The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe 9780199562978, 0199562970

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
List of Maps
List of Tables
List of Text Boxes
List of Contributors
Introduction
PART I. THE BRITISH ISLES
1 The United Kingdom: Is There Really an Anglo Model?
2 Ireland: Halting Steps Towards Local Democracy
PART II. THE RHINELANDIC STATES
3 Belgium: A Tale of Regional Divergence?
4 The Netherlands: Subnational Democracy and the Reinvention of Tradition
5 Luxembourg: The Challenge of Inclusive Democracy in a ‘Local State’
6 Germany: Varieties of Democracy in a Federal System
7 Austria: From Consensus to Competition and Participation?
8 Switzerland: Subsidiarity, Power-sharing, and Direct Democracy
PART III. THE NORDIC STATES
9 Denmark: Between Local Democracy and Implementing Agency of the Welfare State
10 Finland: The Limits of the Unitary Decentralized Model
11 Sweden: Party-dominated Subnational Democracy under Challenge?
12 Norway: The Decline of Subnational Democracy?
PART IV. THE SOUTHERN EUROPEAN STATES
13 France: Between Centralization and Fragmentation
14 Italy: The Subnational Dimension to Strengthening Democracy since the 1990s
15 Spain: The Consolidation of Strong Regional Governments and the Limits of Local Decentralization
16 Portugal: Local Democracy in a Small Centralized Republic
17 Greece: A Case of Fragmented Centralism and ‘Behind the Scenes’ Localism
18 Malta: Local Government: A Slowly Maturing Process
19 Cyprus: Political Modernity and the Structures of Democracy in a Divided Island
PART V. THE NEW DEMOCRACIES
The Visegrád States
20 Poland: Europeanization of Subnational Governments
21 The Czech Republic: Local Government in the Years After the Reform
22 Hungary: Remarkable Successes and Costly Failures: An Evaluation of Subnational Democracy
23 Slovakia: Local Government: Establishing Democracy at the Grassroots
The Baltic States
24 Estonia: Challenges and Lessons of the Development of Local Autonomy
25 Latvia: Experiments and Reforms in Decentralization
26 Lithuania: Brave Enough to Implement Daring Democratic Reforms?
The Balkan States
27 Slovenia in Transition: Decentralization as a Goal
28 Bulgaria: The Dawn of a New Era of Inclusive Subnational Democracy?
29 Romania: From Historical Regions to Local Decentralization via the Unitary State
CONCLUSIONS
30 European Subnational Democracy: Comparative Reflections and Conclusions
Appendix 1 Structure of Subnational Governments in Europe (2007)
Appendix 2 Subnational Finances in Europe
Appendix 3 Trust, Importance of Local/Regional Government, and Levels of Corruption in Europe
Subject Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
K
L
M
N
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Name Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

the oxford handbook of

LOCAL AND REGIONAL DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE

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the oxford handbook of .................................................................................................................................................................

LOCAL AND REGIONAL DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE .................................................................................................................................................................

Edited by

JOHN LOUGHLIN FRANK HENDRIKS ¨M ANDERS LIDSTRO

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # The several contributors 2011 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–956297–8 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

P R E FAC E

AND

A C K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

...............................................................................................................................................

This book originated in a 1998 report entitled Regional and Local Democracy in the European Union which was prepared for the European Union’s Committee of the Regions (CoR) by the three editors and other colleagues (1999). The report was an inventory of the ‘state of play’ of democracy at the regional and local levels, and it showed the wide variety of arrangements in the institutional expression of democracy at the subnational level in the then fifteen member states. To some extent, this variety could be explained by distinctive ‘state traditions’ in Western Europe. This concept, originally formulated as three traditions by Dyson (1980) was further developed by Loughlin and Peters (1997) into four: the Anglo-Saxon, the French/ Napoleonic, the Germanic, and (differing from Dyson’s formulation) the Scandinavian. The report also gave many concrete examples of issues such as electoral turnout and mechanisms which allowed citizens’ direct participation in regional and local decision-making. A revised and expanded version of this report, Subnational Democracy in the European Union: Challenges and Opportunities, was subsequently published by Oxford University Press in 2001 and appeared in paperback in 2004. The OUP publication went further than the report and raised the issue about the meaning of democracy itself. Hitherto, democracy had primarily been understood as national representative democracy where the legitimacy of democratic institutions was validated by, and derivative of, assemblies elected by the nation. The question in this book was whether there could be sources of democratic legitimacy other than the nation-state. In 2004 and in 2007, however, the European Union had expanded to twentyseven member states and there had been important developments in regional and local democracy since the original 1998 CoR report. It was clear that much of the original material was outdated and also that the transition to democracy of the new member states raised interesting questions in relation to the theory of democracy. In consultation with Dominic Byatt of OUP, it was therefore decided to produce the present book in the format of an Oxford Handbook. This meant commissioning new authors who are mostly experts on subnational democracy and originating from the member states.

vi

preface and acknowledgements

The Handbook is the result of high levels of collaboration among the editors and authors and was made possible thanks to financial and other support from various institutions and funding agencies. First, the editors would like to thank the authors who wrote the individual chapters and generously responded to the suggestions and nagging of the editors. In most cases, the authors were writing in a language that was not their own and managed to do so in a way that was impressive. Second, the editors would like to thank a number of agencies for their financial contributions which directly or indirectly facilitated the production of this book. The Swedish Science Council made a substantial research grant to Anders Lidstro¨m and John Loughlin to explore some of the themes of the book (‘The Transformation of Governance and the New Territorial Politics’ (Swedish Science Council 421-2004-1343)). We would like to thank Brendan Donnelly of the London-based Federal Trust and John Pinder of the Madison Trust who hosted a conference in London in 2008 to discuss several of the theoretical issues dealt with in the book. The Department of Public Administration of the University of Tilburg hosted a meeting of the three editors in 2008. John Loughlin benefited from Visiting Fellowships at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London to work on editing the chapters of the book in 2009. Third, some individuals helped with editing and formatting: Niamh BakerLoughlin, an undergraduate at King’s College London and Mark Dimond of Cardiff University. Cait Thorkelson at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Umea˚ University has produced the maps at the beginning of each chapter. Finally, we would like to thank Dominic Byatt, Chief Editor at Oxford University Press, who has been unfailing in his enthusiasm for the project and in his patience. Dominic was the editor at OUP responsible for the initial volume and it has been a pleasure to continue this collaboration ten years on. John Loughlin Frank Hendriks Anders Lidstro¨m Cardiff, Tilburg, and Umea˚ January 2010

C ONTENTS ..........................................

List of Figures List of Maps List of Tables List of Text Boxes List of Contributors

x xii xiv xxi xxii

Introduction John Loughlin, Frank Hendriks, and Anders Lidstro¨m

1

PART I. THE BRITISH ISLES 1 The United Kingdom: Is There Really an Anglo Model? Peter John and Colin Copus

27

2 Ireland: Halting Steps Towards Local Democracy John Loughlin

48

PART II. THE RHINELANDIC STATES 3 Belgium: A Tale of Regional Divergence? Ellen Wayenberg, Filip De Rynck, Kristof Steyvers, and Jean-Benoıˆt Pilet

71

4 The Netherlands: Subnational Democracy and the Reinvention of Tradition Frank Hendriks and Linze Schaap

96

5 Luxembourg: The Challenge of Inclusive Democracy in a ‘Local State’ Patrick Dumont, Raphae¨l Kies, and Philippe Poirier

123

6 Germany: Varieties of Democracy in a Federal System Arthur Benz and Christina Zimmer

146

7 Austria: From Consensus to Competition and Participation? Franz Fallend

173

8 Switzerland: Subsidiarity, Power-sharing, and Direct Democracy Andreas Ladner

196

viii

contents

PART III. THE NORDIC STATES 9 Denmark: Between Local Democracy and Implementing Agency of the Welfare State Jens Blom-Hansen and Anne Heeager

221

10 Finland: The Limits of the Unitary Decentralized Model Stefan Sjo¨blom

241

11 Sweden: Party-dominated Subnational Democracy under Challenge? Anders Lidstro¨m

261

12 Norway: The Decline of Subnational Democracy? Harald Baldersheim and Lawrence E. Rose

282

PART IV. THE SOUTHERN EUROPEAN STATES 13 France: Between Centralization and Fragmentation Alistair Cole

307

14 Italy: The Subnational Dimension to Strengthening Democracy since the 1990s Simona Piattoni and Marco Brunazzo

331

15 Spain: The Consolidation of Strong Regional Governments and the Limits of Local Decentralization Ce´sar Colino and Eloı´sa del Pino

356

16 Portugal: Local Democracy in a Small Centralized Republic Jose´ M. Magone

384

17 Greece: A Case of Fragmented Centralism and ‘Behind the Scenes’ Localism Nikos Hlepas and Panagiotis Getimis

410

18 Malta: Local Government: A Slowly Maturing Process Henry Frendo

434

19 Cyprus: Political Modernity and the Structures of Democracy in a Divided Island Andrekos Varnava and Christalla Yakinthou

455

PART V. THE NEW DEMOCRACIES The Visegra´d States 20 Poland: Europeanization of Subnational Governments Paweł Swianiewicz

480

contents

ix

21 The Czech Republic: Local Government in the Years After the Reform Michal Illner

505

22 Hungary: Remarkable Successes and Costly Failures: An Evaluation of Subnational Democracy Ga´bor Soo´s and La´szlo´ Ka´kai

528

23 Slovakia: Local Government: Establishing Democracy at the Grassroots Sonˇa Cˇapkova´

552

The Baltic States 24 Estonia: Challenges and Lessons of the Development of Local Autonomy Georg Sootla and Kersten Kattai

576

25 Latvia: Experiments and Reforms in Decentralization Inga Vilka

596

26 Lithuania: Brave Enough to Implement Daring Democratic Reforms? Jolanta Vaiciuniene and Saulius Nefas

618

The Balkan States 27 Slovenia in Transition: Decentralization as a Goal Stanka Setnikar-Cankar

642

28 Bulgaria: The Dawn of a New Era of Inclusive Subnational Democracy? Pavlina Nikolova

664

29 Romania: From Historical Regions to Local Decentralization via the Unitary State Ana Maria Dobre

685

CONCLUSIONS 30 European Subnational Democracy: Comparative Reflections and Conclusions Frank Hendriks, John Loughlin, and Anders Lidstro¨m

715

Appendix 1 Structure of Subnational Governments in Europe (2007) Appendix 2 Subnational Finances in Europe Appendix 3 Trust, Importance of Local/Regional Government, and Levels of Corruption in Europe

747

Subject Index Name Index

749 778

743 745

LIST

OF

FIGURES

.................................................................

Belgium 3.1

The Belgian state structure

74

The Netherlands 4.1

Electoral turnout in municipal elections, 1953–2006

108

Luxembourg 5.1

Evolution of the number of communes from 1839 to 2006

128

Germany 6.1

Financial equalization

153

Switzerland 8.1

Participation in local, national, and cantonal elections and size of the municipalities, 2004

210

Denmark 9.1

Distribution of all seats in municipal councils among political parties and local lists, 1970–2009

230

Norway Electoral turnout in municipal and county council elections, 1901–2007

293

12.2 Women representatives on municipal councils, 1945–2007

294

12.1

12.3

Citizen involvement in different forms of local political participation, 1995–2007

295

Portugal 16.1

Number of civil servants in Portugal, 2005

16.2 Local elections in Portugal, 1989–2009 16.3

Involvement in civil associations, 1999–2002

16.4 Citizens’ groups’ share of vote and seats at parish level

390 401 402 403

Poland 20.1

Budget expenditures in Poland, 2006

20.2 Subnational capital spending in Poland, constant prices of 2005 20.3

Structure of Polish subnational government revenues, 2007

485 489 491

list of figures 20.4 Proportion of party candidates among local and regional councillors, 2006 20.5

Proportion of mayors who were elected as candidates of national political parties, 2006

xi

496 496

Hungary 22.1

The Hungarian local government election systems

536

Slovakia 23.1

Public administration structure

23.2 Organization of municipal bodies 23.3

Organizational structure of regional government

23.4 Subnational revenue composition, 2007

557 560 561 565

Romania 29.1

The share of transfers to local budgets from state budget revenues

700

LIST

OF

MAPS

.......................................................

1.1

United Kingdom

27

2.1

Ireland

48

3.1

Belgium: Regions

71

4.1

The Netherlands: Provinces

96

5.1

Luxembourg

123

6.1

Germany: La¨nder

146

7.1

Austria: La¨nder

173

8.1

Switzerland: Cantons

196

9.1

Denmark

221

10.1

Finland

241

11.1

Sweden: County councils and regions

261

12.1

Norway: County councils

282

13.1

France: Regions

307

14.1

Italy: Regions

332

15.1

Spain: Autonomous communities

357

16.1

Portugal

384

17.1

Greece: Prefectures

410

18.1

Malta

434

19.1

Cyprus

455

20.1

Poland: Regions

480

21.1

The Czech Republic: Regions

505

22.1

Hungary: Counties

528

23.1

Slovakia

552

24.1

Estonia

576

25.1

Latvia

596

26.1

Lithuania

618

list of maps 26.2 Administrative division of the Republic of Lithuania

xiii 625

27.1

Slovenia

642

28.1

Bulgaria

664

29.1

Romania

685

L I S T O F TA B L E S ...........................................................

Introduction State traditions

11

0.2 Models of democracy

15

0.1

The United Kingdom 1.1

Local government scale

1.2 The structure of UK local government 1.3

Electoral systems

1.4 Councils with elected mayors 1.5

Local government expenditure in the UK, 2006–7

1.6 Financing of local authority expenditure in Great Britain, 2006–7

31 31 32 32 41 42

Ireland 2.1

Structure and membership of Irish local authorities

53

2.2 Local authority current expenditure by programme group, 2007

56

Local authority capital expenditure by programme group, 2007

56

2.3

2.4 Sources of income for current expenditure, 2007 2.5

2004 Local elections: seats per party

2.6 Occupations of county and city councillors, 1999 2.7

Sample Strategic Policy Committee (SPC) scheme

57 59 60 62

Belgium 3.1

Municipalities in the three Belgian regions

3.2 Sizes of municipalities in the three Belgian regions 3.3

Types of local government income in the three Belgian regions

3.4 Competencies of local governments in the three regions 3.5

Public employment in general and at local level, per region, 2002

3.6 Expenses for important policy domains, per region and per inhabitant

79 79 80 82 83 83

The Netherlands 4.1

Distribution of valid votes and Second Chamber seats by party in 2009 (elections 2006)

100

list of tables 4.2 Principal functions and responsibilities of each tier of government in the Dutch political-administrative system 4.3

Distribution of municipalities and population by municipal population size, 2008

4.4 Development of municipal incomes

xv

102 103 104

Municipal government operating expenses by main type of activity, 2007

104

4.6 National distribution of votes cast in the 2007 municipal council elections

106

4.5

4.7

Subject and character of local referendums, 1990 to 8 May 2008

110

Luxembourg Distribution of valid votes and parliamentary seats by party in the 2009 parliamentary election

126

5.2 Distribution of municipalities and population by municipal population size, 2009

129

5.1

5.3

Percentage of seats at local elections 1987–2005 (communes with PR electoral system)

133

Germany 6.1

Results and voter turnout (preceding Landtag elections)

155

6.2 Direct democracy in German La¨nder

158

Revenues of local governments, 2008

160

6.3

6.4 Existence and success of independent groups in local elections 6.5

Regulations for citizens’ initiatives and referendums

163 164

Austria 7.1

Revenues of provinces and municipalities, 2008

7.2 Number of municipalities and population of the provinces, 2009 7.3

Size categories, number and population of the municipalities, 2009

7.4 Social representativeness of local councillors, 1998

179 180 180 188

Switzerland 8.1

Expenditures of cantons, municipalities, and the Federation compared, 2005

207

Denmark The size of Danish municipalities before and after the 2007 reform

226

9.2 The functions of municipalities and regions (gross current and capital expenditure, budget 2008)

227

9.1

xvi 9.3

list of tables The subnational system of finance (budget 2008)

228

Finland 10.1

Party strength in the municipalities 1992–2008 and in the parliamentary elections in 2007

10.2 Citizen–politician ratio in the municipalities 10.3

Voting turnout in the municipal and parliamentary elections 1992–2008

249 250 251

Sweden 11.1

Sources of revenue of Swedish local government, 2006

11.2 Party strength in the municipalities, 1994–2006, and in the national election, 2006 11.3

Citizen–politician ratio in the municipalities

11.4 Citizens’ confidence in their municipal elected representatives

268 269 270 271

Norway Distribution of valid votes and parliamentary seats by party in the 2009 parliamentary election

285

12.2 Distribution of municipalities and population by municipal population size, 2008

286

12.3a Municipal government operating expenses by main type of activity, 2007

289

12.3b County government operating expenses by main type of activity, 2007

289

12.4 Sources of local government revenue, 2007

290

12.1

12.5

National distribution of votes cast in the 2007 municipal council elections

292

France 13.1

Subnational authorities in mainland France

314

13.2 Local government finance: expenditure, 2007

323

Local government finance: income, 2007

323

13.3

Italy Distribution of valid votes and parliamentary seats by party in the 2008 parliamentary election

337

14.2 Distribution of municipalities and population by municipal population size, 2006

340

14.1

14.3

Principal functions and responsibilities of each tier of government in the Italian political-administrative system

341

list of tables

xvii

14.4a Regional and autonomous provinces government operating expenses by main type of activity, 2003

345

14.4b Provincial government operating expenses by main type of activity, 2003

346

14.4c Municipal government operating expenses by main type of activity, 2003

346

Spain 15.1

The number of inhabitants in Autonomous Communities, 2008

362

15.2 Range of population size in municipalities, December 2008

363

The number and types of local authorities by Autonomous Community, 2009

364

15.3

15.4 The electoral system(s) 15.5

The subnational system of finances and taxation: sources of finance of Autonomous Communities, 2006

15.6 Revenue composition of municipalities for 2004 without borrowing 15.7

Government formation and electoral results for state-wide and regional parties in the last regional elections

365 366 368 369

15.8 Municipal elections, 2007

371

15.9 Number and type of local referendums in Spain, 1985–2009

374

Portugal 16.1

Main political parties at local and regional level

16.2 The electoral system

387 388

Number and types of local authorities in Portugal, 2001

391

16.4 Number and percentage of municipalities (municipios) according to population size, 2003

392

16.3

16.5

Number and percentage of parishes according to population size, 2003

392

16.6 Age of incumbents in local authorities in Portugal, 2001

392

Socio-professional structure of incumbents in local authorities, 2001

393

16.7

16.8 Gender of incumbents in local authorities, 2001

393

16.9 Local cumul de mandats among MPs in Portuguese parliament, 2009

394

16.10 Total general government expenditure at central, regional, and local level as share of GDP, 2007

396

16.11 Regional elections in Azores, 1976–2008

398

16.12 Regional elections in Madeira, 1976–2007

399

xviii

list of tables

16.13 Local elections in Portugal, 2005

402

Greece 17.1

Number of prefectures and municipalities in Greek regions

17.2 Competencies of local government in Greece 17.3

Revenues and expenditures of local government, 2004

17.4 National and prefectural election results 17.5

Employees in urban and rural municipalities, 1996

17.6 Distribution of second-tier local governments by population 17.7

Distribution of municipalities by orders of magnitude before (1996) and after (1999) the implementation of the ‘Capodistrias’ plan of amalgamations

