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Interactive decision making has become a recurrent practice across countries, policy sectors and tiers of government. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how organizational arrangements, i.e. the way the interactive process is designed, influence its outcomes.

The research is carried out through a multiple case study. Four cases of interactive decision making are analyzed using a qualitative framework.

Findings can contribute to shed light on the organizational underpinnings of the outcomes of interactive decision making. Accessibility, in particular meant as process openness, i.e. the intensity of the decision-making powers that are devolved to the public, seems to represent the key factor in producing positive outcomes, especially if associated to less-formalized arrangements.

On the practice oriented side, findings provide decision makers with insights about how to design interactive mechanisms to improve the chances they would “work.” Specifically, finding suggest to launch interactive initiatives only when the public’s expectations in terms of process openness can be satisfied.

The way organizational arrangements influence outcomes is likely to be affected by context-specific factors interacting with the formers in generating the latters. Therefore, in order to reach meaningful research results it might be necessary to systematically factor context-specific features in the analysis. Here lies the relative novelty of the paper: although the relation between arrangements and outcomes of interactive decision making has been already investigated by other contributions, the present analysis purposefully focusses on cases occurred in the same policy sector, in one homogeneous geographical location and characterized by the same administrative tradition in order to discount the influence of these factors.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.