ancient cities

454 Local Government
local level to motivate participation, such as competitive
political parties or media; and (2) local
politics lacks the dramatic and emotive matters of
high consequence, such as war and nationalism as
well as charismatic politicians. Furthermore, in
many cases, small-scale political institutions are
equally if not more likely to encourage parochial
self-interested behavior rather than cooperative
and cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviors. Local
jurisdictions of local government are often vulnerable
to “state capture” by local elites, who then
advance policies that are not responsive to the full
range of interests in the local community.
In sum, historical experience shows that de
Tocqueville’s and Mill’s equation of localism with
greater democratic control is misleading: The
premise that tackling a democratic deficit necessarily
implies greater political decentralization to
municipalities is not a priori sustainable. The
objective of deepening democratic governance at
all levels of government is not necessarily incompatible
with greater central government control
and even a diminished political role for lower levels
of government. The unit of analysis for democratic
institutions is primarily the intergovernmental system
as a whole rather than local or central levels
taken independently.
Paradigms in the Study
of Local Government
Given its decentralized and federal structure and
prominent cities, the United States has the most
extensive theoretical debates over the nature of
local government. These debates, which focus on
issues including community power, comparative
historical and political sociology, and urban
regime theory, have influenced debates in other
countries to greater or lesser extents.
The debate over community power has contrasted
three paradigms, seeking to account for
the nature of political power in local urban settings.
Elite power theorists claim that local governments
are dominated by social and economic
elites and that politics and policy are shaped in
accordance with elite interests, thereby marginalizing
the interests of ethnic and racial minorities
and the poor. In contrast, pluralists, such as Robert
Dahl in his famous study of local politics in the
city of New Haven, Connecticut (United States),
claim that in fact local government is an arena of
competing political, economic, and social groups,
which combine to shape the policy decisions of
the local government. The different arenas of
power do not accumulate into a single elite.
Radical critics advance the idea that not all pertinent
issues are permitted to reach the arena of
pluralist bargaining between groups. Local elites
and masses are subject to ideological biases
against raising certain issues for debate (such as
significant income redistribution in a capitalist
system). These taboo issues are thus kept off the
agenda, either as a result of conscious design or
unconscious or ideological biases.
In an influential synthesis, Paul Peterson
reversed the established causality between politics
and policy: He argued that it was more fruitful to
view the types of local politics (elitist, pluralist, or
radical) as resulting from the nature of the policy
tasks required of local governments (economic
growth, allocation of economically neutral public
services within the city, and redistribution, respectively).
Where cities are forced to compete for
economic resources (a situation particularly characterizing
the United States but less so in other
settings such as France or the United Kingdom),
city politics is highly constrained.
Another influential strand in the study of local
government draws on comparative historical and
political sociology. Ira Katznelson’s City Trenches
demonstrated that different local government systems
and the different political and sociospatial
contexts in which they are embedded have played
an important role in shaping local social movements
as well as determining the boundaries of
what local government can do.
Over the last two decades, urban regime theory
has dominated the American political science and
urban studies literature on local government. It
seeks to develop a classification of local governments
in terms of the relationships that local government
has with the private sector and local civil
society. Different types of relationship and influence
lead to different types of urban regime.
However, it is unclear to what extent this paradigm
represents an advance over earlier debates;
moreover, its applicability outside the U.S. context
has been questioned. This paradigm should
not be confused with debates over regime change.
In post-communist Eastern Europe, for example,