417 418 419 420 424 425

426

Malta 18.1

Demographic distribution of Maltese municipalities

18.2 Political parties at the local level in Malta 18.3

Local public sector expenditure, 2005

18.4 Local public revenues (excluding loans), 2005/6 18.5

Local public expenditure by function, 2005

18.6 State grants to local councils 2008/9–2009/10

441 442 447 447 448 448

Cyprus 19.1

RoC municipal election results, December 2006

19.2 TRNC municipal election results, June 2006

468 470

Poland 20.1

Territorial division of Poland—average sizes and their ranges, December 2006

20.2 Turnout in Polish local elections since 1990

485 498

The Czech Republic 21.1

Size structure of municipalities in the Czech Republic, December 2007

21.2 Results of the 2006 elections to local councils

512 516

Results of the 2008 election to regional councils

518

21.4 Citizens’ trust in subnational government, 2007–2008, compared with trust in other political institutions

520

21.3

Hungary 22.1

The Hungarian political system in the majoritarian–consensus model

22.2 Local governments by size of population in Hungary

530 533

list of tables 22.3

Characteristics of subnational levels in Hungary

22.4 Distribution of annual sources of revenues of local governments, 2006 and 2007 22.5

National and local government expenditures

22.6 Total mandates won by independents and organizations obtaining the most mandates in 2006 22.7

Confidence in political institutions

22.8 Election turnout at local and parliamentary elections, 1990–2006

xix 534 538 538 540 541 541

Slovakia Slovak municipalities by size

558

23.2 Self-governing regions in Slovakia

561

23.1

Distribution of votes in the regional councils by political affiliation

563

23.4 Subnational government spending and revenues

564

23.3

Estonia 24.1

Trust in main political and administrative institutions in Estonia

24.2 Power resource of actors in local government in Estonia 24.3

Size of local government units in selected new EU member states

24.4 Sources of local revenue, 1998 and 2007, and the rate of change 24.5

Attitudes of councillors in Estonia

580 582 582 585 587

24.6 Evolution of actors at local elections in Estonia, 1993–2005

587

Support to parties at national and local elections in 2000s

588

24.7

24.8 Electoral success of the winning party in communities of different size at the 2005 elections

589

Latria 25.1

Number of councillors in the different-sized local authorities

25.2 Voter turnout in local elections, 1994–2009 25.3

Evaluation of collaboration of local governments, 2008

25.4 Evaluation of future tendencies of collaboration of local governments

606 607 613 613

Lithuania 26.1

Electoral turnout in presidential elections

26.2 Electoral turnout in parliamentary elections 26.3

Electoral turnout in local government elections

26.4 Number of parties that received mandates in elections to the parliament and to local government councils

621 621 622 623

xx

list of tables

26.5

Strikes and warning strikes, 2000–8

624

26.6 Tax return sources of municipalities

628

26.7

Number of registered political parties

630

Slovenia 27.1

State tradition in Slovenia

27.2 Breakdown of municipalities by number of inhabitants 27.3

Participation in Slovenia in direct and indirect forms of democracy

27.4 Candidature of parliamentary deputies as mayor and vice versa, 1992–2006

645 649 651 654

Local community spending in Slovenia as percentage of GDP, 2002–7

656

27.6 Local community revenues in Slovenia as percentage of GDP, 2002–7

656

27.5

27.7

Local community spending as a proportion of overall central government and local community spending, 2002–7

27.8 Local community taxes in Slovenia as a proportion of overall taxes, 2002–7

658 659

Bulgaria 28.1

Principal political parties

28.2 Bulgaria’s territorial organization according to the NUTS classification 28.3

Local self-government in Bulgaria

28.4 The municipal budget

668 669 670 672

Romania Results of local elections, 2004, 2008

693

29.2 Territorial administration in Romania, 2008

695

29.1

29.3

Type and content of competences

29.4 Dynamic of local public revenues, 2004–6 29.5

Execution of the local budgets by development region and county

29.6 The attributions of regional institutions 29.7

Turnout in Romanian local and national elections, 1996–2008

29.8 Citizens’ participation in associations

696 698 699 701 703 703

Conclusions 30.1

The local referendum in Europe

30.2 The elected mayor in Europe

734 736

LIST

OF

T E X T B OX E S

.................................................................................

Austria Revenues of provinces and municipalities

178

7.2 Structure of the provinces and municipalities

179

Political parties at the subnational level

183

7.1

7.3

7.4 Cumul de Mandats of local and provincial politicians 7.5

The electoral system

7.6 Social representativeness of local councillors

184 187 187

Norway 12.1

Principal functions and responsibilities of each tier of government in the Norwegian political-administrative system

288

The Czech Republic 21.1

Territorial division of the Czech Republic (as of 2007)

21.2 Subnational authorities in the Czech Republic

510 510

LIST

OF

C O N T R I B U TO R S

.................................................................................................

HARALD BALDERSHEIM is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. ARTHUR BENZ is Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Political Science, Technische Universita¨t Darmstadt, Germany. MARCO BRUNAZZO is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the University of Trento, Italy. SONˇA CˇAPKOVA´ is Assistant Professor in the Department of Regional Development and Public Administration at Matej Bel University in Banska´ Bystrica, Slovakia. ALISTAIR COLE is Professor of European Politics at Cardiff University. He has published widely in the field of French and comparative politics. CE´SAR COLINO is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Administration in the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology at the Spanish National DistanceLearning University (UNED) in Madrid, Spain. COLIN COPUS is Professor of Local Politics and Director of the Local Governance Research Unit at the School of Public Policy, De Montfort University, UK. ANA MARIA DOBRE is an Associated Researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Institute for International and European Policy, University of Leuven, Belgium. ELOIˆSA DEL PINO is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain. FILIP DE RYNCK is Professor of Public Administration at University College Ghent, Belgium. PATRICK DUMONT is Researcher in Political Science at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg. FRANZ FALLEND is Senior Scientist at the Department of Political Science and Sociology, University of Salzburg, Austria. HENRY FRENDO is Professor of History and Director of the Institute of Maltese Studies at the University of Malta, Valletta. PANAGIOTIS GETIMIS is Professor for Urban and Regional Planning and Policies, Department of Economic and Regional Development, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.

contributors

xxiii

JENS BLOM-HANSEN is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. ANNE HEEAGER is a Researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. FRANK HENDRIKS is Professor of Comparative Governance at the Tilburg School of Politics and Public Administration at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. NIKOS HLEPAS is Associate Professor of Regional and Local Government, Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the National and Capodistrian University of Athens. MICHAL ILLNER is Senior Scientist in the Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, and a member of its Department of Local and Regional Studies, Czech Republic. PETER JOHN is Hallsworth Chair of Governance in the School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK. LA´SZLO´ KA´KAI is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies, University of Pe´cs, Hungary. KERSTEN KATTAI is Lecturer at the Institute of Political Science and Governance, Tallinn University, Estonia. RAPHAE¨L KIES is Researcher in Political Science at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg. ANDREAS LADNER is professor of Political Science at the Autonomous University Institute IDHEAP in Lausanne. ANDERS LIDSTRO¨M is Professor of Politics in the Department of Political Science, University of Umea˚, Sweden. JOHN LOUGHLIN is Fellow of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge and Affiliate Lecturer in Politics in Cambridge University. He was previously Professor of European Politics in the School of European Studies, Cardiff University, Wales, UK. JOSE´ M. MAGONE is Professor of Regional and Global Governance at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany. SAULIUS NEFAS is Associate Professor of Public Administration in the Faculty of Politics and Management at Mykolas Romeris University, Lithuania. PAVLINA NIKOLOVA is an International Relations Officer at the European Commission. SIMONA PIATTONI is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Trento (Italy), where she teaches Comparative Politics, European Politics, and Local Government. JEAN-BENOIˆT PILET is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

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PHILIPPE POIRIER is Professor of Political Science at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg and Associate Professor at the Colle`ge des Bernardins and Universite´ de Paris IV Sorbonne (Celsa), France. LAWRENCE E. ROSE is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. LINZE SCHAAP is Associate Professor of Public Administration in the Tilburg School of Politics and Public Administration at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. STANKA SETNIKAR-CANKAR is Professor of Economics of the Public Sector in the Faculty of Administration, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. STEFAN SJO¨BLOM is Professor of Local Administration at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Finland. GA´BOR SOO´S is Research Director of the Tocqueville Research Center Budapest, Hungary. GEORG SOOTLA is Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Political Science and Governance, Tallinn University, Estonia. KRISTOF STEYVERS is a Lecturer at the Centre for Local Politics, Department of Political Science of Ghent University, Belgium. PAWEŁ SWIANIEWICZ is Professor in the Department of Local Development and Policy, Faculty of Geography and Regional Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. JOLANTA VAICIUNIENE is Director of Municipal Training Center in the Faculty of Social Science at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania. ANDREKOS VARNAVA is Lecturer in Modern History in the School of International Studies. Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Flinders University, Australia. INGA VILKA is Assistant Professor in the Public Administration Department of the Faculty of Economics and Management at the University of Latvia. ELLEN WAYENBERG is Assistant Professor in Policy Analysis at University College Ghent and at Ghent University, Belgium. CHRISTALLA YAKINTHOU is Country Manager of the International Center for Transitional Justice’s Cyprus Program, and a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. CHRISTINA ZIMMER is Research Assistant at the Department of Political Science at FernUniversitaet in Hagen, Germany.

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I N T RO D U C T I O N S U B N AT I O N A L DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE: CHANGING B A C KG R O U N D S A N D THEORETICAL MODELS .............................................................................................

john loughlin frank hendriks anders lidstro¨ m

The Changing Context of Subnational Democracy

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Territorial governance in ‘Les Trente Glorieuses’ In the heyday of the welfare state (1945–75) the ‘nationalization’ of governance had gathered pace through a centralization and bureaucratization of public policy programmes which left regional and local authorities as primarily ‘agents’ with the function of delivering welfare services on behalf of central governments (the

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‘principals’). Although local authorities could become powerful actors in this scenario as was the case in the Scandinavian countries, in practice their political autonomy and room for manoeuvre was diminished. Furthermore, during this period democracy was accepted primarily as representative democracy, and other forms, such as direct or even participatory democracy were seen by some authors such as Schumpeter (1942) as undesirable. During the 1960s, however, there was a growing interest in other forms of democracy besides the representative, nationalized form, as evidenced, for example, in Carole Pateman’s seminal book Participation and Democratic Theory, published in 1970. The growing interest in forms of democracy besides the representative type must be placed in the context of the post-war welfare state. What the French called ‘Les Trente Glorieuses’—the thirty ‘glorious years’ between 1945 and 1975—was the period of post-war recovery in Western Europe when everything was expanding. Economic reconstruction assisted by the US Marshall Plan led to an economic boom and a continually rising population (the ‘baby boom’) in most Western European states. After the deprivations of the 1930s, economic depression, and the Second World War, European citizens demanded from their governments high levels of social and economic security. During this period most of the political and economic elites in Western Europe, whether from the Left or the Right, agreed that such an approach was necessary. Crouch (1999) calls this the ‘mid-century consensus’. This consensus led to two principal outcomes which were closely related to each other. First, most Western governments adopted a Keynesian model of economic state interventionism which sought to control market forces in order to achieve positive policy outcomes such as full employment and low inflation. Of course, different states adopted this approach in various ways, leading to the notion of ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice 2001). The Bretton Woods system of regulating international commercial and currency exchanges was an application of Keynesian ideas. Indeed, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), now the World Bank (WB), established at Bretton Woods were originally meant to be instruments of Keynesianism. Second, although various kinds of welfare state were being established in the same countries (EspingAnderson 1990), they all shared a number of features: they were centralized, highly bureaucratic and sought to impose a uniformity of social policy approaches and outcomes across the entire territory of the state (Loughlin 2009). Not everyone shared this consensus. Some of the New Left saw it as dangerous both for Marxist revolution—since they ‘bought off ’ and neutralized the revolutionary fervour of the working class—and also for the individual who meant to achieve full personal autonomy in all domains (Marcuse 1964). The most dramatic expressions of this discontent were the student revolts which culminated in the ‘events’ of May ’68 in Paris. However, these developments had, at first, little impact on the political systems of Western states, including their democratic

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systems. The other important school of thought which rejected the Keynesian economic approach and the welfare state were what we now call the New Right, a group of scholars from different disciplines, mostly based in the United States but many of whom were of European origin (see below). Finally, what is striking about this period of post-war political and economic history is that, although the European Community was created in the 1950s partly in response to the devastation of the Second World War and, in the minds of at least some of its founders, in order to overcome what they regarded as the harmful consequences of the nationstate by creating a European federation, in practice the EC only reinforced the latter, what Milward (1992) called ‘the European rescue of the nation-state’. After an initial phase when the foundations of a federal Europe were laid in the 1950s, the EC entered into a period of ‘sclerosis’, and the integration project would only come alive again with the crisis of the nation-state in the 1970s and 1980s. These developments would have an important impact on the theory and practice of democracy.

The shifting context of democracy: from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism The expansionism of the Trente Glorieuses began to falter in the 1970s. First, there was a series of interrelated crises: the 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the 1973 oil crisis, the failure of the traditional Keynesian approach to solve the economic problems of stagflation and rising unemployment, etc. One major response to these crises was the adoption of a set of ideas in economic, political, and social theory of the above-mentioned ‘New Right’ (Von Hayek 1962 [1944]; Friedman 1962; Niskanen 1971; Nozick 1974). These ideas subsequently became known as ‘neo-liberalism’, which can be interpreted as an ideology and policy approach directly opposed to the welfare state and Keynesian economic policies. It was also an important factor in the development of a new phase of globalization in the 1980s (Scholte 2005). The importance of neo-liberalism for individual nationstates, aside from the issue of globalization, lies in its adoption by the UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (elected in 1979) and the US President Ronald Reagan (elected in 1980) who used its ideas to attempt to undo some of the principal features of the welfare state which they held responsible for the economic and social crises of the 1970s. Although Thatcherism and Reaganism did not fully succeed in undermining the welfare state, they did introduce many reforms which significantly changed both its operating culture and the relations between state, society, and market. Whereas the welfare state had emphasized the state’s domination of the market and society, neo-liberalism attempted to place the market in the key position of dominance over both state and society.

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Administrative and policy reforms such as New Public Management (NPM), privatization, and deregulation were attempts to create market-like conditions within public administration. Those who promoted these reforms used the accelerating globalization of markets and economies as a justification that the reforms were inevitable (Hirst and Thomson 1996). The importance of globalization came home to many people, perhaps for the first time, with the financial crisis which began in 2007 in the US sub-prime mortgage markets and which quickly spread to threaten the world’s entire banking system and began to affect the ‘real’ economy as well. The crisis sparked an unprecedented mobilization of governments across the world to rescue the financial system through pumping astronomical amounts of currency into the banks to prop them up and to absorb their ‘toxic’ debts. What these developments revealed was that finance and banking had become truly global with markets that largely escaped the control of national governments or even international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. How had this come about? The answer to this question lies in the developments already discussed above of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of international financial regulation and the emergence of a new neo-liberal order which has been largely unregulated or only with very light forms of regulation. Some authors such as Hirst and Thomson (1996) have expressed scepticism as to whether the current phase of globalization is really different from forms of globalization that were already happening towards the end of the nineteenth century. Most scholars today, however, accept that a qualitatively and quantitatively new form of globalization began in the 1980s, closely related to what we have identified above as neo-liberalism (Held and McGrew 2003; Scholte 2005). Although globalization has not abolished the nation-state, it has significantly modified the international system in which nationstates operate (Srensen 2008) as well as the internal functioning of nation-states (Scholte 2005). The key change has been the shift from national political, economic, and social systems characterized by their largely self-contained character, to systems that are much more open and ‘porous’ (Bartolini 2005).

Globalization, neo-liberalism, and territorial governance The neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s also had an important impact on territorial governance understood as the relations between central and subnational governments. During the period of welfare state hegemony the relationship was largely a ‘principal–agent’ relationship, where the ‘principal’ was the central state of which the local authorities were ‘agents’ delivering public services on their behalf (Caulfield 2000). The crisis of the welfare state model and the emergence of neoliberalism meant a shift from this ‘principal–agent’ model to one that was more

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characterized by ‘choice’. In effect, this shift was the application of the neo-liberal conception of governance, based on competition through the creation of marketlike conditions, to the level of territorial governance (Loughlin 2009). It was reinforced by demands from an expanding, well-educated middle class that from the 1980s came to replace the working class as the main social force in most European countries. The middle class tended to have more individualistic values and emphasize the right to choose between service providers. In the United States, where the welfare state tends to be weak and exists only in some of the more ‘liberal’ states such as those in New England, this application took the form of ‘fiscal federalism’, which suggested that political decentralization was, in effect, an attempt to create market-like conditions in local government (Oates 1999). In fiscal federalism, local citizens are regarded as ‘consumers’ of public services and the high degree of mobility in US society meant that they could easily move around to ‘shop’ for the best services in different localities. Fiscal federalism, however, could not work in European societies not least because of the low levels of mobility of citizens in European states. Furthermore, it would be difficult to apply given the strong redistributive policies of the European welfare state system. This is not to say that decentralization did not occur in Western Europe during this period (Sharpe 1979; Page and Goldsmith 1987; Hesse and Sharpe 1991; Lidstro¨m 2003; Denters and Rose 2005). However, these trends were primarily about decongesting top-heavy regulatory political and administrative systems by devolving some functions to lower levels, often without granting a high level of political autonomy. Nevertheless, at times, they did seek to give local authorities greater freedom to develop their own policy approaches and even their own institutional organization without detailed regulation ‘from above’. This was one of the underlying rationales (among others) of the French 1982 decentralization reforms (Loughlin 2007). In the late 1980s, the Scandinavian countries, beginning with Sweden, initiated a set of reforms known as the ‘Free Commune’1 experiment, which tried to lessen government regulation in specified policy areas such as education or health care (Baldersheim and Sta˚hlberg 1994). These reforms have now been ‘mainstreamed’ into the Scandinavian local government systems. Of course, the underlying rationale of these reforms was to streamline the policy and administrative systems of the countries carrying them out. Nevertheless, there was also a growing realization that political decentralization and local autonomy were important elements of democracy itself. This can be seen in the development of the idea by a number of international organizations such as the Council of Europe and the United Nations.

1 Also called the ‘Self-regulating Municipality’.

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European integration Although it is sometimes seen as a self-contained development driven by purely intra-European factors, the ‘relaunch’ of the process of European integration in the early 1980s was to a great extent a response to the challenges of globalization. Confronted by the economic and social crises of the 1970s, the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERTI) met in the Paris boardroom of Volvo in 1983 to discuss their response. The industrialists realized that no single European state could adequately tackle the problems alone but that it would be much better if they did so together. In 1992 the Single Market project was launched as the means by which further integration would be achieved. This led to the signing of the Single European Act (SEA) and the Single Market was largely completed by the deadline of 1 January 1993, but it entailed further revisions of the Treaties at Maastricht (1993), Amsterdam (1997), and Nice (2001). A further important development was the collapse of the USSR and the other communist regimes in East and Central Europe and the Balkans from 1989 onwards. This opened up the prospect of a significant enlargement of the EU with the number of member states reaching thirty or even more. Indeed, the Treaties of Amsterdam and Nice were in large part attempts to revise the EU institutions in order to accommodate the increased number of members. But an even more ambitious project was the drafting and approval in 2004 of a Constitutional Treaty by the Convention on the Future of Europe presided over by the former French president Vale´ry Giscard d’Estaing. Unfortunately for those who wished to see a strengthened European Union, the Constitutional Treaty fell with the failure of the 2005 referendums in France and the Netherlands to approve it. A modified version of the Constitutional Treaty took shape in the Lisbon Treaty signed in 2007 and was finally ratified in 2009. In the meantime, enlargements in 2004 and 2007 brought the number of EU member states to twenty-seven with eight new states from the former communist bloc plus Malta and Cyprus. Without going into all the details of these developments, it is clear that they have had important consequences for territorial governance in the member states.

