Kyu-Nahm Jun awarded a Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship

Congratulations to Dr. Jun on receiving her Faculty Fellowship!

Associate Professor Kyu- Nahm Jun, Ph.D., was awarded a Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship for her project, "Fiscal Crisis, Austerity, and the Prospects of Democratic Governance and Public Participation: Evidence from U.S. Municipalities." The fellowship will fund data collection for her research in understanding the impact of financial emergency and fiscal austerity on democratic governance and participation at the local level.

This research will assemble information about public participation during times of fiscal crisis when local democracy is suspended by the state takeover of local governance. The main research questions are:

1. Does the fiscal health or fiscal emergency of a municipality affect the level of local participation?

2. What has been the impact of the state takeover of municipal finances and management on publicparticipation in U.S. local jurisdictions?

Jun's research is motivated by the fiscal crisis that many U.S. municipalities faced during and after the recent recession. Many states implemented intervention programs to resolve local fiscal exigencies with divergent strategies. In 2012, Michigan adopted a stringent "emergency manager" law that dramatically increased the authority of emergency managers in state intervention processes to address local fiscal crises. The law received a great deal of criticism for its impact on local democratic governance. As the power of all democratically elected local officials is suspended under the current law, many communities are considered to be de facto disenfranchised by the installation of an emergency manager, making it crucial to investigate the effects of state receivership systems adopted by various states, such as the emergency manager system in Michigan.

"We need to understand its impact on democratic governance as the state takeover limits the self-determination of municipalities in order to resolve a dire situation," said Jun. "The extreme measure that states have taken will provide crucial lessons in dealing with the local fiscal crisis without the blatant disregard for local autonomy and democracy. So far, there has not been a systematic evaluation of the effects of the state receivership system on democratic governance."

Jun will conduct her research using quantitative and qualitative analytic techniques, and the funding from the Humanity Center's 2019 Faculty Fellowship will support the data collection for the quantitative analysis component of a broader research project on the fiscal health of municipalities and democratic governance. This research agenda is grounded on her previous research efforts, which have focused on examining public participation at the community level, specifically the neighborhood or community council system in municipalities. To evaluate the effects of public participation in urban governance, she studied the implementation process of the citywide Los Angeles neighborhood council system.

As an extension of this line of inquiry, her most recent work examines the implementation of Community Advisory Councils in the city of Detroit, the first citywide participation system in Detroit's history. The prior and ongoing research projects have positioned her to evaluate the effects of state receivership systems on democratic governance and public participation in municipalities.