local government

A governing institution which has authority over a subnational territorially defined area; in federal systems, a substate territorially defined area. Local government's authority springs from its elected basis, a factor which also facilitates considerable variation in its behaviour both between and within countries.

Structure in Europe is generally multitier. In Federal Germany below the state-level Länder are commonly found two tiers of local government: the upper-tier Kreise and the lower-tier municipalities. Regionalized states such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and France echo such arrangements by having three levels of local government: the region; provinces or counties; and communes as the lower-tier basic authority. By contrast, many Scandinavian countries, Britain, and many of its former colonies eschew three-tier local government for two. In Britain the structure developed after 1888 was based upon lower-tier district authorities and upper-level county (in England and Wales) or regional (in Scotland after 1972) authorities. In the 1990s, debate in Britain reintroduced the idea of having only one tier of local government. In England some cities, and concise county areas with strong senses of community such as Rutland and the Isle of Wight, were given single-tier authorities, whilst other larger county areas retained two tiers. From 1996, the whole of Scotland and Wales was divided into single-tier authorities. Conversely, 2000 two-tier local government for London was restored with the creation of the Greater London Authority to oversee strategic functions, above a lower tier of metropolitan boroughs. In the United States, beneath the state level there is one common tier of local government—the county—but the existence of a second tier of municipalities is piecemeal, entirely dependent upon petitioning by local residents. Often a state will have two-tier local government in some mainly urban areas but only one-tier local government in other mainly rural areas. Furthermore, specific functions such as education, responsibility for which has been concentrated in the tiered local government structure in Europe, have usually been placed under single-purpose elected local bodies in US states.

Organization of the elected executive in local government varies primarily between the mayoral system and the committee system. In the former, long found in France and the United States, a mayor is most frequently separately elected as the political leader of a council (in some smaller US cities, the mayor is a figurehead and the city is run by an unelected ‘city manager’). In the latter, previously seen in the UK and Sweden, councillors are elected who then make decisions by committee. 2000 the United Kingdom introduced arrangements by which most local authorities could either be run by directly elected mayors, by elected mayors with an unelected city manager, or by a party group nominated mayor leading a cabinet. Other non-executive councillors took on purely scrutiny and representative functions. Only in small authorities with a population of 85,000 or less could the committee system continue. Historically, development of council workforces was based upon the building up of large functionally defined departments of permanent staff. However, since the 1980s, local bureaucracies have begun to be broken up in preference for the public contraction of work privately supplied.

Local government expenditure generally accounts for a significant proportion of GDP—between (in 1988) 11 per cent in Great Britain and 30 per cent in Denmark (see also local government finance). Large-scale expenditure in Scandinavia reflects the fact that costly social services, including social security, secondary education, and health care have been put in the charge of local government at the county/province level and public utilities such as water, gas, and electricity supply at the commune/municipalities level. In other countries this is not the case, but British local government, for example, retains significant responsibilities in education, planning and roads, environmental protection, and leisure service provision, and continues to expand its economic development role.

Local government's role in the political system has been considered primarily in terms of its relationship with central government. Observers from a liberal democratic standpoint have stressed two bases upon which such relationships have been formulated since the nineteenth century. First, local government has been considered important to the encouragement of political education and participation, and the basis upon which services could be provided according to local needs. Hence, relationships with the centre have been based on the partnership of free democratic institutions. Secondly, local government has been seen as rational from an administrative point of view as it allows for the efficient provision of public services at the point of service need under the direction of the centre. On this basis local government is seen as the agent of central government. France may be taken to typify the stress on both bases for the development of local government. Political participation has been maintained through the strong community identity underpinning commune local government, and a strong relationship between the operations of local government and the interests of the state has been maintained through the office of departmental prefect. Britain's leaning towards the utilitarian administrative efficiency purpose of local government is reflected in the fact that even its lowest-tier authorities may have bigger populations than some other countries' county/province level authorities.

Since the 1970s fiscal stress and changes in approaches to government have forced a reconsideration of relationships. Central governments have sought to control local government finance and expenditure, and where the community basis for local government has been weak, as in Great Britain, this has extended to the control of service policies. At the same time, in most countries the role of local government has been increasingly cast as that of the buyer of services on behalf of the public that can be provided best on a competitive basis by the private sector, and as a local governing institution which, having been overburdened, should have its responsibilities slimmed. Local government has also lost many responsibilities to non-elected local quangos, created or encouraged by central government, so much so that the local political arena has increasingly been conceptualized as local governance, in which local government is reduced to the status of one player among many.