Linking decentralization and local democracy: The Committee of the Regions, the Council of Europe and UN-HABITAT The Committee of the Regions was set up only in 1994 by the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht) which was signed in 1992. Maastricht was a revision of the EC Treaties necessitated by the 1987 Single European Act (SEA). This was primarily about reforming the main EC institutions and adapting them to the forthcoming single market. However, it also included important provisions relating to the ‘regional question’. The regional question had moved to the top of the political

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agenda as EU member states such as Spain, Ireland, Italy, and Portugal, all of whom possessed economically underdeveloped regions, had feared that the new European market would further disadvantage these regions. In order to secure their agreement for the single market, the EC had agreed to upgrade its regional policy2 by combining a number of funds (the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and part of the Agricultural Fund) into what became known as the Structural Funds (Marks 1992). There were several reforms of the policy in the mid-1980s and early 1990s (Loughlin 1997). Two aspects of the reforms are important. First, the amount of money available for underdeveloped regions was increased. Second, they included the adoption of the principles of subsidiarity and partnership, which meant that subnational authorities and other entities were involved in the implementation of the policy. In practice this meant that regions and local authorities across Europe could access funding which, although tiny in comparison with total EC funding, could be significant for the locality in question. This led to quite a vast mobilization of subnational authorities across Europe (Borras-Alomar et al. 1994; Keating and Loughlin 1997; Jeffery 1997; Keating 1998; Loughlin 2005). At the same time, other groups were putting the ‘regional question’ onto the political agenda. The German La¨nder were concerned that the EC was eating into their prerogatives by dealing only with the Federal government in areas of their competence (e.g. regional policy) (Jeffery 1994). The European Commission’s Directorate-General (DG XVI) responsible for regional policy was also engaged in promoting the issue. Finally, while pan-European regional and local authority institutions had existed for many years, the regional policy reforms gave them a new lease of life, and a new association—the Assembly of European Regions—was set up in 1985 in order to promote the ‘regional interest’ as such in Europe. This was the context in which the Committee of the Regions was established (Warleigh 1999). However, there was a clear divergence of opinion between, on the one hand, these ardent regionalists, some of whom sought something like a European Bundesrat in which the regions could exercise an important influence on European legislation, and, on the other hand, several national governments involved in the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) preparing the Maastricht Treaty, who wished to limit the role of regions. As a result, the Committee which was finally established, far from being a fully-fledged ‘institution’, representing the ‘Third Level’ of European decision-making, was merely an advisory ‘body’ with the same constitutional status as the Economic and Social Committee (ESC).3

2 Heretofore, European Regional Policy was primarily about ensuring that national regional policies did not interfere with the mechanisms of the market, that is, were not national subsidies to particular economic sectors. 3 A ‘body’ is constitutionally less important than an ‘institution’. The CoR has continually lobbied, with little success, to be granted the status of the latter.

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Nevertheless, although its constitutional status was identical to the ESC, the CoR moved quickly to become, in practice, a rather different kind of body, not least because it was composed of elected politicians rather than the unelected if worthy dignitaries that were found in the ESC (Loughlin 1996). The Council of Europe (CoE) is an intergovernmental body, founded in 1949, which groups together forty-seven European states stretching from Ireland to Russia and from Finland to Portugal.4 It was founded to promote human rights and democracy. It does so by promulgating various ‘Charters’ and ‘Conventions’ dealing with particular aspects of rights or democratic practice. From its very beginning, the Council paid special attention to democracy at the local level. In 1957, it established the Conference of Local Authorities of Europe. In 1975, this became the Conference of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe and included for the first time representatives of European regions. In 1979, it was renamed the Standing Conference of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe. The Standing Conference was responsible for promulgating, in 1985, the European Charter of Local Self-Government (henceforth the Charter) which was concerned to define the conditions of local autonomy vis-a`-vis central (and regional) authorities. In 1994, there was a further strengthening with the upgrading of the Standing Conference which became the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe (CLRAE). The CLRAE became one of the principal institutions of the Council alongside the Committee of Ministers, the Parliamentary Assembly and the European Court of Human Rights. The promulgation of the Charter may be interpreted as local authorities seeking to free themselves from the excessive regulation by central (and/or regional) governments. It is essentially concerned with laying out the conditions necessary for the exercise of local autonomy and the rights of local authorities vis-a`-vis their national (or regional) governments. These conditions cover issues such as local fiscal autonomy, the right to adequate funding to carry out tasks designated by superior levels of government, the right to self-organization, etc. The importance of the Charter lies in the fact that it is a Treaty-like document which, once signed and ratified5 by a member state may be used by the Council to hold that state to account with regard to the Charter’s implementation. The CLRAE monitors this implementation through a committee of independent experts, one from each of the forty-seven member states.6 The Council of Europe played an important role in the transition to democracy of the countries of East and Central Europe following the collapse of the communist regimes after 1989. Another CoE body, the Venice Commission (also known as

4 For the full list of member states of the Council of Europe, consult its official website: http:// www.coe.int. 5 As of 2009, forty-four of the forty-seven member states had signed and ratified the Charter. 6 Two of the editors of this book, Anders Lidstro¨m and John Loughlin, and some of the authors who have contributed chapters, are members of this committee.

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the European Commission for Democracy through Law), established in 1990, assisted the new democratic states in drawing up constitutions and legislation which conformed to the highest standards of Western liberal democracy. Many of these new constitutions incorporated the principles of the European Charter of Local Self-Government and also gave expression to them in subsequent legislation. The Committee of Independent Experts of the CLRAE monitors all forty-seven member states, including of course the new democracies, to ensure that these principles are honoured in practice. It is true that the reality often falls far short of the constitutional principles, but the Charter provides an important benchmark against which to measure progress. During the 1990s, the principle that effective political decentralization is an essential element of ‘good governance’ gained further recognition through one of the organizations of the United Nations. UN-HABITAT, which is responsible for local development and urban issues, drew up a set of ‘guidelines’ approved unanimously by its Governing Council at their annual meeting in Nairobi in April 2007. The guidelines drew on the European Charter but developed it further. The Charter had been primarily concerned with defending the rights and autonomy of local authorities vis-a`-vis central and regional governments but paid little attention to the relationship between local authorities and their own citizens and groups from the wider civil society. The guidelines pay particular attention to the latter question and include sections on participatory democracy as well as on local governance including relations with societal groups.

Factors behind the trends towards decentralization These shifts in global and national governance have had a profound impact on the positions of regional and local authorities. First, while national governments remain the key level of national decision-making, they themselves are part of a system of global governance, which is ‘multi-level governance’ in a wider sense, where decisions affecting their citizens are taken by organizations that are often hidden and beyond democratic control. This has ‘relativized’ the position of national governments and undermined their position as the guardians of national sovereignty. This is the context in which regional and local authorities have reinforced their own claims to democratic legitimacy. Second, as national borders have become more ‘porous’, with numerous ‘exit’ possibilities, subnational authorities have, to some extent at least, ‘escaped’ from the control of their own national governments (Bartolini 2005). This has allowed some, although not all, of them to develop links and activities outside their own national borders a development sometimes called ‘paradiplomacy’ (Duchacek 1986; Michelmann and Soldatos 1990). Third, as indicated above, economic organization shifted from being ‘national’ to being ‘global’ (Scholte 2005). This has had important consequences for

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subnational authorities, particularly regions, whose functions often include economic development. The shifting priorities of national governments, influenced by a neo-liberal approach to economic development, meant that there were fewer resources available from central authorities to assist subnational governments in a direct ‘top-down’ manner. The latter were increasingly obliged to adopt a more competitive and ‘bottom-up’ approach to economic development which sometimes pitted them against other regions and local authorities within their own states as well as internationally, which is sometimes called ‘competitive regionalism’. It was in the 1980s and 1990s that a new model of regional development emerged, with names such as the ‘learning’ or ‘innovative’ region being employed (Cooke and Morgan 1998). City-regions and metropolitan areas were becoming increasingly important as habitats and centres for economic activities. From 1950 to 2007, the share of Europeans living in cities increased from 50 to 72 per cent (UN 2008). In order to address common needs in the city-regions new levels of governance were established. Although there are examples of directly elected metropolitan governments (e.g. Greater London Authority), the strengthening of city-regions has mainly paved the way for an extensive use of inter-municipal cooperation (e.g. in France) (Hendriks et al. 2001; Le Gale`s 2002; Heinelt and Ku¨bler 2005). Fourth, the economic transformations which resulted from the new globalization affected the structures, values, and organization of society itself. This became particularly important with the spread of new technologies, and not least the internet and the mobile phone. This has led to a number of contradictory developments which pose challenges for local authorities. On the one hand, the new communication possibilities allow citizens to be more aware of what is happening in the world and also allow them to enter into direct contact with their political and administrative systems. On the other hand, and somewhat paradoxically, they have also led to increasing fragmentation, isolation, and individualism. Citizens are less inclined today to become involved in any kind of organization and we have witnessed a decline in membership of trade unions, political parties, churches, choral societies, and other forms of association. The American political scientist Robert Putnam has a striking image of this phenomenon in the title of his seminal book: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Putnam 2000).7 Since regional and local authorities are alleged to represent their regional and local ‘communities’, this poses a serious challenge to the basis of their existence and to the concept of regional and local democracy (Loughlin et al. 2001). Undoubtedly, all of these challenges also represent opportunities for subnational authorities to develop new forms of democratic participation as well as new forms of organization designed to meet the challenges of globalized political, economic, and cultural systems. 7 Putnam draws attention to the fact that people in America increasingly go to the bowling alley alone to play against themselves rather than with companions.

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Theoretical Approaches

................................................................................................................ The approach developed in this book is to use two main sets of theoretical constructs—state tradition and democratic type—both to compare across all twenty-nine country cases and to attempt to understand the central phenomenon: subnational democracy in Europe.

Table 0.1 State traditions Features

State tradition Anglo-Saxon

Germanic

French

Scandinavian

Is there a legal basis for the ‘State’

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

State—society relations

Pluralistic

Organicist

Antagonistic

Organicist

Form of political organization

Union state/ limited federalist

Integral/ organic federalist

Jacobin, ‘one and indivisible’

Decentralized unitary

Basis of policy style

Incrementalist ‘muddling through’

Legal corporatist

Legal technocratic

Consensual

Form of decentralization

‘State power’ (US); devolution/ local government (UK)

Cooperative federalism

Regionalized unitary state

Strong local autonomy

Dominant approach to discipline of public administration

Political science’sociology

Public law

Public law

Public law (Sweden); organization theory (Norway)

Countries

UK; US; Canada (but not Quebec); Ireland

Germany; Austria; Netherlands; Spain (after 1978); Belgium (after 1988)

France; Italy; Spain (until 1978); Portugal; Quebec; Greece; Belgium (until 1988)

Sweden; Norway; Denmark

Source: Loughlin and Peters (1997).

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State traditions Here we build on the notion of ‘State Traditions’ which was initially introduced by Dyson (1980) and developed subsequently by Loughlin and Peters (1997). This typology helps to organize states into groupings. This is a useful starting-point since the state tradition will often lay down sets of parameters which determine the conditions within which democracy, at both national and subnational levels, is understood and practised. An initial distinction that may be made is between countries in the ‘Anglo’ tradition—the UK, Ireland (as well as the US, Canada, Australia, etc.)—and the countries of continental Europe. In the Anglo tradition, the ‘state’ as such does not exist in the same way that it exists in the other European countries on the continent, that is, as an entity with its own legal personality— what is called in French ‘une personne morale’. On continental Europe, the state, as a ‘moral person’, is capable of entering into contractual relations with other legal entities such as local authorities, universities, or, indeed, private enterprises. One example of this is the ‘contrats de plan Etat—re´gion’ which the French state signs with its regions. In the Anglo tradition, one usually speaks of ‘government’ or government departments rather than the state. Another important difference is that in the Anglo tradition, government was traditionally dominated by society, while in the continental tradition it is rather the state which dominates society. These differences have influenced other aspects of both approaches to understanding policy and state–society relations. For example, in the Anglo tradition, and particularly in the US, politics is dominated by a pluralistic approach emphasizing the role of groups, with government departments being considered simply as ‘groups’ alongside the groups of civil society. Similarly, public administration is less concerned with constitutional-legal structures and more with the power relations that exist behind these structures as in the theory of ‘intergovernmental relations’ developed by Wright (1978) and popularized in the UK case by Rhodes (1979). The continental European tradition of understanding politics and public administration, on the other hand, has its roots not in the ‘social sciences’ but in public law. This emphasizes the role of the state and parliamentary legislation in defining policy over and above society. The continental tradition was strongly influenced both by traditions of Roman law and the legacy of the Napoleon code, admittedly mostly present in Southern Europe. Nevertheless, there are also interesting differences among the countries of continental Europe, which we have resumed under three broad categories: French, Germanic, and Scandinavian. The key contrasts here are between the French and the Germanic approaches. In each case, there is a distinctive understanding of the nature of the state and the nation and the relationship between state and society. The Germanic tradition has more of a corporatist and organic character with groups from civil society being incorporated into the policy-making functions of the state itself. The nation is conceived as a corporate body based on

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a common language and culture which transcended the territorial fragmentation of the German lands during the nineteenth century. The French tradition is quite different and conceives the state as somehow embodying the nation but where the nation is a collection of individual citizens joined together by a ‘general will’. Sometimes, German nationalism is expressed as ‘ethnos’, while the French understanding is expressed as ‘demos’. One is born into a specific German culture, while one may choose to become French. Of course, the two concepts become intertwined with the arrival of the modern nation-state since Germanic ethnos also implies demos and French demos evolves into ethnos, where French citizenship also means adoption of French language and culture. The Scandinavian tradition stands somewhere between the Anglo and the Germanic and bears some resemblance to the French tradition. Like the Anglo tradition it has a tradition of selfreliant communities, giving it strong local government but, like the German, it has a strong state with some corporatist features. Like the French tradition, it emphasizes central control and uniformity. State traditions also express distinct forms of territorial governance. The French tradition tends towards a high degree of centralization and uniformity. The Germanic tradition is marked by organic federalism. The Anglo tradition, given its weak form of ‘state’, has a pragmatic and ad hoc form of territorial governance. The Scandinavian tradition, as mentioned above, has a strong central state but also strong local governments. Table 0.1 illustrates some of these dimensions and also assigns countries to particular traditions. These boxes should be seen simply as starting-points: some countries will be influenced by several traditions, although most countries have a dominant state tradition. One theme emerging out of this book is that almost all states are, in practice, ‘hybrid’. The organization of the book—the clusters of countries—to some extent reflects these broad similarities although there are also important divergences within clusters (e.g. Spain, although coming from the Napoleonic tradition, has evolved into something like a federal state). The Loughlin/Peters typology was used in the original 2001 version of this book but, in the current version, we have supplemented it with another typology which seeks to refine it from the perspective of subnational democracy (see the next section). In the coming chapters we distinguish between: the British Isles (Ireland and the UK); the Rhinelandic states (the Benelux, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland); the Nordic states (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway); the Southern European states (Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain); and the ‘New Democracies’ (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia). In the case of the countries of Western Europe, these categories more or less correspond with the four state traditions of the Loughlin/Peters typology. The ‘New Democracies’ are more problematic and, although in most cases have been influenced by the four traditions, they are in fact quite heterogeneous. Although they all share a common history of communism and the transition to democracy (see the

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Conclusions of this book for further reflections on this), their pre-communist histories are quite distinct. Some of them shared the historical experiences of Western Europe such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution and the rise of liberal democracy. Others, in contrast, were part of the Ottoman or Russian Empires which had not experienced these developments to the same extent. Although these longer-term historical influences should not be exaggerated, neither should they be ignored as it may be that a particular country had historical memories, however repressed, of democratic life, while others had simply never experienced this. Furthermore, individual countries among the new democracies had ancient links and affinities with other European countries—Poland and Romania with France, Estonia with Finland, Hungary with Austria, etc. In many cases, these ancient links were revived with the fall of communism and as the new democracies reached out to Western Europe. We shall return to some of these issues and explore them in the light of the findings in the twenty-nine case studies. We will now turn to our theoretical reflections on the nature of subnational democracy.

Models of democracy Lijphart (1999) has made a fundamental distinction between majoritarian ‘Westminster democracy’ on the one hand, and cooperative ‘consensus democracy’ on the other. He distinguishes these along the federal—unitary and the politics— executives dimensions. Hendriks (2010) has used the Lijphart scheme in an amended and expanded way, to allow it to incorporate subnational democracy. He distinguishes between four competing models of democracy: pendulum democracy, consensus democracy, voter democracy, and participatory democracy (see Table 0.2). These four models are the result of interrelating two basic distinctions that are well known but commonly kept apart in the existing literature:

Aggregative versus integrative democracy. The key question here is: how are democratic decisions taken? Are they taken in an aggregative (majoritarian) process, in which a simple majority of 50 per cent þ 1 eventually wins, even if this majority is up against sizeable minorities? Or are decisions taken in an integrative (non-majoritarian, deliberative) process, in which people attempt to reach the widest possible— ideally complete—agreement? Is it ‘the winner takes all’ or is it a process of consensus building? Is it majoritarian ‘voting’ or deliberative ‘conferring’?8

8 The distinction between majoritarian versus non-majoritarian is well known from the works by Lijphart (1999). Cognate categorizations, such as aggregative versus integrative, have been made by March and Olsen (1989).

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Table 0.2 Models of democracy Aggregative (majoritarian)

Integrative (non-majoritarian)

Indirect (representation)

Pendulum democracy

Consensus democracy

Direct (self-determination)

Voter democracy

Participatory democracy

Direct versus indirect democracy. The key question here is: who is eventually taking the decisions? Do citizens designate representatives who eventually take the decisions (the indirect-democracy option)? Or do members of the community eventually take the decisions themselves (the direct-democracy option)? Is it public decision-making ‘by all concerned’ or ‘in other people’s stead’? Is it a democracy of ‘lookers-on’ or a democracy of ‘do-it-yourselfers’?9 Pendulum democracy refers to the model of democracy in which political power alternates between two competing political formations and their leaders—like the pendulum of a clock. Its best-known manifestation is the so-called Westminster model. Pendulum democracy is fundamentally indirect and representative in nature. Citizens periodically cast their votes and hand over decision-making powers to their elected representatives. Decision-making is largely majoritarian and aggregative: the winner takes all in constituencies, because of the ‘first-pastthe-post’ electoral system; the government is monopolized by the winning party, even if its majority is minimal. In pendulum democracy, broad-based citizen participation focuses on the brief period of elections. Policy implementation, policy preparation, agenda-setting, and political control are taken over from citizens by the elected politicians as much as possible. According to its supporters, a major advantage of pendulum democracy is that the voters’ signals given in general elections make themselves vigorously felt, first in political representation, and then in government formation and policy-making. A party that loses elections can hardly win executive power, as is possible in consensus democracies. Voter democracy combines aggregative decision-making with direct popular rule, unmediated by political representation. Citizens participate in voter democracy by casting their votes in plebiscites, either on a small scale, as in assembly meetings, or on a large scale, as in referendums. A nice example of voter democracy is the New England town meeting, where citizens take decisions on public matters in assembly (by show of hands, count of ayes and nays, and majority rule). A more large-scale manifestation of this type is the California-style decision-making proposition 9 The distinction between direct and indirect democracy is well known and often made. See Dahl (2000). The distinction between the spectator or ‘looker-on’, who stays out, and the do-it-yourselfer or gladiator, who enters the arena, can be found in the work of L. W. Milbrath and M. L. Goel (1982); see also Manin (1987).

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(referendum), in which a simple majority decides binary questions (for or against a particular proposition; aye or nay). Such plebiscites are often foreshadowed by opinion polls, consumer surveys and the like, which can also be aggregated efficiently and numerically. Its proponents feel that the strength of voter democracy lies in citizens’ non-dependence on others for having their voices heard and their preferences in public matters counted—a critical mass of preference indicators enables them to compel attention and force decisions in a way that is straightforward, loud and clear. Participatory democracy combines direct self-governance with integrative decision-making. It is illustrated by classic as well as contemporary cases of ‘communal’ self-rule, ‘communicative’ and ‘deliberative’ citizen governance. In a participatory democracy, a minority would never be simply overruled by a straightforward numerical majority; minorities are to be included not excluded. If done at all, counting heads only takes place in the final stages of decision-making, and serves to confirm shared views rather than to take decisions. Decision-making is first and foremost a process of engaging in thorough, preferably transformative, and usually lengthy deliberations to search for consensus. The widespread participation of all involved—in agenda-setting, policy preparation, implementation and control—is considered the best way of warranting the legitimacy of collective decision-making. In a participatory democracy, everyone has the same right to raise and debate an issue, and relations are largely horizontal, open, and ‘power-free’, that is, no one can issue an ultimatum or a veto from a position of power. The strength of participatory democracy is the cultivation of concord and commonality, its proponents contend. Consensus democracy refers to a general model of democracy, a specific version of which can be found in countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria; this particular version, developed in the context of historically divided societies, is also called ‘consociational democracy’. The general model of consensus democracy is basically indirect and integrative. Representatives of groups and sections of society are the prime decision-makers. They go about their business in an integrative and consensus-seeking way, usually in a conference-room or round-table type of setting. Collective decision-making largely tends to take place in co-producing, co-governing, and coalition-oriented ways and aims to establish consensus and broad-based support. The majority preferably does not overrule substantial minorities by simply counting heads; policies are preferably built on a broad platform of support, both politically and socially. In the agendasetting and preparatory stages, representatives of social interest groups and specific sections of the population are widely consulted; in implementing policies, civil society and third-sector organizations are also widely involved. Integration and collaboration are seen as core qualities. Democratic practice is the result of a dynamic process of push and pull between these models of democracy. Pendulum democracy may be most prominent in some

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countries, and consensus democracy in others (Lijphart 1999), but this never occurs in an exclusive or uncontested way. Functioning democratic systems, ‘vital democracies’, are usually hybrids of different models (Hendriks 2010).

