local politics
The politics of subnational units. Liberal theorists customarily assess the strength of local democracy, and thus focus on electoral politics, the politics of decision-making and governing accountability in elected local government. In comparative terms local politics appears to be heavily shaped by the degree of federalism. Federal states have strong local politics although the autonomy of local politics in the United States from interest-group pressures has long been controversial: see also community power; pluralism; machine. Unitary states such as France and Britain tend to have weak local politics (although in France this is tempered by the custom of national politicians doubling up as mayors of their local commune).
Developments in local government from the 1980s increased the range and number of service-providing bodies at the local level, meaning that elected local authorities became one—although still the most important—amongst a number of institutions of local governance. Liberal optimists would suggest the required partnership working between local agencies would enhance the accountability of elected local government in its community context. Pessimists suggested that the networks across local governance would more likely exacerbate the closed, self-interested elite nature of the governing process.
The new right in the USA and Britain has conceptualized local politics as the local market-place for the provision of services. In the 1980s they advocated market solutions to service delivery problems and the contraction of local government in favour of a range of private, voluntary, and quasi-governmental agencies at a local level. They view this market-place of service providers which has risen to replace the monopolistic control of elected local government as automatically a good thing. As a corollary to this the local citizen is conceived as a customer whose political participation is made through consumer actions in the local service market-place. In Britain the new public management revolution in the late 1980s and early 1990s focused on the development of more market-based methods in the supply of services. The development of a more active customer-orientated culture in demand is more problematic. The citizens' charters for local government launched in the early 1990s attempted to enhance local government accountability to service consumers and local tax-payers. The Blair Governments after 1997 while espousing a broader rhetoric of citizen participation did much to consolidate a customer-orientated culture through its stress on service league tables and consumer consultation. Major initiatives to develop this basis to local politics have nevertheless failed. One motivation for the poll tax was to increase awareness of the true costs of local government, and hence make citizens behave as active consumers and vote for what they were prepared to pay for. In practice it had the opposite effect as central taxes were transferred to paying for local services in a vain attempt to relieve the tax's unpopularity. The episode ended with local participation weaker than when it began.
Radical writers have seen local politics more in terms of a wider local system of power, conceptualized often as a local state. A major thesis for the UK advanced by Peter Saunders in The Dual State argued that the capitalist state had segregated itself according to social investment and social consumption functions. The latter were located in the local state, primarily provided by elected local government, but also by the National Health Service and other voluntary and quasi-governmental agencies, because they could be most efficiently tailored to ameliorating proletarian need by being located close to it. Later discussion has focused on how local politics has moved from being fordist to post-fordist in fulfilling the needs of capitalism. However, as long as local politics moves its focus away from elected local government into unelected agencies where it is easier for business interests to predominate, the legitimacy of the local state may become increasingly hard to sustain.
— Jonathan Bradbury