On the European mainland where local government is strongly territorially based, and in North America and Scandinavia where there is a greater concern to reinvent government than to privatize it, continued autonomy for local government will remain, perhaps not in the role of providing services directly, but in defining the local needs which other providers must meet. In contrast, British local government during the 1980s and 1990s followed a model in which it was expected to diminish into a contractor of services within a straitjacket of regulations imposed by central government. The Blair Government after 1997 offered a continental style community leadership role, symbolized in the granting of a general competence power for the first time ‘to promote the economic, social and environmental well-being of their area’. It also changed the duty of councils to that of achieving best value in local services, in which private contraction was only one option and not imposed. The practical capability to assert local leadership and discretion nevertheless remained dependent upon improvements in local service delivery and a willingness to work with a range of local partners. Indeed the implications of failure became more serious as central inspection multiplied and a local council that did not meet centrally set standards could see the wholesale removal of such services as local schools to a private contractor.

— Jonathan Bradbury

Local Government is the designation given to all units of government in the United States below the state level. During the colonial period, the pattern of local government was not uniform throughout the thirteen colonies. In New England the town was the principal unit of local rule, responsible for poor relief, schooling, and roads. The primary governing body was the town meeting, an assembly of all the enfranchised residents, though the popularly elected selectmen seem to have assumed increasing authority over town affairs. In the southern colonies, the parish vestry and county court were the chief elements of local government. Appointed by the royal governor, the members of the county court exercised both administrative and judicial powers, supervising road construction as well as presiding over trials. The parish vestry of the established Church of England administered poor relief. In the middle colonies, local government was a mix of the New England and southern elements. Both county governments and towns were significant, sharing responsibility for local rule. In the middle colonies and in Maryland and Virginia as well, the colonial governors granted municipal charters to the most prominent communities, endowing them with the powers and privileges of a municipal corporation. Although in some of these municipalities the governing council was elected, in Philadelphia, Norfolk, and Williamsburg the city council was a self-perpetuating body, with the incumbent councilors filling vacancies. In marked contrast to the direct democracy of the town meeting tradition of New England, these were closed corporations governed by a self-chosen few.

Change After the American Revolution

The closed corporations, however, did not survive the wave of government change unleashed by the American Revolution. By the 1790s the electorate chose the governing council in every American municipality. Moreover, the state legislatures succeeded to the sovereign prerogative of the royal governors and thenceforth granted municipal charters. During the nineteenth century, thousands of communities became municipal corporations. Irritated by the many petitions for incorporation burdening each legislative session, nineteenth-century state legislatures enacted general municipal incorporation laws that permitted communities to incorporate simply by petitioning the county authorities.

Meanwhile, the newly admitted states west of the Appalachians were replicating the local government structure of the Atlantic seaboard states. Most of the trans-Appalachian South followed the example of Virginia and North Carolina and vested local authority in county courts that exercised both judicial and administrative powers. With the disestablishment of the Church of England during the Revolutionary era, however, the parish vestries lost all secular governing authority. The new midwestern states imitated New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, dividing local responsibilities between counties and town-ships. Nowhere west of the Appalachians was the town-ship as significant as in New England, but it survived as a major element of rural government in the states north of the Ohio River.

To administer public education, the nineteenth-century states added a new unit of local government, the school district. These districts exemplified grassroots rule run amuck. By the early 1930s there were 127,531 such districts in the United States. There was a district for virtually every one-room school, and in some districts the number of school board members exceeded the number of pupils. With an average of 118 districts per county, Illinois had the largest number of school governments. One Illinois district comprised only eighty acres.

Reducing Grassroots Power

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the nation's cities, however, were the most criticized units of local government. Although they were responsible for the creation of grand parks, well-stocked public libraries, up-to-date fire departments, and the world's most advanced water and sewerage systems, the major American municipalities fell short of the expectations of prosperous city dwellers who rallied behind a growing body of good-government reformers. Members of the urban elite resented the clout of plebeian councilmen representing immigrant constituencies and cited well-publicized examples of political corruption in their crusades for reform. To weaken the grip of the supposedly venal political party organizations, reformers called for the introduction of a civil service system and a nonpartisan municipal bureaucracy. Moreover, they urged the adoption of nonpartisan elections. They also sought to curb the power of ward-based politicians from working-class neighborhoods by introducing at-large election of council members and by strengthening the role of the mayor, who was usually a figure of citywide distinction chosen by a citywide electorate.