Subnational Europe: extending the analysis of democracy National and subnational democracy. To some extent, our research has been guided and inspired by Lijphart’s (1999) study of democracy in thirty-six countries around the world. Reporting on a great number of countries in one volume, Lijphart focuses on the formal institutions of the national state. In our book—focusing on subnational democracy in European countries—we attempt to look beyond the statal and formal patterns of democracy, to analyse its formal and informal manifestations at the regional and local levels. Nevertheless, subnational expressions of democracy are embedded within national state systems, which means that Lijphart’s basic dichotomy between Westminster and consensus democracy is still a useful starting-point. In this book we wish to develop Lijphart’s conceptualization in a number of ways. First, we will translate the majoritarian/non-majoritarian divide from the national or macro level to the subnational or meso level of institutional analysis (the micro level being the level of individual actor analysis). The democratic logic that colours the nation or state to a large extent also colours the town or place embedded within the nation or state—at least, this is often assumed, which calls for critical scrutiny. Abstracting from specificities, Hendriks (2010) breaks down pendulum democracy at the local level into ten structural characteristics, referring to Lijphart’s (1999) well-known ten-item characterization of representative-majoritarian democracy at the national level. Translating ‘Lijphart’ from the macro to the meso institutional level gives the following:

· concentration of executive power in one-party local government supported by a simple local council majority; executive dominance in monistic (as opposed to dualistic) relations between local · council and government; · a two-party system, with one party in government and the other in opposition; dichotomy of local government and opposition; a · majoritarian, district-based, winner-takes-all electoral system; local districts as constituencies; a · pluralist interest group system with free-for-all competition; uncoordinated and competitive; every local interest acting for itself; centralized and unitary local government; weak sub-local institutions and strong · central institutions; ‘consolidated corporation’, one and undivided;

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· concentration of regulatory powers; local government along the vertical lines of council committees and related sectoral bureaucracies; · home rule; strong sense of local autonomy, weak sense of co-government; · limited legal-administrative supervision; preventive and repressive tutelage weakly developed; · financial-economic auditing under local political control; independent local auditing weakly developed.

The translation of Lijphart’s executives-parties dimension from the national to the local level is quite straightforward. Translation of the federal-unitary dimension requires a bit more flexibility. The basic question here is, whether governmental relations resemble those of a decentralized federation, involving a great deal of power dispersal and sharing, as well as checks and balances; or whether they rather resemble those of a centralized unitary system, involving little of the former but a great deal of ‘home rule’, local autonomy and concentration of regulatory powers, combined with few ‘autonomous nosy parkers’, such as independent financialeconomic auditing and external legal-administrative supervision. Likewise, the logic of consensus democracy can be translated from the macro to the meso institutional level as well. In an ideal-typical manner, consensus democracy would be characterized by the following local institutions:

· executive power-sharing in broad multiparty coalitions; local government by coalition; balanced and dualistic relations between local council and government; a · multiparty system with usually more than one ruling party and more than one in opposition; an · electoral system of proportional representation; no winner-take-all district model for distributing council seats; · a coordinated interest group system; ‘local corporatism’ stressing interest mediation and coordination; decentralized, quasi-federal government; multi-tier and multi-unit local govern· ment; dispersal of regulatory powers; strong need for horizontal coordination of policy · sectors; · institutionalized interdependency; strong sense of co-responsibility; tradition of co-governance and co-production; · legal-administrative supervision; preventive and repressive oversight by external bodies; independent financial-economic auditing; audits by external bodies or local · ‘courts of audit’.

The two patterns of meso-level democracy are ideal-types. Real-existing institutions of local democracy will to some extent, but never fully, converge to these patterns.

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Indirect and direct democracy. We will supplement Lijphart’s dichotomy by paying due attention to patterns of direct democracy, in addition to the patterns of indirect democracy that Lijphart works with. By adding voter democracy and participatory democracy, both models of ‘do-it-yourself democracy’, our palette of colours allows us to paint with greater range and richness. Surely, direct democracy is not confined to the subnational realm. Referendums, for example, have been organized both nationally and subnationally. Experiments with deliberative democracy have focused on very local but also very national issues. But, the subnational realm does present a relatively fertile breeding ground for expressions of, and experiments with, direct democracy—more so than the national level. In general we can say: the more large-scale and macro-level the governance system, the more likely it is that models of representative democracy are central and models of direct democracy secondary or even marginal (Lijphart 1999; Dahl 2000). Subnational democracy in Europe displays many elements of what has previously been described as voter democracy and participatory democracy. The local or regional referendum (a simple majority of voters chooses directly between option ‘A’ or ‘B’) is probably the first thing that comes to mind to most observers. The logic of voter democracy inspires other popular instruments of subnational governance like urban panels, local polls, regional surveys and the like (individual opinions and preferences are amassed, aggregated, and numerically compared and in the end the biggest number carries the biggest weight). Amsterdam was one of the first towns to develop a virtual existence as ‘digital city’; many other towns, and also some regions, have followed with internet sites where citizens can communicate, assemble, and sometimes vote in a virtual way. Internet polls are typically aggregative (‘63 per cent in favour of a central car park, 37 per cent against’), internet fora are often more integrative, sometimes even explicitly ‘deliberative’ (without steering or conditions imposed from above). Traces of participatory democracy can be found in various experiments with ‘communicative’ planning, ‘deliberative’ decision-making, and ‘participatory’ budgeting in regions, cities, and neighbourhoods. These are just a few examples of what is explored in this book. Formal and informal democracy. Third and last, our analysis will be sensitive to the fact that democracy—particularly subnational democracy—is not only expressed through formalized institutions but also through semi-formal or even informal institutions. Direct democracy can be expressed through formalized instruments such as local referendums, but, as we have shown in the previous section, it may also be expressed through non-formalized methods such as those used in processes of ‘participative’, ‘interactive’, ‘communicative’, or ‘deliberative’ decisionmaking. These are not described in constitutional or communal law, although they

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have become common practice in many cases. Representative democracy may be explicitly majoritarian or non-majoritarian in a formal analysis, but pendulum democracy and consensus democracy are not only expressed by lines on the politico-administrative map. They are also cultivated by informal and often unwritten rules-of-thumb and guiding precepts. Such notions and precepts underlie the real world of democracy that we are interested in.

Organization of the Book

................................................................................................................ First, we requested the contributors to examine whether the above models were useful in analysing their particular countries. Some responded to this request with greater fidelity than others but most did attempt to apply the theoretical models at least to some extent. In any case, the authors did pay due attention to the institutions of subnational democracy in addition to the patterns of national democracy that Lijphart focuses on. Second, they identified not only models of indirect democracy but also models of direct democracy, using the fourfold typology outlined above. Third, they were sensitive to the non-formalized elements of democratic culture in addition to the formalized, structural patterns of subnational democracy in Europe. And finally, they did connect patterns of subnational democracy to state traditions as manifested at the subnational levels of governance. We shall make a more systematic analysis of our findings from the country chapters in the Conclusions of this book. The book includes chapters on each of the twenty-seven member states of the European Union as well as Norway and Switzerland. Although this is not all of the countries of Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, it does provide an almost complete compilation of these countries. The chapters are divided into five sections each corresponding to our macro-country groupings. Each chapter follows a common structure although there are some variations within each chapter, which is justified by the distinctive constitutional and political organization of each country. The book concludes with a set of conclusions which attempt to identify some general features of European subnational democracy and also to apply both the state traditions and the subnational democracy models.

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REFERENCES Baldersheim, H. and K. Sta˚hlberg (eds.) (1994). Towards the Self-Regulating Municipality: Free Communes and Administrative Modernization in Scandinavia. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bartolini, S. (2005). Restructuring Europe: Centre Formation, System Building and Political Structuring between the Nation-State and the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Borras-Alomar, S., T. Christiansen, and A. Rodriguez-Pose (1994). ‘Towards a “Europe of the regions”? Visions and reality from a critical perspective’, Regional and Federal Studies 4/2, pp. 1–27. Caulfield, J. (2000). ‘Local Government Finance in OECD Countries’, Paper presented to Local Government at the Millenium International Seminar, 19 February 2000, University of New South Wales. Cooke, P. and K. Morgan (1998). The Associational Economy: Firms, Regions, and Innovation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crouch, C. (1999). Social Change in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dahl, R. A. (2000). On Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Denters, B. and L. E. Rose (eds.) (2005). Comparing Local Governance: Trends and Developments. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Duchacek, I. (1986). The Territorial Dimension of Politics: Within, Among, and Across Nations. Boulder and London: Westview Press. Dyson, K. E. (1980). The State Tradition in Western Europe: a Study of an Idea and Institution. Oxford: Robertson. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hall, P. and D. W. Soskice (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Held, D. and A. McGrew (eds.) (2003). The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heinelt, H. and D. Ku¨bler (eds.) (2005). Metropolitan Governance: Capacity, Democracy and the Dynamics of Place. Baington: Routledge. Hendriks, F. (2010). Vital Democracy: A Theory of Democracy in Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hendriks, F., V. van Stipdonk, and P. Tops (eds.) (2001). Urban-Regional Governance: Practices and Prospects, The Hague: Reed Elsevier. Hesse, J. J. and L. J. Sharpe (1991). ‘Local government in international perspective: some comparative perspectives’, in J. J. Hesse (ed.), Local Government and Urban Affairs in International Perspective: Analyses of 20 Western Industrialised Countries. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Hirst, P. and G. Thomson (1996). Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jeffery, C. (1994). ‘The La¨nder Strike Back: Structure and Procedures of European Integration Policy-Making in the German Federal System’. Discussion Papers in Federal Studies: FS 94/4, University of Leicester.

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Jeffery, C. (ed.) (1997). The Regional Dimension of the European Union: Towards a Third Level in Europe? London: Frank Cass. John, P. (2001). Local Governance in Western Europe. London: Sage. Keating, M. (1998). The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Keating, M. and J. Loughlin (eds.) (1997). The Political Economy of Regionalism. London: Routledge. Le Gale`s, P. (2002). European Cities: Social Conflicts and Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lidstro¨m, A. (2003). Kommunsystem i Europa [Local Government Systems in Europe]. Malmo¨: Liber fo¨rlag. Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirtysix Countries. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Loughlin, J. (1996). ‘Representing regions in Europe: the Committee of the Regions’, Regional and Federal Studies: An International Journal 6/2, pp. 147–65. Loughlin, J. (1997). ‘Regional policy in the European Union’, in S. Stavridis et al. (eds.), New Challenges to the European Union: Policies and Policy-making. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Loughlin, J. (2005). ‘The regional question, subsidiarity and the future of Europe’, in S. Weatherill and U. Bernitz (eds.), The Role of Regions and Sub-national Actors in the European Union, Oxford: Hart. Loughlin, J. (2007). Subnational Government: The French Experience. Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave. Loughlin, J. (2009). ‘The “hybrid” state: reconfiguring territorial governance in Western Europe’, Perspectives on European Politics and Society 10/1, 49–66. Loughlin, J. and B. G. Peters (1997). ‘State traditions, administrative reform and regionalization’, in M. Keating and J. Loughlin (eds.), The Political Economy of Regionalism. London: Routledge, pp. 41–62. Loughlin, J. et al. (1999). Regional and Local Democracy in the European Union. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Loughlin, J. et al. (2001). Subnational Democracy in the European Union: Challenges and Opportunities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Manin, B. (1987). ‘On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation’, Political Theory 15, pp. 338–68. March, J. G. and J. P. Olsen (1989). Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York: Free Press; Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan. Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marks, G. (1992). ‘Structural Policy in the European Community’, in A. Sbragia (ed.), Euro-Politics: Institutions and Policymaking in the New European Community. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Michelmann, H. J. and P. Soldatos (eds.) (1990). Federalism and International Relations: The Role of Subnational Units. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Milbrath, L.W. and M. L. Goel (1982). Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics. New York: University Press of America. Milward, A. S. (1992). The European Rescue of the Nation-State [with the assistance of George Brennan and Federico Romero]. London: Routledge.

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Niskanen, W. A. (1971). Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Chicago: Aldine, Atherton. Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Oates, W. E. (1999). ‘An essay on fiscal federalism’, Journal of Economic Literature 37/3, pp. 1120–49. Page, E. and M. Goldsmith (eds.) (1987). Central and Local Government Relations: A Comparative Analysis of West European Unitary States. London and Beverly Hills: Sage. Pateman, C. (1970). Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rhodes, R. A. W. (1979). Public Administration and Policy Analysis: Recent Developments in Britain and America. Farnborough: Saxon House. Scholte, J. A. (2005). Globalization: A Critical Introduction. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schumpeter, J. A. (1944 [1942]). Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London: Allen & Unwin. Sharpe, L. J. (ed.) (1979). Decentralist Trends in Western Democracies. London: Sage. Sharpe, L. J. (ed.) (1993). The Rise of Meso Government in Europe. London: Sage. Srensen, G. (2008). ‘Globalization and the nation-state’, in D. Caramani (ed.), Comparative Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 602–24. UN (2008). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision. United Nations. Von Hayek, F. (1962 [1944]). The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Warleigh, A. (1999). Committee of the Regions: Institutionalising Multi-level Governance? London: Kogan Page. Wright, D. (1978). Understanding Intergovernmental Relations: Public Policy and Participants’ Perspectives in Local, State, and National Governments. North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press.

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part i .............................................................................................

THE BRITISH ISLES .............................................................................................

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chapter 1 .............................................................................................

THE UNITED KINGDOM: IS T H E R E R E A L LY A N A N G LO MO D E L ? .............................................................................................

peter john colin copus

0

100

200

400 Km

NORWAY

DENMARK

IRELAND

London

NETH.

^_

FR.

Map 1.1 United Kingdom

BEL.

GERMANY

United Kingdom Inhabitants: 61.6 million Surface area: 242 514 km2 Inhabitants/km2: 252.0 State form: Unitary Official description: Constitutional monarchy and Commonwealth realm Languages: English, Welsh (about 20% of population of Wales), Scottish Gaelic (about 60,000 in Scotland), Irish (small numbers in Northern Ireland) Subnational government: 434 local governments 35 county councils, Greater London Authority 3 devolved nations

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Introduction and History

................................................................................................................ Like many aspects of government and politics in the UK, it is hard to find a defining moment that shaped its local government systems and marked a break between one period and another. This lack of a plan is not some artefact of Whig historiography that assumes the slow evolution of a balanced constitution and the progress of a measured form of government. Rather, there has been a complicated history that reflects the gradual decline of local government institutions after their heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time as incremental adaption to changing political status, there have been some radical policy shifts—some designed to revive local democracy—and much inconsistency from one period to another and in each part of the United Kingdom. Part of the problem is that there was no key event that established the system, which is similar to other aspects of the British constitution. This lack of a clear foundation is revealing, as we shall show. The closest to a defining moment was an early piece of legislation, the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which democratized the medieval system of boroughs, a largely closed system of government of towns and cities (Keith-Lucas 1979). This legislation did not give them a large electorate, but it was important for its time. It consolidated a decision-making framework making the whole council responsible for policy and effectively created the committee system that was to last until 2000. It not only democratized the existing corporations, but it also created the opportunity for new ones in the rapidly urbanizing areas, so laying the foundations for city-based local government. The Act did not, however, introduce a uniform system of elected local government across the country. Rather, it provided that Parliament could be petitioned by local citizens to create an elected council for a given municipality. So the 1835 act illustrates the lack of codification of local government in the UK, which has remained to the present day. It is a largely unplanned system of local administration, but with a democratically elected element and some political autonomy that the centre has gradually reformed and diminished. Much of the history of central–local relations shows a disinterested central government that gradually took power to administer the welfare state countered only by the lack of capacity to control what happens in the periphery. These twin themes of centralization and limited local discretion emerge in our discussion below.

the united kingdom

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The Institutional Expression of Democracy

................................................................................................................ The systems of local government in the United Kingdom derive from its state tradition. Dyson (1980) and Loughlin and Peters (1997) believe Britain denied the direct existence of the state, partly because of the way in which society had gradually adapted from feudal deference to capitalism without the need for a strong state, but it also derives from British liberal thought. English writing about politics emphasized individual liberty. The purpose of the institutions of government and the law is to restrain the wish of the executive to wield power excessively (Greenleaf 1983). And the UK constitution and its institutions embodied this conception of limited government. There was no regime of central supervision of local government; nor is there a codified system of administrative law as is the case in many continental countries. This limited notion of the state is reflected in the ideas of localism and local self-government, which express aspects of liberal thought, for example J. S. Mill’s defence of local autonomy in Liberty. The central state was happy for local government to intervene in public life, and Parliament passed a series of local acts that reflected local diversity. As many have commented (e.g. Gamble 1994), both in theory and in practice, the UK has, nevertheless, a strong state, deriving from the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. The executive at Westminster can act decisively and intervene when it wishes. This power tends to be hidden, but becomes visible, when necessary, to allow central elites to make key decisions and to reform the institutions of the state. From the perspective of local government, this arrangement gives the appearance of decentralization and local autonomy, but local government can be changed or even abolished at a stroke when the centre gets focused on a particular problem or issue. This constitutional framework reflects Parliament’s wresting of power from the sovereign in the seventeenth century. Before the Reformation, England was much more centralized than other European states, and this continued during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Executive and parliamentary rule from Westminster extended to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—which resulted from either military defeats or intermarriage and was expressed through a series of ‘Acts of Union’ between England and Wales (1535–42), Scotland (1707), and Ireland (1800). The arrival of democratic politics in the nineteenth century, as Bagehot argued, strengthened the executive-minded character of the UK state. As the democratic franchise was extended and modern political parties emerged, with their control over their elected representatives, a centralized machine took the executive driving seat. Once a political party gained a majority in Parliament, it formed the government, occupied ministerial posts and determined the legislative agenda. The first-past-the post electoral system, based on the centrality of parliamentary

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representation, means that the two principal political parties found it relatively easy to secure a majority of the seats and to form a government, particularly in the period since 1945. In spite of critics of majoritarianism, putative constitutional reformers, such as Prime Minister Gordon Brown in June 2009, find it hard to get support for a change, because the main beneficiaries of first-past-the-post, the two main political parties, would make the final decision. This political system fostered territorial centralization because any dispute between central and local government could always be resolved in the former’s favour. The legal doctrine of ultra vires—local government can act only within the bounds set by Parliament—appears to reinforce the subordinate character of subnational government. There has been no power of general competence (excepting some provisions of the 1972 Act about spending and some new powers in the 2000 Act). There is also no constitutional right for local government to exist and no legal protection of its autonomy despite the recommendations of the Council of Europe’s Charter of Local Self-Government, which the UK has now signed and ratified. Add to this a nationalized media and economy, where key decisions and prominent public issues route through London, and the result is that the national elite has control over the whole country, and in particular England. So there are two elements within the UK state tradition: one emphasizing the limits to power; the other using state power when circumstances and political objectives demand—the iron fist in the velvet glove. This led to a very ambiguous kind of politics for subnational government.

