptual framework guiding our study is that the success of Wisconsin’s collective
bargaining reforms are dependent on the willingness of local government boards,
and specifically the individuals populating those boards, to embrace Act 10 regard-
less of their personal political preferences. If local municipal board member atti-
tudes on Act 10 are primarily informed by their partisan affiliation, as we suspect,
collective bargaining reform remains a source of unproductive political conflict
rather than a tool for improved governance.
Specifically, survey data from Wisconsin city council and village board members
are used to determine that population’s general opinion of Act 10, the extent to
which these elected officials see performance gains attributable to the law, and the
extent to which their opinions of Act 10 are viewed through a partisan lens. Focus
is placed on board member attitudes because governance is, as demonstrated by
Ford and Ihrke (2015), Gabris and Nelson (2013), and Nelson et al. (2011), an
activity in which perceptions are reality. For example, if a Wisconsin city council
member supports merit pay, a reform now possible in a post-collective bargaining
environment, one might conclude that same board member supports the larger
reform that made merit-pay possible. But if Act 10 attitudes are a function of
partisan affiliation, the partisan loyalty of board members may take precedence
over any specific policy initiative, creating a board group dynamic marred by
conflict and inefficiency (Gabris and Nelson, 2013). In other words, the perfor-
mance of a governing board is dependent on how board members perceive board
conflict, trust among members, the presence of coalitions, partisanship, and the
true motivations of their fellow board members (see Golembiewski, 1995). Hence,
in a human governing environment perceptions of key concepts matter as much as
Ford and Ihrke 171
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