LAUSR

Accreditation, long used to signal quality among hospitals and universities, has been available to police, fire, and public works departments since the late 1980s. For public service departments, accreditation is a voluntary process that demands significant organizational resources without a guaranteed outcome. Why would city officials devote scarce resources to such an endeavor? Two explanations are examined. First, accreditation may be a rational response to a history of trouble or the potential for future crisis. Second, municipalities may use accreditation to build a reputation for professional administration of public services. The authors use Poisson regression to test these explanations on a new data set of midsize cities.