The Institutional Expression of Subnational Democracy: Majoritarianism at the Local Level

................................................................................................................ Moving away from the constitutional and legal basis of the system, there are political institutions that help create a form of democracy that is distinctive. Britain tends to have large units of local government (see Table 1.1 for a comparison with the rest of Europe), with the main building-blocks as boroughs in metropolitan areas, unitary (single-tier) authorities in large free-standing cities, and counties in the rest (see Table 1.2). The exception is the districts, which still remain in many areas as a lower tier of local government in mostly rural areas, which run housing, local planning, and some consumer-based services. All the councils, even the lower-tier ones, provide services through a modern and specialized bureaucracy. These services include education, social services, public housing, local roads, consumer projection, environmental services, and a

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Table 1.1 Local government scale

France Spain Germany Italy Belgium Sweden Netherlands Denmark UK 1974 UK 2008 (Changes in England only) UK 2009 (Changes in England only)

Population (millions)

Number of lower-tier councils

Average population per council

Total number of councillors (000s)

Persons per councillor

59 40 83 57 10 9 16 5 56 60

36 700 8 100 12 400 8 000 589 290 443 98 520 468

1 600 4 900 6 600 7 200 18 000 31 000 36 000 51 000 108 000 128 000

515 65 200 100 13 46 10 5 26 22

120 620 420 600 800 200 1 700 1 200 2 150 2 730

61

433

140 000

21

2 900

Source: Adapted from: Chris Game, ‘Lost! 90% of councillors in 35 years: are county-wide unitaries effectively the end of UK local government?’ Paper presented to the PSA Local Politics Specialist Group University of Birmingham—30 January 2009.

range of regulatory functions, such as planning. Local government is organized into service bureaucracies, which are staffed by professional officers, with some central functions of finance, the chief executive’s office and personnel management. Overseeing this is the elected council, where—in most councils in England— the party winning a majority of seats forms an executive of up to ten members, including a leader, which is responsible for decision-making and is held accountable to the main body of councillors. This system creates a form of politics different from those in systems on continental Europe. In England and Wales the use of the first-past-the-post

Table 1.2 The structure of UK local government English local government County councils (traditional two-tier areas): 27 Unitary councils (including county-based unitaries): 55 Metropolitan borough councils: 36 District councils: 201 London boroughs: 32 Total: 351

Local government Scotland 32 unitary councils Local government Wales 22 unitary councils Local government Northern Ireland 26 district councils (to be reduced to 11 in 2011)

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Table 1.3 Electoral systems Election

System

All English and Welsh councils (for councillors)

First-past-the-post

English mayoral councils (for the mayor only)

Supplementary vote

All Scottish and Northern Ireland councils

STV

Mayor of London London Assembly

Supplementary vote Additional member system, combining:14 constituency members elected by first-past-the-post 11 seats elected from London-wide lists

electoral system weakens the representation of smaller parties and increases the likelihood that one of the two large parties will gain a governing majority (Scotland and Northern Ireland use STV for local elections—see Table 1.3). Once in power the majority party has a high degree of control over decision-making with no veto points in the council—except that private meetings of the party may be used to challenge or change policy and decisions. Before 2000, under the committee system, formal decisions were made through party majorities in council committees; now, in most councils in England, this is done in a cabinet, which itself is formed by the majority party (where a majority exists). The Local Government Act 2000 created a centralized executive in local government, which could be either a directly elected mayor or city manager if local electors voted for it, or a cabinet system. All bar eleven elected mayors and fifty-nine small councils still with committees (alternative arrangements) have the cabinet system (see Table 1.4 for a list of directly elected mayors). Even before the reforms, there was weak control of the executive because of party-based voting on committees; now under the cabinet Table 1.4 Councils with elected mayors Bedford Doncaster Hackney Hartlepool Lewisham Mansfield Middlesbrough Newham North Tyneside Stoke-on-Trent Torbay Watford

Independent English Democrat Labour Independent Labour Independent Independent Labour Conservative Labour Conservative Liberal Democrat

Re-elected 2007 Elected 2009 Re-elected 2006 Re-elected 2009 Re-elected 2006 Re-elected 2007 Re-elected 2007 Re-elected 2006 Re-elected 2009 Elected 2005 Elected 2005 Re-elected 2006

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system introduced in 2000, the system of executive scrutiny is weak (Stoker et al. 2002; Leach and Copus 2004). Local referendums can be held to let the voters make a choice whether to introduce directly elected mayors or not: 35 such elections have been arranged, mainly during 2001 and 2002; only a third of these referendums have returned a yes majority. There is now a movement to initiate referenda to get rid of mayors! Stoke is one such successful case. Apart from that, some local authorities have arranged referenda on a voluntary basis, but these are only consultative. Local politics in Britain operates on two dimensions: first, the formalized, open and public process that takes place in council cabinets, scrutiny committees, and full council meetings which have been termed the ‘open theatres of representation’ (Copus 1999, 2004); second, those political processes which take place in the private meetings of the political party group which make decisions, determine the political strategy to be followed in council meetings and bind councillors to public courses of action—the group has been referred to as a ‘closed theatre of representation’ (Copus 1999, 2004). It is in how councillors see the formal and open settings of local democracy as mere extensions of what takes place in the closed party decision-making forums that we see the nature of party political behaviour in local government and its majoritarian features. Council business and policy issues will be considered in the single-party group meeting and decisions are reached by—in most cases—a simple majority vote. The minority opinion within the group is then bound by party rules and by complex patterns of party loyalty and discipline to vote, and in many cases speak, with the majority view, in public. While group formal decision-making is based on majority rule, to ensure coherence within the group a much more subtle process takes place. Party groups can only act coherently in public if the minority factions do not feel marginalized or ignored. Copus (2004: 81) has identified the sources of discontent that can emerge within party groups as national or local allegiances or those based on ideology, personality, and ambition. Those groups that do not carefully balance these sources of discontent, and which allow one faction to dominate the group, risk at best a dysfunctional political dynamic and at worst a public split in the party. The negotiations required to prevent this from happening are far from consensus politics. They are designed to ensure that majoritarian politics succeeds in the council chamber, which is also majoritarian. What has been described here takes place where one party has a clear majority of seats in a council. Indeed, out of 20,000 councillors in England, approximately 92 per cent were elected in May 2008 as candidates of one of the main three political parties: Conservative, Labour, or the Liberal Democrats. Yet roughly one-third of councils in England and Wales have no single party with an overall majority and, as a result of the 2007 Scottish STV local elections, only five of thirty-two Scottish councils have an overall majority (three of which are independent groups). In hung-councils a different form of politics is required either to construct a formal

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governing coalition from more than one party or to allow a minority single-party administration to govern. Indeed, some intriguing and unexpected arrangements have been formed among parties normally opposed to each other when the arithmetic of the council composition demands. It is therefore a mistake to oversimplify the UK system to regard it as not pluralist. Here we have in mind the decentralization of power and decision-making to a parliament in Scotland and assemblies in Wales, Northern Ireland, and London, which also has an elected mayor. Each of these parts of the UK has been governed differently and with different constellations of interest groups and political parties. Crucially, with the exception of the London mayor (but not the Assembly), these are governed not by majorities but by coalitions. It would seem that the stereotype of a majoritarian system at the local level is now not sustained by the evidence, especially given recent changes to UK politics, and in spite of the strengthening of the power of the executive in recent years.

Local Government and the Page and Goldsmith Classification

................................................................................................................ Page and Goldsmith (1987: 3) identified three dimensions to local government that provide a framework from which to consider the power and influence of local government and its relationship to the central state: its functions, its access to central government, and its discretion to make policy. They raise the question of the connection between the functions of local government and the level of discretion it has over those services. Being the provider of important services, such as housing, education, or social services and health, is not sufficient to make local government powerful within the overall governance system. Rather, its position is either enhanced or undermined by two other factors: discretion and access to higher levels of government. In the Anglo group of nations local government has a weak legal, financial, and political status, but it is a major player in shaping and delivering public services; those services are, however, allocated from the centre, which has varying levels of control over not only what is provided, but how and to what standards. The Page and Goldsmith model is a good starting-place to understand some of the key aspects of the UK system, at least how it operated in the middle of the twentieth century. Local government ran many services—most of those of the welfare state except health and social security. We can see here the allocation of extensive functions to local government, amounting consistently over many decades to about a third of public expenditure and 10 per cent of GDP. The English

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public law tradition emphasized broad permissive powers to act (Loughlin 1986) and to let local authorities get on with the job and to make decisions as they saw fit. And studies have shown the extent to which local government has made independent decisions, formulated policy, and varied considerably, from either studies of policy outputs (Sharpe and Newton 1984) or case studies of local authority political systems (Newton 1976; Stewart 2003; Stoker 2004). The UK local government systems have often been thought to have weak representation at the centre as typically MPs are rarely recruited from councillors. Those who are councillors are expected to cut off their local connections when elected, and cease being councillors—tradition and attendance rules prevent this. Although there were prominent local politicians who were national figures in the post-Second World War period, they were few in number, and distinguished more by their notoriety or a boss-style of leadership rather than their political power at the centre and prominence on the national stage. Traditionally local government representation is weak, operating more at a professional level through the associations and professional bodies. There is often a cultural disdain for local government on the part of central government politicians and civil servants (Greenwood 1981; Jones and Travers 1996). In Bulpitt’s (1983) account, the centre is more interested in international affairs and the economy and is happy to let the periphery govern itself. This, however, means a lack of representation and separation into two spheres, what he called the dual polity. There is some truth in this view and existing practice to some extent conforms to it. It also fits plausibly into the Page and Goldsmith scheme. But it was not the complete picture even in the heyday of local government during the post-war decades, and certainly is not now. First, local government is seen by central government as primarily a means to provide public services. This has led to detailed control over local government. Today, local government has very little discretion over many services with decisions about their nature, level, quality, and cost being decided, set, and monitored by central government and enforced by an array of inspectorates. Local government is responsible for major service provision with education, housing, the personal social services, and social care. But councils often have little influence over what happens within their own localities and even less when it comes to influencing central government decisions about locally provided services. So big, powerful, and resource-intensive services do not equate into powerful local government—councils cannot govern through services alone. But in spite of these examples of distributive politics, the lack of consistent channels of influence and contact between the centre and the localities is a defining characteristic of local government in Britain along with its large geographical extent and large population sizes. This largely reflects the weakness of local representation and the predominance of a centrally controlled technocratic approach. Notions of economies of scale, efficiency, and effectiveness have underlain the demand for increasingly large local government units and have underpinned

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the debate about single-tier versus multi-tiered local government. Yet the evidence on which this assumption is based is far from conclusive and there is also evidence that larger local government units have a damaging effect on democratic criteria such as electoral turn-out, public participation, and trust in councillors and local officials (Ladner 2002; Larsen 2002; Denters 2002; Kelleher and Lowery 2004; Greasley 2009). Moreover, there are councils with names that reflect points of the compass rather than identifiable communities and which have been created by lumping two pre-existing areas together and joining them by little more than their name. Sometimes, the new councils have names that reflect geographical features or are simply made up. This raises the question as to how the merged communities can have an independent political voice and identity. The answer has been largely to ignore the question and to extinguish smaller community identities in the hope that such feelings of local loyalty as may exist will be transferred to the new, larger, councils. Thus the weakness of representation is cumulative because the successive reorganizations weaken community representation, which in turn undermines argument for its defence and leads to more reorganizations. The numbers of councillors are few compared to the large geographical scale (see Table 1.1). The localities are under-represented: in England the ratio is 1:4,500, which is far more than elsewhere in Europe. The consequences of such underrepresentation are that there are fewer opportunities for the public to engage in elected office (strengthening the hold that political parties have on local government); councillors represent large electoral areas making it more difficult for them to be local leaders who have arisen from their local communities; councillors with electoral areas experiencing particular concentrations of social problems or deprivation will find it particularly difficult to spread their efforts across large electoral areas and councils; and, simply, very few people would have heard of, contacted, or be aware of who their local councillor is, thus creating even further distance between the councillor and the citizen. Local politicians in England, despite sitting on large councils providing powerful and important public services, do not have a related power and influence over the wider governing system within the UK—the case is somewhat different for councillors in Scotland and Wales, whose direct access to the devolved institutions of those countries may yet enhance their political influence. In England, with no parliament or government of its own in contrast to Scotland and Wales, councillors must try to influence the UK government—a much harder prospect than influencing a devolved political institution, given the greater political and institutional distance between the UK central authorities and English councils, the traditional interactions between the two and that the powers of the devolved institutions of Scotland and Wales which bring them—as new political bodies—into closer contact with their respective councils than the UK government is with English councils. While forums exist in which councillors can meet with MPs, ministers, and senior civil servants, and while many informal links exist within political

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parties—assuming the councillor’s party is in government, of course, such events are much more of a top-down, than a bottom-up affair. Moreover, the backbench councillor is almost entirely excluded from this process, which is mostly open to council leaders and council cabinet members. The backbencher would have to use informal party linkages with senior national politicians to pursue an issue—and it cannot be assumed that all councillors will have such linkages at their disposal. Thus the English council lacks the key resource of access to national politicians and civil servants that would enhance its political influence in the national governing system. The Local Government Association (LGA) negotiates from a position of weakness and its influence depends on the centre’s willingness to compromise or to address and respond to the concerns of the local government establishment— which cannot be taken for granted in the UK’s political system.

Citizenship and consumerism It is probably fair to say that the role of citizens in traditional local government was largely passive because they were confronted by a bureaucracy that delivered services in a top-down manner. In the past, this bureaucracy was countered by an active and participatory party system, where both parties had mass membership and where there was a range of local interest groups. The decline of party membership has eroded this base as have the decline of trades unions and the exit of the middle classes from participation in local politics in the 1960s (Lee 1963; Green 1981; Barker 1983). There has also been a dramatic decline in local electoral turnout, now down to about 25 per cent of registered votes and falling faster than turnout at the national level. There have been various attempts to revive local democracy, starting with a comprehensive attempt to reform the structure of local government in 1969, which was designed to create a modern visible form of local government. Over many decades, policy-makers have sought to accommodate citizens, giving them opportunities to participate. For example, in 1969, the Skeffington Committee proposed extending the citizen’s right to contribute to public planning decisions, particularly before the final decision. There followed a series of reforms of the planning process, which incorporated citizen involvement on a statutory basis. The government experimented with community forms of participation by setting up community development projects in 1969, which promoted a participatory approach to neighbourhood development (Loney 1983). In the 1980s, a series of market-based reforms were supposed to increase local accountability, not least the ill-fated community charge (the ‘poll tax’) introduced in 1989 in Scotland and in England 1990, but abolished in 1993, which sought to make the link between voting and public spending decisions. This proved impossible because of the central grants system, which determined local tax rates more than local spending decisions (Butler et al. 1994). Ironically, it was the sheer

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unpopularity of the poll tax that did much to stimulate voter interest in local elections, which was a reason voter turnout increased during the late 1980s and 1990s before resuming its downward slide. The market-based reforms of the 1990s were designed to improve the visibility of local government, to make it more responsive to citizen-consumers, and to increase efficiency. Gyford (1991) identified changes that placed citizens more in the driving seat as consumers expecting a good service from local service providers. This had its roots in changes in the attitudes of citizens, no longer deferential to professionals, such as social workers or planners, and wishing to put their point of view to the bureaucrats and the experts. The concern with reviving local democracy preoccupied Labour policy-makers when they prepared for government in the 1990s, represented by the Commission on Local Democracy, which opted for directly elected mayors as one solution. Central government has tended to ignore the democratic potential of local authorities and has tried to inject different kinds of democratic responsiveness through the use of other mechanisms or bodies. At first it was quangos (quasi nongovernmental organizations), such as the Training and Enterprise Councils, which sought to have a wide range of board members. Many non-elected local bodies experimented with citizen juries and other democratic innovations. This happened right from the early days in public management reform, for example by strengthening the role of school governing bodies and governors in relation to schools and the council governors. In urban regeneration, there is the requirement to consult and to form partnerships in bids for funding, such as in the Single Regeneration Budget programme which ran from 1994. More generally, some kinds of regulation mean that agencies, whether they are directly controlled by elected politicians, or whether they are in the public or private sectors, are opened up to public gaze. It has always been the case that public law guidelines, requiring fairness and consultation, apply not just to public sector agencies but to all bodies carrying out public tasks. The expansion of regulation is an extension of this principle. The best term for describing these diverse arenas for engagement is citizen governance, where the state creates institutions that give the citizen some influence in decision-making, a series of initiatives that were more prominent in England rather than in the rest of the United Kingdom since devolution in 1998. There are several published descriptions of these English initiatives (Brannan et al. 2006), so only a brief summary is needed here. Examples include Tenant Participation Compacts and Housing Cooperatives that are forums for council house tenants. In health there is statutory consultation by Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) and health panels to encourage long-term involvement and representation of communities in policy-making. In addition, Foundation Hospitals are accountable to local communities and include members of the public on their governing bodies. Crime is another policy area where there is public participation in Crime and Disorder Partnerships created in 2004. The 2006 Local Government White

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Paper, and subsequent legislation, applied these ideas on participation directly to local government. The following measures have been introduced:

· ·· ·· · ·· · ·

community calls for action which gives councillors the ability to refer to the relevant scrutiny committee any matter raised with them by a member of the public; powers to enable councils to create parish councils; changes that ensure petitions from the public are dealt with in a transparent manner; expanding the power of the Ombudsman; empowering people to manage their own neighbourhoods; increasing opportunities for communities to take on the management and ownership of local assets and facilities such as under-used community centres or empty schools; simplifying and extending the scope of tenant management of housing; encouraging local charters between communities and service providers; providing a new ‘power of well-being’ for the best parish councils to improve the development and coordination of support for citizens, community groups, and local authorities; and changing the ‘Best Value’ duty to ensure that authorities inform, consult, involve, and devolve to all citizens and communities.

It is important to realize that community participation emerged from within local public agencies as well as being imposed from above by central government. Thus the neighbourhood decentralization movement of the 1980s (Lowndes and Stoker 1992a and 1992b) was a radical initiative from within local government, which depended on giving services to decentralized units, where services were guided by consultation forums. This had support from the left of the political spectrum. Even though there is potential conflict with representative institutions, local government has embraced new democratic reforms and central government has either facilitated them or imposed them from above.

The current state of governance In addition to the growing role of the citizen in directly engaging with local government and other structures, has been the expansion of the complex world of partnerships, unelected agencies, and the differentiation and break-up of local government institutions themselves. While partnerships have always been a feature of local government, trends in the 1990s have made them almost a defining feature of the urban political system, characterized by extensive collaboration among traditional local government institutions, the decentralized or contracted-out agencies of local government, central government organizations operating locally,

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the private sector linked to the public sector. The complex maze of organizations necessitated the creation of inter-organizational networks to sustain it. This kind of coordination and long-term relationship has been called ‘local governance’ by many commentators (Stoker 1999; John 2001). Successive central governments have sought to encourage more governance arrangements of this kind by requiring partnerships to be included in bids for funding or in seeking to encourage joinedup policy-making. Governments have also sought to include the voluntary sector in the delivery of government services. In some ways, however, governance could be seen as an expression of increased centralization as the centre moves towards detailed interventions in local affairs. This often occurs through agencies with direct accountability to ministers, which need to forge alliances with local government bodies. It may be, however, that these agencies display alliances with local government, for example in the field of economic development (Cole and John 2001). This means that, because the centre has to ensure effective implementation of policies in a complex governance environment, it may have to cede autonomy to accomplish this. In addition, the undermining of traditional forms of bureaucracy in local government by twenty years of new public management reforms may have disrupted administrative conservatism in local government services. The new environment may have given space to innovators, who have developed new policy areas, such as the European Union, the environment, employment policy, thus leading to a renaissance of policy-making in some respects (Atkinson and WilksHeeg 2001). Whether these activities amount to little more than minor policy initiatives while the main decisions are taken elsewhere is a matter for debate.

Challenges and Opportunities

................................................................................................................ In many ways subnational government in the UK has reached a steady state after many years of reform and restructuring. The latest round of restructuring, the creation of new unitary councils coming into effect in April 2009, is an extension of a gradual move to a unitary structure of local government, by creating nine new councils from existing counties and districts (Chisholm and Leach 2008). It seems likely that a shift to an all-unitary system of local government is an intended policy of government—or at least the civil service—and that such a shift will come by gradual increments, culminating in a final sweeping away of the remaining two-tier councils; the timescale for such a move, however, may be over some decades until it resembles the reforms in Scotland and Wales which removed the two-tier system and created unitary systems in both cases.