Some cities discarded the mayor-council scheme and experimented with new forms of government. In 1901 reformers in Galveston, Texas, introduced the commission form of municipal rule. Under this plan, a small commission elected at large exercised all legislative and executive authority. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of cities adopted the commission option, but after 1915 it fell from favor and reformers rallied instead in support of the city manager plan. This scheme of government originated in Staunton, Virginia, in 1908 and spread rapidly until by the end of the twentieth century more than half of all American cities had adopted it. Its major feature was a strong, centralized, professional executive branch under a city manager who was hired by the city council. Council-manager government made little headway among the largest cities of the Northeast and Midwest, where voters preferred strong mayors with the political skills necessary to mediate clashing ethnic and economic interests. But many communities embraced the notion of a nonpartisan, expert administrator at the helm of government.

During the twentieth century there was also reform in those bastions of grassroots rule, the school district and the New England town. In an attempt to upgrade rural education, the states restructured school government, eliminating eighty thousand redundant school districts between 1940 and 1960. Consolidated school districts replaced existing minuscule units of government, and one-room schools yielded to graded institutions with students bused in from a five-or ten-mile radius. In twentieth-century New England a number of the largest towns deviated from the town meeting tradition and adopted an institution known as the representative town meeting. In these communities an assembly of usually over two hundred elected representatives determined town policy. No longer could every enfranchised townsperson vote in the town meeting; that became a prerogative belonging to the elected representatives.

Special Districts

Meanwhile, thousands of new special districts were adding to the complexity of American local government. Between the early 1950s and late 1980s the number of such districts rose from twelve thousand to thirty thousand. Most of these local governments were established to provide a single service or perform a single function. The functions included fire protection, water, sewerage, mosquito abatement, parks and recreation, airports, and a variety of other activities. In a few instances, special districts were created for multiple purposes such as water and sewerage, but all were limited in scope. The governing boards of special districts were often appointed rather than elected, and this gave rise to some concern over the degree of popular control possible in these governments. Two major reasons existed for the rapid growth of special districts. First, many potential service areas did not coincide with the boundaries of existing local governments, and special districts could be created to fit these service areas. Second, many local governments had exhausted the taxing and bonding authority granted to them by the state legislatures, and each special district could begin with a new grant of authority to tax and borrow.

Merged Government and Its Alternatives

The growing number of special districts in metropolitan areas as well as the proliferation of suburban municipalities gave rise to new concerns about duplication of effort and inefficient delivery of services. From the 1920s on, metropolitan reformers decried the multitude of conflicting governments and offered schemes for unifying the fragmented American metropolis. The most far-reaching of these proposals would have merged counties and city into a single unit of metropolitan government. During the 1960s this option, with some modification, was adopted in Nashville, Tennessee; Jacksonville, Florida; and Indianapolis, Indiana. Elsewhere, reformers proposed federative structures that would preserve existing municipalities but assign certain regional responsibilities to an overarching metropolitan government. Voters repeatedly rejected such schemes, though in 1957 something resembling a federative plan was adopted for Miami-Dade County in Florida.

Local governments and their citizens generally resisted sweeping reforms that would alter the basic structure of government in metropolitan areas. Instead, many local governments sought other means to avoid duplication and inefficiency in the provision of services. One increasingly popular device was the intergovernmental agreement. By utilizing contractual agreements, existing governments could band together to provide services that single units were unable to afford. In other cases, as in California's Lakewood Plan, cities could contract for services with an urban county that already provided such services to unincorporated areas. During the second half of the twentieth century, such agreements were popular because they permitted existing governments to continue operation and allowed local citizens to maintain mechanisms for local control of policy.

Americans have, then, opted to adjust to fragmentation rather than embrace consolidation or a radical restructuring of government. Thousands of school districts disappeared during the mid-twentieth century, but town-ships survived in the Northeast and Midwest, as did a myriad of little municipalities in metropolitan and rural areas.

Bibliography

Daniels, Bruce C., ed. Town and County: Essays on the Structure of Local Government in the American Colonies. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978.

Pollens, John C. Special District Governments in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Stone, Harold A., Don K. Price, and Kathryn H. Stone. City Manager Government in the United States: A Review After Twenty-five Years. Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940.

Teaford, Jon C. The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Teaford, Jon C. Post-Suburbia: Government and Politics in the Edge Cities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Wooster, Ralph A. The People in Power: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Lower South, 1850–1860. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: the government of a local area

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