ancient cities

452 Local Government
central monarchs and parliaments were forced to
partner with these local governments to govern
regions and cities so as to secure the resources necessary
for war making and state making. However,
the development of modern national states
depended crucially on the elimination of municipal
autonomy in favor of centralizing state bureaucracies
and power holders, transforming the state
system from indirect to direct rule.
Between the late seventeenth century in absolutist
France and mid-nineteenth-century reforms
in England, most European states transformed
varied forms of urban governments from autonomous
units to professional, bureaucratic agents of
the central government, and with that came the
centralization of important public sector functions
such as taxation and conscription. Ancillary to
these goals were functions such as maintaining
public order, providing housing, and organizing
urban food supply, as well as the concession of
power to local representative bodies.
Out of this process emerged modern national
state systems and their expansion into social and
economic policy. The new regime after the French
revolution of 1789 represents an extreme case of
the subordination or tutelage of local government
as an instrument of centralized rule. All modern
local governments are a legacy of this historical
transformation. Most contemporary non-Western
state systems are also modeled on one or the
other version of European intergovernmental
state systems.
Types of Local Government
The types of local government can be analyzed
principally in terms of two variables related to the
form of political regime: (1) power sharing, the
type and degree of division of power, and (2) the
degree of decentralization. Local governments
also vary widely in their structure as well as their
functions and services.
Almost all regimes, whether majority rule or
consensus based, divide power to some degree
between central and noncentral levels. In principle,
the degree of autonomy of local government
is highest in federal systems, which allocate constitutionally
guaranteed powers to subnational units.
In contrast, unitary states reserve final authority to
central governments. A dramatic recent example
of the exercise of central authority over local governments
in a unitary state was the abolishing of
the elected Greater London Council by Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United
Kingdom in 1985; it was reinstated in 2000.
Significant country-specific differences exist
even within each of these categories. For example,
although the United States is a federal state system,
it provides constitutional autonomy only to
the (50) states, whereas city governments are considered
“creatures of the state” (this is known as
Dillon’s Rule after a U.S. Supreme Court case in
1868). This power relationship was illustrated
most dramatically in the 1970s when the state of
New York temporarily replaced the city council of
New York City with a special board to manage
the city’s budget directly.
The design of local government autonomy is
based on one of two principles. The ultra vires
principle restricts municipal competencies to those
explicitly granted them by central government.
The principle of general competence permits local
government authority in all areas except those
explicitly restricted by central government law.
Decentralization is the process of transferring
responsibilities from central to local government,
often a combination of fiscal, political, or
administrative functions. Decentralization often,
although not always, corresponds to local governments
getting a bigger share of total public-sector
expenditures and revenues and greater local financial
autonomy from central government. In the
last three decades, many countries, including many
unitary systems, have undertaken experiments to
decentralize authority and administrative functions.
From this perspective, the federal–unitary
distinction appears less salient than the de facto
degree of local autonomy.
Therefore, at the most generic level, all local
government systems can be classified along two
axes: (1) high/low degree of constitutional autonomy
(fiscal, political, administrative) and (2) wide/
narrow range of functional responsibilities and
services delivered. Although a majority of countries
fall into either the unitary–centralized
and federal–decentralized cells of the typology,
other combinations also exist. For example, the
Scandinavian countries and Japan are unitary and
decentralized, whereas India is both federal and
highly centralized.