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Local government as an institution and councillors as elected representatives are experiencing a long-term decline in their public reputations. Pressure groups such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance, who campaign to highlight perceived inefficient and wasteful use of public money, serve also to undermine the standing of local government (see Tables 1.5 and 1.6 for local authorities’ expenditures and revenues for 2006–7). In responding to such campaigns, councils are likely to fall into the trap of spending public money on creating a positive media image, which in turn leads to increased criticism of spending priorities at a time when they are under pressure. Councils in 2009 struggled to meet about an overall £1 billion budget deficit caused by the global economic downturn and by a lower than average government grant settlement, all at a time when demand for public services was increasing. The local authority grant made available by central government for 2009/10 increased by 42 per cent to £73.1 billion. At the same time the council tax cap was set at 2.6 per cent, which led to job losses. The use by government of public expenditure and taxation levels as a tool with which to manage the international financial crisis placed local government in the UK in a particularly difficult position. Not only was local government subject to centrally set expenditure controls, it also lacked any flexibility over its tax-base but has some fee and charging discretion. It was only the skills, existing in particular councils, to negotiate with and to accrue resources from, extraneous funding Table 1.5 Local government expenditure in the UK, 2006–7 (£ million) Current expenditure*

Capital expenditure**

1st tier 2nd tier 3rd tier England Scotland Wales

100 294 11 240 6 152

12 072 1 545 889

Total Great Britain Northern Ireland Debt interest

117 686 409 516

14 506 102

Accounting adjustments Total subnational governments

14 058 14 608 2 158

UK Capital Receipts (EU Funds) subtracted from departmental budgets Accounting adjustments Total sub-national governments (consolidated)

Total expenditure

1 056 132 669

13 506

146 175

* Date of reference: 2008. ** Source: Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2008, p. 96.http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/1/A/ pesa0809_complete.pdf

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Table 1.6 Financing of local authority expenditure in Great Britain, 2006–7 (£ million) Current finance in Departmental Expenditure Limits (DEL)

2006–7

Aggregage External Finance (AEF) England Revenue Support Grant Non-domestic rate payments Dedicated Schools Grant Other Specific and special grants Total England Scotland Revenue Support Grant Specific and special grants Total Scotland

3 443 17 500 26 576 19 578 67 097 5 778 1 043 6 821

Wales Revenue Support Grant Non-domestic rate payments Specific and special grants Total Wales Total AEF Great Britain1 Non AEF current grants2 Total current finance in DEL

2 899 844 310 4 090 73 851 4 079 82 088

Capital support in DEL Capital grants/SCE4 (C) 2 Credit approvals/SCE (R) Total capital support in DEL3 Total central government support in DEL

6 027 4 269 10 512 92 600

Current finance in departmental Annual Managed Expenditure (AME) AEF current grants Non-AEF current grants Total current finance in departmental AME Total capital support in departmental AME2 Total central government support in departmental AME

1 327 18 618 19 945 83 20 028

Locally financed expenditure Local authority self-financed expenditure Locally financed support in Scotland in AEF Total locally financed expenditure Accounting and other adjustments Total local authority expenditure 1 2 3 4

25 821 1 884 27 705 5 842 146 175

Great Britain only because Northern Ireland does not have support within AEF. Includes receipts from the EU that finance grants to local authorities, which are inside departmental budgets. Excludes debt repayment grants from central government which no longer score in budgets. Supported Capital Expenditure.

Source: Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2008, p. 84.http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/1/A/ pesa0809_complete.pdf

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sources such as the EU, which provided councils with some financial room for manoeuvre. Yet any such success in doing so is subject to central government support or at least acquiescence; a government determined to restrict public expenditure by local government could narrow or cut off altogether access to any additional sources of funding and so begin a cat-and-mouse game, much like that which occurred under the Thatcher governments. What was seen then was not a victory of the localities over the centre’s increasingly desperate attempts to rein-in local spending but rather a series of policy and financial skirmishes, the results of which gradually narrowed local government’s room for policy and financial manoeuvre. The use of local government as a mechanism of economic management is not limited to the Conservatives of the 1980s: it is a continuing theme of local government in England. The existence and activities of the Standards Board, created by the Local Government Act 2000 to monitor and judge on councillor behaviour and ethical standards, provides a ready source for those looking for examples of bad behaviour amongst local politicians—even though the majority of complaints made to the board lead to no action being taken because complaints were frivolous or unfounded. The concern about local councillors may be displaced by the scandals about the expenses of Members of Parliament, which exploded in the public scene in May and June of 2009. Despite a bad press, however, councillors contribute considerable amounts of their own time to council work (which is remunerated); a contribution which has grown over time (Young and Davies 1990; Young and Rao 1994; Local Government Association 2005, 2007, 2009). A major challenge faced by local government is the increasing ethnic diversity of large sections of the country and of urban areas in particular, bringing with it extra demands on the provision of public services. In 2009, around one in seven primary school pupils, for example, did not have English as their first language; almost 566,000 primary pupils, some 14 per cent of the total, speak a language other than English; almost 11 per cent of secondary school pupils have English as a second language. In addition to service demands brought about by the diversification of local communities, particularly in urban areas, a challenge is also posed to longstanding interpretations of local representative democracy. The terms representative democracy and representation are being seen, by some, as sociological or microcosmic representation; that is, that councils and the councillors elected to them should reflect numerically the ethnic make-up of the local community and further that council composition should also reflect the ethnic composition of the population. Such arguments, while gaining traction on the left of the political spectrum, ignore that representative democracy was not designed to serve such a function, but rather to ensure that political opinions were represented in political chambers. Minorities in the context of liberal representative democracy are political and not identity minorities. Arguments for microcosmic representation also appear to

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assume that the task of the representative is to represent not the interest of the whole community, but the section of it from which the representative hails; a view which has serious implications for community cohesion and which displays a far more exclusive view of representation than has hitherto been the case. Yet councils are under pressure from government to respond to the increasing diversity of local communities by becoming more diverse themselves. Whatever one’s view of such pressure or one’s interpretation of local representation, this is another policy area where central government is dictating how local councils should respond, thus undermining further the political independence and autonomy of local government. Councils have responded in a number of ways to these challenges. The generally held view in local government—certainly amongst many chief executives—is to embrace and encourage the move towards larger, unitary councils—even though this may result in fewer top-jobs to go round—it does, however, inflate the salaries of those remaining few. Common folklore in local government is that bigger is better and more efficient—a conclusion not consistently borne out by research (Muzzio and Tompkins 1989; Travers et al. 1993; Keating 1995; Stewart 2003; Kelleher and Lowery 2004). Many councillors have accepted that ‘bigger is better’, although many have also fought the idea that their existing councils should be absorbed by a larger new unitary council; in business parlance the creation of a new, larger unitary council is less an amalgamation and more a takeover bid. New larger councils may give the appearance of generating a stronger strategic view, but, this is also part of the mythology of size—small councils can be strategic and larger councils still lack the powers that would enable them to govern an area. It would appear that the issue of elected mayors has been taken off the agenda by the Labour government, but the Conservatives have expressed some interest in the idea. There are currently no plans by councils, at least, to shift to the mayoral form of governance. Indeed, Stoke-on-Trent is shifting from a mayor and manager system, to an indirectly elected leader. It is difficult to predict whether mayoral governance in England is a failed experiment or an idea whose time has not yet come. A shift to mayoral governance does present councils with an opportunity to approach local democracy in a new way and may provide some room for manoeuvre, which, in the current economic and political climate, may be of some considerable benefit. It is undoubted that, in renewing London government, the elected mayor for London has been able to play a powerful figurehead role and also to wield some not inconsiderable power and influence—the dismissal and appointment of a new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, indicates how much influence can be wielded by such mayors, in a way that council leaders would find hard to match.

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Conclusions

................................................................................................................ Local government in the UK remains as a key agency to deliver public services, which has a democratic component to oversee its mainly bureaucratic decisions. But in spite of its longevity and importance, it has struggled to be an effective and legitimate force in British politics and policy-making, particularly since the midtwentieth century. The decline in political status, which had became more apparent at the end of the 1970s, has continued into the twenty-first century, in spite of the reforms of local government leadership and the creation of some high-profile and innovative political institutions, such as the Greater London Authority and the mayor for London. But the rest of local government operates on the margins of political life, with weak visibility, representation, and influence at the centre. Even as a service provider its role is limited. Rather than the large discretion envisioned by the Page and Goldsmith model, it actually has low discretion, moderate functions, and weak access to the centre. In part, this fate is a consequence of a centralized political culture and an elite disdain for local government institutions that has created a largely passive and unimaginative institution. This view can be countered by the dynamism of experimentation, such as over environmental policy, for example, or economic development (see Atkinson and Wilks-Heeg 2001) and examples of strong and effective political leadership. But local government has rejected reforms that would lead to a stronger executive and a better public profile. As well as suffering from central direction local government is often too conservative and interested in maintaining the cosy world of control by political parties. Local government remains a convenient way to deliver central monitored and regulated services, and can be blamed by central government for poor service decisions. In this context, its low status is an equilibrium position, neither pointing to further decline, nor to a revival, but sustaining the political dysfunction of the twentieth century.

REFERENCES Atkinson, H. and S. Wilks-Heeg (2001). Local Government from Thatcher to Blair: The Politics of Creative Autonomy. Cambridge: Polity. Barker, B. (1983). The Operation of Bristol Labour Party: A View from the Edge. School of Advanced Urban Studies, Working Paper 27, Bristol University. Brannan, T., P. John, and G. Stoker (2006). Re-energizing citizenship. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Branson, N. (1979). Poplarism, 1919–1925: George Lansbury and the Councillors’ Revolt. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

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Bulpitt, J. (1983). Territory and Power in the United Kingdom: An Interpretation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Butler, D., A. Adonis, and T. Travers (1994). Failure in British Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, J. A. (2007). Explaining Local Government: Local Government in Britain Since 1800. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chisholm, M. and S. Leach (2008). Botched Business: The Damaging Process of Reorganising Local Government 2006–2009. Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Douglas McLean. Cole, A. and P. John (2001). Local Governance in England and France. London: Routledge. Copus, C. (1999). ‘The councillor and party group loyalty’, Policy and Politics 27/3, pp. 309–24. Copus, C. (2004). Party Politics and Local Government. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Denters, B. (2002). ‘Size and Political Trust: Evidence from Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 20/6, pp. 793–812. Dyson, K. (1980). The State Tradition in Western Europe. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Gamble, A. (1994). The Free Economy and the Strong State. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Greasley, S. (2009). Non Executive Councillors and Democratic Health. Manchester: IPEG/ NWIN. Green, D. (1981). Power and Party in an English City: An Account of Single-Party Rule. London: Allen and Unwin. Greenleaf, W. H. (1983). The British Political Tradition. London: Methuen. Greenwood, R. (1981). ‘Fiscal Pressure and Local Government in England and Wales’, in C. Hood and M. Wright (eds.), Big Government in Hard Times. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Gyford, J. (1991). Citizens, Consumers, and Councils: Local Government and the Public. London: Macmillan. John, P. (2001). Local Governance in Western Europe. London: Sage. Jones, G. and T. Travers (1996). Attitudes to Local Government in Westminster and Whitehall. Commission for Local Democracy Report No 14, May. Keating, M. (1995). ‘Size, efficiency and democracy: consolidation, fragmentation and public choice’, in D. Judge, G. Stoker, and H. Wollmann (eds.), Theories of Urban Politics. London: Sage, pp. 117–34. Keith-Lucas, B. (1979). The Unreformed Local Government System. London: Croom Helm. Kelleher, C. and D. Lowery (2004). ‘Political participation and metropolitan institutional contexts’, Urban Affairs Review 39/6, pp. 720–57. Ladner, A. (2002). ‘Size and direct democracy at the local level: the case of Switzerland’, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 20/6, pp. 813–28. Larsen, C. A. (2002). ‘Municipal size and democracy: a critical analysis of the argument of proximity based on the case of Denmark’, Scandinavian Political Studies 25/4, pp. 317–32. Leach, S. and C. Copus (2004). ‘Scrutiny and the political party group in UK local government: new models of behaviour’, Public Administration 82/2, pp. 331–54. Lee, J. M. (1963). Social Leaders and Public Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Local Government Association (2005). National Census of Local Authority Councillors in England 2004. Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research.

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Local Government Association (2007). National Census of Local Authority Councillors in England 2006. Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research. Local Government Association (2009). National Census of Local Authority Councillors in England 2008. Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research. Loney, M. (1983). Community against Government: The British Community Development Project, 1968–1978: A Study of Government Impotence. London: Heinemann. Loughlin, M. (1986). Local Government in the Modern State. London: Sweet and Maxwell. Loughlin, J. and B. G. Peters (1997). ‘State traditions, administrative reform and regionalization’, in M. Keating and J. Loughlin (eds.), The Political Economy of Regionalism. London: Frank Cass, pp. 41–62. Lowndes, V. and G. Stoker (1992a). ‘An evaluation of neighbourhood decentralization – part 1: customer and citizen perspectives’, Policy and Politics 20/1, pp. 47–61. Lowndes, V. and G. Stoker (1992b). ‘An evaluation of neighbourhood decentralization – part 2: staff and councillor perspectives’, Policy and Politics 20/2, pp. 143–52. Muzzio, D. and T. Tompkins (1989). ‘On the size of the city council: finding the mean’, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 37/3, pp. 83–96. Newton, K. (1976). Second City Politics: Democratic Processes and Decision-Making in Birmingham. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Page, E. and M. Goldsmith (1987). Central and Local Government Relations. London: Sage. Rhodes, R. (1988). Beyond Westminster and Whitehall. London: Unwin-Hyman. Sharpe, L. J. and K. Newton (1984). Does Politics Matter? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, J. (2003). Modernising British Local Government: An Assessment of Labour’s Reform Programme. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoker, G. (1999). The New Management of British Local Governance. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Stoker, G. (2004). Transforming Local Governance: From Thatcherism to New Labour. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Stoker, G., F. Gains, P. John, N. Rao, and A. Harding (2002). Implementing the 2000 Act with Respect to New Council Constitutions and the Ethical Framework: First Report. http:// www.ipeg.org.uk/research/elgnce/index.php Travers, T., G. Jones, and J. Burnham (1993). Impact of Population Size on Local Authority Costs and Effectiveness. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Young, K. and M. Davies (1990). The Politics of Local Government since Widdicombe. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Young, K. and N. Rao (1994). Coming to Terms with Change: The Local Government Councillor in 1993. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

chapter 2 .............................................................................................

I R E L A N D : H A LT I N G S T E P S TOWA R D S LOCAL DEMOCRACY .............................................................................................

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Ireland

ISLE OF MAN

Inhabitants: 4.5 million Surface area: 70 285 km2 Inhabitants/km2: 59.8 State form: Unitary Official description: Republic, parliamentary democracy Languages: English, Irish

Dublin

Subnational government : 114 local authorities

UNITED KINGDOM 0

25

50

100 Km

Map 2.1 Ireland

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Introduction and History

................................................................................................................ The entire island of Ireland, consisting of thirty-two counties, used to form part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and constituted one of the UK’s four nations (the others being England, Scotland, and Wales). In 1921, after a long campaign for Home Rule in the nineteenth century and the War of Independence between 1916 and 1920, the island was partitioned. Six of the nine northern counties of Ulster (one of the four historic provinces of Ireland) became Northern Ireland and remained within the United Kingdom. The other twenty-six became partially independent1 to form the Irish Free State and remained within the British Commonwealth. In 1949 the Free State declared itself a Republic and left the Commonwealth. It is this history of being part of the United Kingdom and then separating from it to form an independent state that has shaped the institutions and political culture of modern Ireland (Foster 1988). Although Ireland has developed a distinctive political culture of its own, its political and administrative institutions have their origins in the period of British rule before independence. There was an Irish parliament for the entire island in the eighteenth century, in which the Protestant minority (to the exclusion of the Catholic majority) were represented. Following a revolt in 1798 this was abolished in 1800, after which was passed the Act of Union of 1801, the founding date of the ‘first’ United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Ireland was then administered from Dublin Castle in a quasi-colonial manner. Throughout the nineteenth century, the pattern of installing local democracy was the same as in the rest of the UK: a series of Victorian legislative acts, culminating in the 1898 Local Government (Ireland) Act, resulted in a two-tier structure of authorities elected on a wide franchise. The upper tier consisted of county-level authorities in the form of county councils and county boroughs (cities). The second tier consisted of rural district councils and, in the smaller towns, non-rating town commissioners. These Acts were passed by the British parliament at Westminster and still formed the legislative basis for Irish local government until the Irish Local Government Act of 1991. Although Ireland, unlike the UK, has a written constitution, local government followed the British approach and had a statutory (that is based on Acts of Parliament) rather than a constitutional basis (that is, based on a written constitution). Irish local government was subject to the ultra vires rule typical of British local government: the Oireachtas (the Irish parliament) defined the areas of competence of local government which did not possess a general competence. This was changed by the 1991 Act, but the political culture of dependence on the centre that it engendered has taken longer to change (Collins and Haslam 1997). In 1999, the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution Act recognized in the constitution 1 Britain continued to occupy some of the new state’s ports until 1938.

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the role of local government in providing democratic representation (Art. 2a). A further reform of local government took place with the 2001 Local Government Act and, in 2002, Ireland ratified the European Charter of Local Self-Government. A number of features, however, differentiate the history and understanding of democracy in Ireland from Great Britain. Unlike Britain, which underwent rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century, most of Ireland (with the exception of the north-east corner around Belfast) remained rural and agricultural. The majority of Irish land-dwellers were small tenant farmers who were penalized if they improved their holdings. These farmers lived in great insecurity; there were several famines in the country, the most serious being in 1845–52 when about one million people died and another million emigrated (Lyons 1971). These events had enormous consequences for the political development of the island and led to an intense conflict about the issue of land ownership and its reform. Related to this was the problem of religion: the small minority who possessed the bulk of the land were the Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry, while those who possessed little land or none at all were mostly Catholic. Furthermore, Catholics were penalized in a number of ways (for example in being excluded from the vote and from exercising various other civil rights) until the middle of the nineteenth century. Even though these penalties were lifted by the Emancipation Act of 1832, power still lay in the hands of the Protestant ruling classes supported by the considerable numbers of Protestant farmers and members of the business classes in the North of Ireland. In this situation, the Catholic Church and the small Catholic middle class assumed important roles as the leaders of the people. Indeed, the Catholic clergy were largely drawn from this class. The conflict over land and religion became bound up with another cleavage: nationality. Most Catholics were nationalists of one kind or another who sought to change Ireland’s relationship with Great Britain, either through greater autonomy (Home Rule) within the UK or through complete independence (Republicanism). Although some of the leaders of Irish nationalism were Protestant aristocrats, most Protestants, especially in the North, were unionists; that is they opposed any change and wished to remain within the United Kingdom. Although class was not absent from these conflicts, it was not a primary issue and both communities within Ireland tended to form interclass alliances. Thus, nineteenth-century Ireland experienced intense conflict around three issues: land, religion, and nationality; in Great Britain the basic political cleavages were much more related to social class. They also led to continual political unrest and violence on a scale much greater than occurred in Great Britain. The conflicts involving nationalists, unionists, and the British led to the partition of the island following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. This in turn led to a division in nationalist ranks and a civil war in the South (1921–3) fought between those who supported and those who rejected the Treaty settlement. It is this conflict that has dominated, at least until very recently, the politics of Ireland

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with the two major parties (Fianna Fa´il and Fine Gael) being the inheritors of the opposing sides in the conflict. What is important is that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when democratic institutions were being set up, the cleavages concerning land, religion, and nationality became fixed, as it were, and continued to dominate the political life of the island and to condition the nature of democracy itself throughout the twentieth century. They have done so in a number of ways. First, most Irish Catholics became alienated from the political system and distrusted the central government, whether in London or in Dublin. Irish MPs, the majority of them Nationalists, did sit in the Westminster parliament, but felt impotent to influence affairs in Ireland. With the democratization of local government in the 1890s, the latter became a base from which to build either nationalism (in the Catholic parts of Ireland) or unionism (in the Protestant parts). The second important effect was the high degree of centralization in Ireland. Because of the quasi-colonial nature of Ireland’s relationship with Britain and the continual unrest throughout the island, Dublin Castle, the centre of Irish administration, became the centre of a system of control over the entire island. This was reinforced by the political violence that accompanied the foundation of the new state, when the government in power felt it had to impose a system of strict control over the country. Finally, the rural character of much of Ireland encouraged a system of patronage or clientelism especially at local government level. In fact, it could be argued that this system was necessary given the weakness of Irish democracy at the level of Dublin and the distance of these rural communities from Westminster. It was also necessary given the chronic insecurity, whether caused by economic factors or by political violence, that was endemic in the countryside. The final important historical development has been the extraordinary economic success of the island since the 1980s known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Ireland went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to being one of the wealthiest, being ranked second in GDP per inhabitant and with the lowest unemployment rate of the EU27 in 2005 (Dexia 2008, 379). From 2007, however, Ireland, like the rest of the world, did not escape the financial and economic crises of the ‘credit crunch’ and the economic ‘miracle’ began to falter.

The Institutional Expression of Democracy

................................................................................................................ Ireland is a parliamentary democracy that, in Lijphart’s terms, follows the Westminster majoritarian pattern, what Hendriks calls the ‘pendulum’ system of democracy. On the other hand, Ireland, unlike the UK, uses the STV system of

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proportional representation which removes it somewhat from a ‘pure’ majoritarian system. Elections take place to the Da´il (Lower House of Parliament) at least once every five years. There are other elections: the president is elected every seven years, elections to the European Parliament every five years, and, occasionally, there may be referendums on amendments to the Constitution. As mentioned above, the electoral system is proportional representation by means of a single transferable vote (PR-STV) which, unlike the UK, often results in coalition governments.2 All resident Irish citizens over 18 are entitled to vote in all of these elections. Britain and Ireland have had a Common Travel Area since the foundation of the Irish state, and British citizens resident in Ireland may vote at national, local, and European elections (as Irish citizens may so vote in Britain). EU citizens may vote at European and local elections and all residents, regardless of citizenship, may vote at local elections. There are sixty members in the Seanad (Upper House of Parliament), which is loosely modelled on the British House of Lords and has an advisory and amending role. Eleven members are nominated directly by the incoming Taoiseach (Prime Minister), six are elected to represent the universities, while the remaining forty-three are elected on a restricted franchise that mainly consists of the county and city councillors in the state. Ireland has inherited many features of the British state tradition (Loughlin and Peters 1997), not least the relations between central government and local government originally based on the ‘ultra vires’ principle. But the French Republican tradition of the unitary state exercised an influence to some extent on Irish nationalism throughout the nineteenth century. This influence may be the reason why the new Irish state adopted a highly centralized form with power concentrated in Dublin and relatively weak local governments (in contrast to the British tradition of strong local government—although see Chapter 1 of this volume for a nuanced and somewhat sceptical interpretation of this).

The Institutional Expression of Subnational Democracy

................................................................................................................

The institutional framework Since the 2001 Local Government Act, there is a two-tier system (see Table 2.1). The upper tier consists of twenty-nine county councils—twenty-four of the twenty-six counties have one council, Tipperary has two, Dublin has three. There are five city 2 This changed with the 2010 UK election as this book was going to press which resulted in a coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

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Table 2.1 Structure and membership of Irish local authorities Category of authority County councils City councils Borough councils Town councils Totals

Number of authorities

Total number of members

29 5 5 75 114

753 130 60 684 1627

Source: Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government website: http://www.environ.ie\en\ LocalGovernment\Voting\PublicationsDocuments\FileDownLoad,1881,en.pdf

councils that cover the largest cities in the state (Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Galway). These thirty-four authorities have the same powers and form the core of the local political system. The lower tier consists of eighty town councils, although five of the larger towns (Kilkenny, Sligo, Drogheda, Clonmel, and Wexford) may use the title ‘Borough Council’ instead of Town Council although their powers are the same as the other Town Councils. These were formerly called borough corporations, urban district councils and town commissioners (Dexia 2008: 384).

Regionalization Strictly speaking, there is no level of regional government in Ireland, but there are administrative regions or regional development authorities (Laffan 1995). In 1994, the government set up eight Regional Authorities, consisting of elected representatives from the county councils, whose task is to coordinate some of the county/city and sub-county activities and play a monitoring role in relation to the use of EU structural funds. Two Regional Assemblies, the Border Midland & Western Region (BMW) and the Southern & Eastern Region (S&E), covering larger areas than the Authorities, were established in July 1999 to manage the National Development Plan and in order to qualify for EU Structural Funds.3 They promote coordination of the provision of public services in their areas, manage regional operational programmes in the EU’s Community Support Framework (CSF), and monitor the general impact of all EU programmes of assistance under the CSF. The capital city Dublin is both a regional authority and a county, with the same geographical boundaries. This means that Dublin, confusingly, has four local governments: the Dublin City Council and three other county councils (Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, Fingal, and South-Dublin) 3 Hitherto all of the Republic of Ireland had been classified as an Objective 1 Priority region but Ireland’s massive economic growth meant that by the mid-1990s it no longer met the criteria for this. Its solution was to create two new regions within Ireland that did meet the criteria.

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with the Dublin Regional Authority responsible for coordination (Dexia 2008: ´ dara´s na 384). The Irish-language community in Ireland has its own authority, U Gaeltachta, which exists to promote economic development as well as community, cultural, and language-development activities. This does not cover a single geographical region, but represents the various Irish-language communities dispersed throughout the country. Shannon Development is an economic development agency in the west of Ireland that started in relation to the development of Shannon Airport, but with a wide brief to promote sustainable regional development in the entire region.

Local government functions There has been a steady reduction in the responsibilities assigned to local government in Ireland (Callanan and Keogan 2003). Functions that are carried out by local authorities in other European countries, even in a (until recently) highly centralized country like the United Kingdom, such as education, police, and social welfare, are the responsibility of central departments in Ireland, with the exception of some minor contributions by local authorities. Even these functions are exercised only within a policy framework determined by the central government (Dexia 2008: 387). However, there was some increase in local autonomy following the 2001 Act which changed the ultra vires principle to allow local governments to be responsible for any matter of ‘local interest’. Local governments are multi-functional organizations whose responsibilities are now classified in terms of eight community development programmes:

·· ·· ·· ··

Housing and building; Road transportation and safety; Water supply and sewerage; Planning and economic development; Environmental protection; Recreation and amenities; Agriculture, education, health, and welfare; Miscellaneous services.

Nevertheless, central government still exercises the main competences in areas such as health, education, and social services with local government playing a minor role (Dexia 2008: 388). Local governments may also establish local public companies, subject to private law, in which capital can be mixed, wholly public, held by local governments alone, or held in association with other public bodies. They may also enter Public— Private Partnerships (PPPs) of which the majority are in the water and waste management sectors (Dexia 2008: ibid.)

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The city/county manager system The county and city manager system was introduced into Ireland in 1929 under the influence of city management models in the United States (Collins and Haslam 1997). The manager is a full-time chief executive with a supporting administrative staff. The key to the system is the division of functions into ‘reserved’ and ‘executive’. Reserved functions are the responsibility of the elected councillors and cover important matters of policy and principle: financial affairs, development plans, passing of by-laws. All other functions are ‘executive’ and automatically come under the authority of the manager. In theory, the elected members have powers to oversee the managers, and the latter have a duty to assist the elected members. It is generally recognized, however, that the managers, as quasi-permanent, professional, and salaried officials, are in a stronger position than the elected councillors, who are unpaid, part-time, and often transient (Coyle 1996; Forde 2005: 138). The manager’s position is further enhanced by the fact that his appointment is the responsibility of the Public Appointments Service, a national agency, and he may be dismissed only by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage, and Local Government. Elected councillors may, after a two-thirds majority vote, suspend him for incompetence or misconduct but must request the Minister for the Environment to remove him from office.

Local finances In 2005, subnational public expenditure was 6.7 per cent of Irish GDP and 19.5 per cent of total public expenditure which was among the lowest ratios in Europe (Dexia 2008: 390). Local financing has been controversial since the abolition of household rates in 1978, made following a commitment given in a national election campaign. Attempts by local authorities to make good the deficiency by levying charges for household water supply met with resistance and threatened political upsets in the large cities. In 1996 these charges were also abolished, and a new system was set up whereby local motor tax revenues previously directed to the national exchequer would now be made available for local spending. This was boosted in March 1998 with the announcement that a dedicated slice of national revenue (index-linked) in addition to the revenue from motor taxation would be made available for distribution to the local authorities. In 2007, local government spent around 310.5 billion, of which about half was current spending and half capital spending (see Tables 2.2 and 2.3). Revenue for local authority capital and current expenditure comes from a variety of sources. Capital expenditure is financed mainly from central government grants. However, the Planning and Development Act 2000 allowed local authorities to require developers to part-fund the provision of infrastructure. Under the National

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Table 2.2 Local authority current expenditure by programme group, 2007 Programme Housing and building Road transportation and safety Water supply and sewerage Development incentives and control Environmental protection Recreation and amenities Agriculture, education, health, and welfare Miscellaneous services Total

Expenditure (3 million) 716.88 1252.44 651.23 252.91 874.88 404.96 294.95 270.76 34.7 billion

Source: Green Paper (2008: 98).

Table 2.3 Local authority capital expenditure by programme group, 2007 Programme Housing and building Road transportation and safety Water supply and sewerage Development incentives and control Environmental protection Recreation and amenities Agriculture, education, health, and welfare Miscellaneous services Total

Expenditure (3 million) 2 222.76 1909.79 775.82 260.72 209.21 210.16 13.19 198.34 35.8 billion

Source: Green Paper (2008: 98).

Development Plan (2000–6), this allowed local authorities to raise 32.1 billion, and a similar amount is projected for the period of the current plan (Green Paper 2008: 98). Besides these development levies, other sources include borrowing, own internal resources, and property sales. Some projects may be funded entirely by local authority own resources and borrowing (see Table 2.4). Current expenditure, covering day-to-day running costs, is funded from a variety of sources although these may vary between authorities. About 58 per cent comes from rates on businesses and from goods and services. The remaining 42 per cent comes from central government and is divided almost evenly between general purpose grants from the Local Government Fund and specific grants and subsidies (Green Paper 2008: 98). The vast majority of state grants are earmarked although there is also the Local Government Fund (LGF) which is a general purpose grant introduced in 1999. The entire proceeds of the motor tax (projected at 31,080 million for 2008) are

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Table 2.4 Sources of income for current expenditure, 2007 Source Charges for goods and services Rates Government grants and subsidies Local government fund—general purpose grant

% of total income for current expenditure 31.2 26.4 22.4 20.0

Source: Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, http://www. environ.ie\en\LocalGovernment\LocalGovernmentAdministration\LocalGovernment Finance (accessed November 2008).

supplemented by the Exchequer (3545 million for 2008). The Fund rose from 3797 million in 1999 to 31.6 billion in 2008 (Green Paper 2008: 99). This has allowed local authorities to keep rate increases as low as possible. Nevertheless, despite these moves towards increasing the amount of local ‘own resources’, local spending is still subject to tight control by the central state. All local investment projects are determined by the central government through the national financing programme. Furthermore, local authorities are under considerable difficulty in meeting the costs of environmental protection in areas such as waste management, drinking water, and treatment of waste water. These strains have been exacerbated by the massive increases in population experienced by many local authorities as a result of strong immigration in recent years. Many reports, of which the latest was the Indecon Report (2005), have criticized this state of affairs and have made various recommendations to enhance local financial autonomy but these have rarely been implemented. One recommendation of the Indecon Report which has been implemented is the introduction in 2006 of a levy on newly built commercial property (Dexia 2008: 395).

The dual mandate and directly elected mayors The Local Government Act 2001 abolished the dual mandate whereby councillors could also be TDs (members of parliament) and also made provision for directly elected mayors for cities and counties. This latter provision was not implemented, ostensibly on the grounds that the regime initiated by the 2001 Act needed time to settle following the abolition of the dual mandate (Green Paper 2008: 40). The probable real reason, however, was that the provision drew intense criticism especially from many councillors who were afraid that their own position would be diminished were there to be a directly elected mayor (ibid.) There was, nevertheless, a promise to keep the provision under review.

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The 2008 Green Paper Stronger Local Democracy: Options for Change duly returned to the question and has made the direct election of mayors the centrepiece of its proposal for strengthening local democracy. The Programme for Government published by the Irish government in 2007 committed to the provision of a directly elected mayor for Dublin by 2011 (Department of the Taoiseach 2007). The Green Paper examines the different forms this might take and also recommends the implementation of the 2001 Act’s provision for directly elected mayors for counties and cities, although it also raises the question as to whether this should also be applied to other levels of local government. One of the problems with the proposal to create a mayor for Dublin is to define the area covered by the mayor’s remit: should the mayor represent the area of Dublin City Council or, as the Green Paper recommends, should he be the mayor for a wider region including the other three local authorities of the greater Dublin area (Green Paper 2008: 33)? The Paper also recommends that the Dublin mayor should be given a strategic role in areas such as regional planning, water, waste water, waste management, and housing. However, it recommends too that the creation of such a position meant that many issues would have to be resolved, not least the mayor’s relations with the central government, the Dublin Regional Authority, and the four Dublin authorities, each of which might have their own elected mayors if the 2001 Act’s provisions are finally implemented. Parallel to the proposal to have a directly elected Dublin Mayor, the Green Paper recommends directly elected mayors in cities and counties. Currently, the council elects the mayor from among its members on a yearly basis. The principal rationale behind the move to directly elected mayors is to strengthen the local authorities by giving important powers of initiation to the mayors: of budgets, development plans, etc. It also recommends that the default decision-making powers of the managers be transferred to the mayors. In effect, these recommendations signal the development of a cabinet-style executive headed by the mayor and controlling the managers rather than the latter controlling the council. Of course, the Green Paper is simply making recommendations and it remains to be seen whether the Irish government will accept or whether the resistance of councillors will block them once again. What does seem certain at the time of writing (2009) is that there does seem to be a firm commitment on the part of the government to implement the proposals. Nevertheless, even if this does happen, as with the case of a Dublin mayor, there will be many thorny issues to resolve. These reflections are, in any case, useful in illustrating some of the basic weaknesses of contemporary local government in Ireland.

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Table 2.5 2004 local elections: seats per party Party Fianna Fa´il Fine Gael Labour Party Sinn Fe´in Progressive Democrats Green Party Socialists Workers’ Party Others

No. of seats 2004

No. of seats 1999

þ/

302 293 101 54 19 18 4 2 90

382 277 83 21 25 8 2 3 82

80 þ16 þ18 þ33 6 þ10 þ2 1 þ8

Source: Christopher To http://www.electionsireland.org\index.cfmhttp:\www.electionsireland.org\results\local \index.cfmok and Sea´n Donnelly, Electionsireland.org, 2009.http://www.electionsireland.org\results\local\ seatsummary.cfm?election=2004L

Subnational politics Despite the limited political and policy-making role of Irish local authorities, the political parties and the electorate take local elections very seriously. Although there has been a decline in turnout, this nevertheless remains quite high compared to some other European countries, especially the United Kingdom. In the 2004 local elections turnout was 56.95 per cent. Elections are held every five years in June and this often occurs midway through the life of the Da´il. This means they are often seen as tests of the popularity of the government. Furthermore, county councillors, although they have a weak democratic base in the councils and despite the truncated nature of their functions, serve as conduits between the locality and the centre. This was most evident during the period of the dual mandate but, since the abolition of the latter, TDs have sometimes ensured that ‘their’ local seats are occupied by a relative. There are also a small number of non-party independent councillors. The results of the 2004 local elections show that the two major parties still dominate local politics with Fianna Fa´il still the biggest party followed by Fine Gael (Table 2.5). The results also confirm that local elections are ‘second order’ elections dominated by national issues and are seen as a judgement by the electorate on the government of the day, in this case a coalition of Fianna Fa´il and the Progressive Democrats both of which suffered heavy losses of seats. The socio-economic profile of councillors reflects the rural nature of Irish society with a preponderance of farmers, directors, and those exercising the liberal professions and few working-class people. This is illustrated in a survey of occupations of county and city councillors made after the 1999 local elections (Table 2.6).4 4 I would like to thank Dr Aodh Quinlivan of University College Cork for bringing this table to my attention.

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Table 2.6 Occupations of county and city councillors, 1999 Occupation of councillor* Public representative** Farmer Teacher Director Publican Housewife Manager *** Retired Solicitor Contractor Technician Nurse Self-employed Doctor Engineer Auctioneer Barrister Factory worker Undertaker Office worker Total

Number 196 156 66 27 25 24 22 16 14 13 12 10 8 7 7 6 5 5 3 3 883

* The survey was made on the basis of the descriptions (if any) councillors included on the ballot paper. ** This survey was made after the elections held in June 1999 when the ‘dual mandate’, abolished in 2003, was still in operation. 118 councillors who declared themselves to be ‘public representatives’ were TDs. *** The term ‘manager’ covers a variety of occupations. Source: Kenny (1999).

Citizens’ attitudes to local government in Ireland According to the 1996 Eurobarometer results, Irish people have a strong sense of identity with their town and village (92 per cent) although they have an even stronger attachment to their county (97 per cent) (Eurobarometer no. 44, 1996). There is also a strong attachment to the county for sporting purposes. However, there is little direct data on citizens’ attitudes towards local government, nor the degree to which they participate in local government. Nevertheless, electoral turnout figures indicate that turnout for local elections is much higher in rural Ireland than it is in the area around Dublin. This suggests that people living in rural Ireland are more attached to local government than those living in the Dublin conurbation. These findings are borne out by an unpublished survey carried out for the Devolution Commission by Lansdowne Market Research.5 This survey also 5 The Department of the Environment kindly allowed the author access to this report for the previous version of this book (Loughlin et al. 2001) and has given permission to quote the main findings, but not the detailed results.

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found active community involvement to be at relatively low ebb. Only one quarter of the respondents expressed an interest in local politics, and about two-thirds had had no contact with the local council in the previous twelve months. A majority rejected the idea of becoming involved in the local community themselves, with one in five stating that nothing would encourage them to participate. A majority said they knew ‘just a little’ about their own council and most felt the council did not keep them well informed about its services. Most people felt their own opinions had little or no influence on council decisions. Nevertheless, despite these negative findings, the majority was satisfied with the working of democracy in their area and a majority wished to see councils have more powers.

Local governance, subnational citizenship, and participation Policy networks at the local level have tended to be less well developed in Ireland compared to other European countries, possibly because of the weakness of the powers of Irish local authorities and the clientelistic nature of local politics. Mediation between the centre and the locality usually occurred through personal contacts with politicians who previously could exercise a dual mandate being local councillors and TDs. Although this has been abolished since 2001, the clientelistic culture it generated will take longer to change. The Irish government has taken a number of initiatives to promote active citizenship at both national and local levels. In 1996, it published Better Local Government: A Programme for Change, a policy initiative which was the foundation for a wide range of changes in Irish local government, from the use of performance indicators, new human resource practices, improved financial management, and a greater focus on customer care and quality services (DoE 1996). A core principle of the Better Local Government reform programme was to ‘enhance local democracy’ (Callanan 2005). This was to be achieved through the creation of Strategic Policy Committees (SPCs) which would both strengthen the local councillors vis-a`-vis local officials and also provide an institutionalized mechanism for community groups to participate in local decision-making. Although local authorities already had a statutory obligation to consult citizens on planning and environmental issues, responses to this tended to be very sporadic and uneven with large development projects attracting strong reactions, but most of the time there was indifference. The SPCs were meant to provide a longer-term and more consistent approach to policy consultation (Callanan 2005). Two-thirds of the SPC is composed of local councillors and the remaining third of ‘sectoral interests’—business, trade unions, community and voluntary groups, and other relevant local interests (see Table 2.7). The chair is a local councillor nominated by the council. As is evident, local councillors are preponderant in the SPC. One of the issues raised by the SPCs is the representativeness of the community and voluntary groups. The government issued a number of criteria that would determine the inclusion of a particular group (Callanan 2005: 918):

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Table 2.7 Sample Strategic Policy Committee (SPC) scheme SPC 1 Cultural, corporate, and general services

SPC 2 Housing services

SPC 3 Community and environmental services

SPC 4 Roads, transportation and safety

SPC 5 Planning and economic development

9 Members in total

9 Members in total

11 Members in total

12 Members in total

9 Members in total

6 County Council elected members

6 County Council elected members

6 County Council elected members1 Town Council elected member

6 County Council elected members 2 Town Council elected members

6 County Council elected members

3 Sectoral Members

3 Sectoral members

4 Sectoral Members

4 Sectoral members

3 Sectoral members

Representing: (a) Trade Unions (1) (b) Sports and recreational bodies (1) (c) Arts/ heritage/Irish language groups (1)

Representing: (a) Local Authority residents/ voluntary housing organizations (1) (b) Travellers’ organizations (1) (c) Disadvantage/ disabled sector (1)

Representing: (a) Environmental/ conservation groups/group water schemes (1) (b) Community/ voluntary organizations (2) (c) Tidy Towns Assoc. /local development groups (1)

Representing: (a) Agriculture/ Farming organizations (1) (b) Construction industry (1) (c) Business/ commercial (2)

Representing: (a) Planning consultants/ architects/ engineers (1) (b) Gaeltacht/ Island organizations (1) (c) County tourism interests (1)

Source: Callanan (2005: 919).

· · ·

groups should be active in the area (preferably with a county or citywide remit); groups should be open to new members, hold regular meetings and be broadly representative and accountable; while single-issue groups might be considered (such as those focused on the disabled or elderly), groups formed around specific single local issues should not be considered. Other forms of dialogue between local authorities and citizens’ groups are the County/City Development Boards (CDBs) and Community and Voluntary Fora (Green Paper 2008: 65). Nevertheless, despite these mechanisms, an Irish government report issued by the Taskforce on Active Citizenship in 2007 noted that there was a perceived disconnect between citizens and local government. The Green Paper (ibid.) suggests that other more novel forms of engagement might be tried and, in particular, the following:

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petition rights—enabling local communities formally to raise issues; participatory budgeting—enabling local communities to prioritize funding; town meetings—regular open meetings to discuss local government matters; plebiscites—binding local votes on specific proposals.

If implemented and institutionalized, these novel forms of engagement would insert some elements of voter and participatory democracy into Irish local government.

Challenges and Opportunities

................................................................................................................

The transformation of Irish society and economy The environment in which Irish local government operates has experienced profound changes over the past twenty years with the extraordinary growth of the Irish economy which transformed Ireland from one of Europe’s poorest countries to being one of the richest. Nevertheless, not all Irish people benefited from this economic development and significant sections of the population, in both urban and rural areas, continued to experience poverty. Furthermore, Ireland has gone from being a country of emigration to one of net immigration with economic migrants from both EU states and states outside the EU. The 2006 Census showed that 8 per cent of the population was not born in Ireland or the UK and, in some urban areas, 12 per cent of the population was born outside of Ireland. In 1996, there were 70,000 residents born outside Ireland; in 2006, the figure was 380,000. These changes have had important consequences for Irish society and patterns of residence, work, and mobility as well as placing serious strains on the environment. Housing prices rocketed during this period forcing Irish people to reside outside of the main urban centres where they worked, with long commutes between home and workplace. Local governments were obliged to respond to this new situation by providing housing, roads, and other services such as schools. In education, the presence of a heterogeneous population with pupils speaking several languages posed particular problems. Although relations between economic migrants and native Irish have been generally good, there remain issues of social cohesion and integration concerning these newcomers. Today (2009), the global financial crisis has begun to put some of these developments into reverse with rising unemployment and, in effect, the end of the pattern of continual economic growth. This will pose new problems for Irish local governments as the economic crisis may cause efforts at social cohesion and integration to falter. In his foreword to the 2008 Green Paper Stronger Local Democracy: Options for Change, Mr John Gormley, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local

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Government, summarized the challenges facing Irish local government in the twenty-first century (although this was clearly written before the global financial crisis):

·· · ·

Continual population growth and balanced regional development. Tackling social exclusion and integrating new communities. Improved environmental management in areas such as waste, water quality, built and natural heritage protection, and the challenges of climate change. Ensuring greater connection between local government and local people.

Responses The responses to these challenges are enunciated in the Green Paper (2008: 15) in the form of ‘five key principles’ that are also inspired by the European Charter of Local Self-Government:

· · · · ·

An appreciation of the importance of local democratic institutions in representing local communities, in delivering services, in regulating for the common good, and in developing the physical, economic and social environment of the local community. Subsidiarity: allowing decision-making to be handled at the ‘lowest’ appropriate level. Democratic responsibility and accountability: providing that local democratic leaders have appropriate responsibility for making decisions at a local level and clear accountability for those decisions. Ensuring the proper balance between the range and functions of local structures and the need for coherence, value for money, and efficient delivery of services. A continued focus on Quality Customer Service.

The European dimension Membership of the European Union has also generated a number of challenges for Irish local government. First, the arrival of European funds into Ireland was one among several factors that led to the economic boom which began in the 1980s. However, although the EU is often credited with favouring subnational government, in the Irish case it actually reinforced the central state since European funds were controlled by the Ministry of Finance. Indeed, for Structural Fund purposes, all of the Republic of Ireland was classified as a single Objective One priority region. The argument of Irish governments at the time was that Ireland was too small to be further divided into smaller regions. Regional authorities were created but these were simply administrative regions. When the Irish economy reached a

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point where the country as a whole did not qualify for Objective One status (the earlier argument was quietly forgotten), there was a further regionalization with the creation of two regions that would meet the criteria. A further challenge caused by membership of the EU was the increased amount of regulation in areas such as environmental and health and safety standards which demanded compliance by Irish local authorities. This meant increased costs and the employment of new officials equipped with the requisite expertise. Finally, the negative vote on the Lisbon Treaty in 2008 illustrates a certain disillusionment on the part of many Irish citizens vis-a`-vis the European Union although it is not clear how much this will impact on the activities of the local authorities.

Conclusions

................................................................................................................ Irish local government, compared to that in other European states, is relatively weak, dominated by central government with elected councillors dominated by the non-elected manager and with few financial resources. The exercise of the ‘dual mandate’ whereby local councillors could also be TDs reinforced the domination by the centre. Over the past twenty years, there have been several reports and proposals to reform local government in order to strengthen its democratic aspects while at the same time enabling it to carry out those tasks it does have more effectively and efficiently. Most of these reports and proposals have not been followed through by central government which has traditionally distrusted local government. Nevertheless, a few proposals have been implemented. The 2001 Local Government Act abolished the dual mandate and sought to integrate the successful and dynamic local development movement into the traditional local government system. To some extent, this development has been a success. A proposal in the Act to introduce directly elected mayors in the counties and cities was not immediately implemented but the government has returned to the issue with the intention to have a directly elected Dublin Mayor and, in an important 2008 Green Paper on local government reform, recommends directly elected mayors for counties and cities. The Green Paper also explores a number of ways in which participatory democracy might be improved. Should these reforms be accepted it will mean a significant boost for Irish local democracy. Local democracy in Ireland is, by most accounts, very weak, which makes it difficult to connect it to all categories of Hendriks’s typology; it is simply not varied enough to be able to do so. Perhaps the basic problem is that Irish local government has been primarily in a principal–agent relationship with central government. Central government—the ‘principal’—has used local government—

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the ‘agent’—to implement its own policies and programmes with little input from local government itself. In other words, the ‘democratic’ dimension of Irish local government has been strongly overridden by its ‘administrative’ dimension. Nevertheless, Hendriks’s typology is useful in allowing us to highlight certain features of whatever local democracy does exist and to identify some current trends. Thus, it could be said that Irish local government, like national government, occupies a position somewhere between pendulum democracy and a tendency to reinforce some elements of consensus democracy. Directly elected mayors can be seen as an example of pendulum democracy in that this would bring competitive elections for political office and would strengthen elected local politicians vis-a`-vis officials, in this case the managers. On the other hand, such a reform might further weaken the elected councillors. But some of the other measures recommended by the Green Paper would, if implemented, strengthen elements of participatory democracy and even consensus democracy. Better local governance is a programme that wants to stimulate, in a quite channelled and restrained form, a type of ‘interactive governance’, similar to that found in the Netherlands, which is government-led and group-focused. Table 2.7 above even calls to mind models of (neo)corporatism, with representatives from trade unions, industry, farming organizations, and like. Neo-corporatism and consensus democracy are usually seen as akin. Other possible reform measures are akin to direct democracy: for example, participatory budgeting (famously used in Porto Allegre), town meetings (as in New England), and plebiscites (as in the Swiss cantons). These expressions of direct democracy are sometimes more aggregative, sometimes more integrative in Hendriks’s terms.

REFERENCES Callanan, M. (2005). ‘Institutionalizing participation and governance? New participative structures in local government in Ireland’, Public Administration 83/4, pp. 909–29. Callanan, M. and J. F. Keogan (eds.) (2003). Local Government in Ireland: Inside Out. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Collins, N. and R. Haslam (1997). ‘Trends towards decentralization in the Republic of Ireland’, Regional and Federal Studies 7/3, pp. 165–72. Coyle, C. (1996). ‘Local and regional administrative structures and rural poverty’, in C. Curtin et al. (eds.), Poverty in Ireland: A Political Economy Perspective. Dublin: Oak Tree Press. Department of the Taoiseach (2007). An Agreed Programme for Government: A Blueprint for Ireland’s Future 2007–2012. http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/index.asp/locID=566&docID=3493 Dexia (2008). Subnational Governments in the European Union: Organization, Responsibilities and Finance. Dexia Editions: Paris.

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DoE [Department of the Environment] (1996). Better Local Government: A Programme for Change. Dublin: The Stationery Office. European Commission (1996). Eurobarometer. Forde, C. (2005). ‘Participatory democracy or pseudo-participation? Local government reform in Ireland’, Local Government Studies 31/2, pp. 137–48. Foster, R. F. (1988). Modern Ireland, 1600–1972. London: Penguin Press. Green Paper (2008). Stronger Local Democracy: Options for Change. Dublin: Ministry of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. Indecon (2005). Indecon Review of Local Government Financing. (Report Commissioned by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government Prepared by Indecon International Economic Consultants in association with the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham), http://www.indecon.ie/download/pdf/ localgovfin2005.pdf Kenny, L. (1999). From Ballot Box to Council Chamber. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Laffan, B. (1995). ‘Ireland: a region without regions—the odd man out?’, in L. Hooghe (ed.), European Integration, Cohesion Policy, and Subnational Mobilisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loughlin, J. (2002). ‘La Loi Irlandaise de 2001 sur le gouvernement local’, in G. Marcou et P. de Bruyker (eds.), Annuaire 2002 des Collectivite´s Locales. Paris: CNRS, pp. 279–84. Loughlin, J. and B. G. Peters (1997). ‘State traditions, administrative reform and regionalization’, in M. Keating and J. Loughlin (eds.), The Political Economy of Regionalism. London: Frank Cass, pp. 41–62. Loughlin, J. et al. (2001). Subnational Democracy in the European Union: Challenges and Opportunities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyons, F. S. L. (1971). Ireland since the Famine. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Sheehy, E. (2003). ‘City and county management’, in M. Callanan and J. F. Keogan (eds.), Local Government in Ireland: Inside Out. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, pp. 123–42.

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part ii .............................................................................................

THE RHINELANDIC STATES .............................................................................................

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chapter 3 .............................................................................................

B E LG I U M : A TA L E O F R E G I O NA L D I V E RG E N C E ? .............................................................................................

ellen wayenberg f ilip de rynck kristof steyvers jean-beno^it pilet

Belgium Inhabitants: 10.8 million Surface area: 30 528 km2 Inhabitants/km2: 341.1 State form: Federal Official description: Federal parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarchy Languages: Dutch 60%, French 40%, German less than 1% Subnational government: 589 municipalities 10 provinces 6 communities and regions

Map 3.1 Belgium: Regions

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Introduction and History

................................................................................................................ When both were offered to him in 1831, Leopold I favoured the throne of rainy Belgium over that of sunny Greece. Underneath the surface of great unity around one of the most liberal constitutions of the era (Witte, Craeybeckx, and Meynen 2000) three cleavages divided the small nation (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). These cleavages—and their accompanying mechanisms of conflict regulation—would characterize the subsequent course of Belgian history carving out the bedrocks for the current highly segmented institutional make-up. The first two have an indirect impact on subnational democracy as they are the expression of the structural relationship between the state, civil society, and the market. The third has more direct bearings on democracy beyond the nation-state. The first cleavage was ideological as (urban) liberals opposed a rural Catholic domination of society. As a compromise, the clear separation of church and state was compensated by the formal recognition of the role of (non-)denominational social organizations as primary rulers of and providers in social life. From this logic of subsidiarity developed a system of pillarization (verzuiling) that segmented society. In organizational terms, mass political parties stood on top of these pillars. Although a tendency towards depillarization has been discerned since the late 1960s, pillar organizations in part still function as ‘systemic’ patterns of policymaking (Deschouwer 1999; Billiet 2004). The second cleavage was economic as the mass labour force stood against a capitalist elite. With the development of the labour movement and the spread of voting rights, capitalism became gradually more state-regulated. In particular after the Second World War a neo-corporatist regime of social deliberation emerged in a Christian Democratic, conservative welfare state model (Esping-Andersen 1990). It stemmed from the Keynesian-Fordist consensus. The state should help to guarantee a stable climate by institutionalizing social deliberation between employers and employees (Deleeck and Cantillon 2008). Its conservative character is rooted in the intersection of that development with the above-mentioned mechanism of philosophical conflict-regulation by means of pillarization. In particular in relation to the welfare state, these pillars were bestowed with crucial functions and developed into powerful service concerns in fields such as education and public health, and their associated trade unions had an important say in nearly all matters of employment and social deliberation. In many instances these essentially private organizations were given a privileged status and often monopolized substantial aspects of public goods and service delivery. Despite the depillarization mentioned and a trend towards post-Fordism that entailed a partial decentralization of social deliberation, today it is often within these fields that the base of their enduring power position is situated (Huyse 1987; Devos et al. 2007).

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The combined effects of both systemic features on subnational democracy are threefold: (1) a weak position of local government in terms of functions: its expenditures amount to only 7 per cent of the GDP or half of the European average; (2) the disinterest and resistance of pillar organizations towards territorial decentralization given their own power position; and (3) the public–private type of policy-making at all levels of government. This configuration is, however, also strongly affected by the impact of the third cleavage: the conflicts between the two linguistic communities. Especially this third systemic Belgian feature has a more direct influence on the nature of subnational democracy.

The Institutional Expression of State Democracy

................................................................................................................

The hybrid nature of the ‘subnational’ The institutional expression of Belgian democracy has changed drastically since the 1960s due to the impact of the linguistic division between Dutch-speakers mainly living in Flanders and French-speakers mainly located in Wallonia and partly in Brussels. This cleavage gradually grew in importance in the first half of the twentieth century to become prominent since the 1960s. This cleavage is a mixture of ethno-linguistic, socio-economic and centre–periphery elements. First, the cleavage was raised by the Flemish majority to stand for its right to speak, to be educated, and to address the public administration in Dutch. The first demands were to recognize the bilingual character of Belgium, ultimately leading to the so-called ‘language frontier’ (1963). The second component was socioeconomic. In the nineteenth century, the economic elite in Belgium spoke French. The Flemish movement also had an oppositional class dimension. Part of this component was related to centre–periphery sentiments. The centre meant ‘Brussels’, a metaphor for the power of the Belgian national government, dominated by the French-speaking bourgeoisie and oppressing the claims of the periphery (the regions) to handle its own economic development. The political mobilization for more autonomous regions started in Flanders but was later adopted also by the Walloon elite. The current Belgian state form derives from a type that is often termed Napoleonic or ‘Southern’. The national centre of government is the main site of public functions, and local government (municipalities and provinces) usually has quite extensive forms of supervision. The relatively uniform subnational units are rather the expression of place-bound political communities than of functional service

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units. As a counterweight, mechanisms of political localism dominate intergovernmental relations. This means the colonization of central government by the place-bound interest mediation of local politicians influencing the decisions of the centre mainly through an accumulation of political mandates, or using their party political affiliations with ministers and their cabinets (Page and Goldsmith 1987; Hesse and Sharpe 1991). How has regionalization affected this ‘Belgian’ pattern of subnational policy-making? The strong tendencies towards decentralization at the regional level as a means of conflict management have resulted in various rounds of state reform since the 1970s (Platel 2004). As a consequence, the current federal state is made up of highly complex regimes of competence and finance (own revenues and transfers) managed by their own regional governments (see Figure 3.1). Apart from the federal level (competent for overarching matters such as defence and foreign policy but also for domains such as social security which require solidarity across the subnational units) Belgium has two types of subnational, non-local layers (Deschouwer 2005). Regions are socio-economic entities competent for the so-called harder or place-bound policy domains (e.g. economic development, housing, transport, and spatial planning) while communities are language-based entities dealing with the softer or the so-called more ‘personal’ policy domains (e.g. education, culture, and social policy). The three regions are: the Flemish (6 million

Federal government

3 Language communities(LC)

3 Regions

Competencies:

Community/language-related issues (education, culture, etc.)

Territory/region-related issues (infrastructure, development, etc.)

• • • •

Justice & Home affairs Defence Social security Foreign affairs

Federal government

German LC

Brussels-Capital Region

Council + government

Council + government

French LC

Walloon Region

Council + government

Parliament + government

Chamber Vlaanderen

Senate

Parliament + government [LC & region have been merged]

10 Provinces [5 in the Flemish Region & 5 in the Walloon Region while the Brussels-Capital Region has no subdivision in provinces]

589 Municipalities [308 in the Flemish Region, 262 in the Walloon Region and 19 in the Brussels-Capital Region]

Figure 3.1 The Belgian state structure Source: Plees 2005: 50.

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inhabitants), the Walloon (4 million inhabitants) and the Brussels-Capital Region (1 million inhabitants). The three communities are: the Flemish-speaking, Frenchspeaking, and German-speaking (60,000 inhabitants). In Flanders, region and community are merged. The German-speaking municipalities are part of the Walloon Region for policy matters under the competency of the regions. In Brussels, the Flemish- and French-speaking communities are competent for community matters of their own community, except for matters that affect both language communities (here a Joint Community Commission is competent). The various packages of competencies are not entirely homogenous, which makes power-sharing necessary, and are at stake in the permanent discussion about state reform which swings between solidarity based on national homogeneity and subnational ambitions for particularity. One additional specificity of the Belgian system is the absence of a clear hierarchy of legal norms in the trade-off between federal government, regions, and communities. This means that within their field of competence regional entities cannot be overruled by their federal counterpart. On those policy fields they are the one and only ‘national’ government while in other fields (of social or economic policy) policy-making is the result of bargaining between the two levels. Moreover, the process has been a centrifugal one as competencies have flown always from the federal to the regional level. Some observers tend to speak of a sui generis federalism leaning towards confederalism (Devos et al. 2007). This means that the ‘centre’ might be either federal, regional, or a combination of both. The latter holds true for matters regarding the organization and competencies of local government. In many ways the balance between ‘national’ and ‘subnational’ could thus be termed as a state of flux. Therefore our approach to ‘the subnational’ should be flexible and open. One of the most intriguing questions is whether the country’s stories of subnational democracies should be told as a tale of regional divergence. Do formal institutional changes also bring about a system change in the patterns of subnational democracy?

Types of democratic state system For Lijphart, Belgium was the prototype of the consensus model of democracy which included: (1) power sharing in broad coalition cabinets; (2) a balance of power in a give-and-take between executive and parliament; (3) a multiparty system; (4) proportional representation; (5) interest group corporatism; (6) federal and decentralized government; (7) bicameralism although with a reduced power of the Senate; (8) constitutional rigidity; (9) judicial review since 1984 by the creation of the Court of Arbitration; (10) central bank independence (Lijphart 1999: 31–41). Policy-making at the regional level copied the most relevant elements. So there is no radical system change. Collective decision-making at the federal and regional

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levels and between the levels takes place between representatives of the same political parties, and representatives of society are integrated into that system in a corporatist way. The same political parties are active on both levels, with leading politicians easily making the transfer from one level to the other. An increasing divergence between the systemic features of the regional and the federal levels would hamper the consensus-building capacities of the parties in the whole system. The best indicator for our argument is the existence of huge regional ministerial cabinets which are a copy of the federal cabinets and which are the core of the consensus and the corporatist model (Pelgrims 2008). The most important change in the political system is the sharp increase of multipartisanship and the subsequent extreme fragmentation of the political landscape, mainly in the Flemish region (Lijphart 1999: 256). The system evolved from three dominant national parties to the linguistic split of those parties and the rise of many new small parties. The socialist party in the Walloon region was for decades the biggest party but gradually has lost its monopolistic position, although not at the same pace as their counterpart, the Flemish Christian-democrats. This fragmentation hampers government formation and consensus-building.

The electoral systems at central level It took many years from 1831 until the electoral system was based on the principle of ‘one man—one vote’, especially because women were entitled to vote nationally no earlier than in 1949 and the minimum age of 18 was introduced in 1981. The system started as a majoritarian one, but, from 1899 onwards, the rise of socialist and liberal parties led to a proportional system. The regional parliaments gradually evolved in the 1960s from indirectly appointed councils composed of members of the national parliament, towards directly elected assemblies with the first elections in 1995: 118 members in the Flemish, 75 in the Walloon, 89 in the Brussels parliament and 25 for the council of the German-speaking community. The elections for the federal parliament and for the regional parliaments technically are organized in a very similar way (in two rounds based on the D’Hondt system: a proportional division of seats and attribution of seats to candidates). This similarity is another argument for the maintenance of the consensus model despite all the formal changes. The same electoral threshold of 5 per cent is used for all the elections. The most important difference is the enlargement of the electoral districts in Flanders by five since 2003, compared to the thirteen smaller districts in the Walloon Region (for regional elections only; for federal elections provinces are the electoral constituencies in the whole of the country). It seems to be easier for locally embedded candidates to be elected in smaller districts, and that is the most important criticism on the Flemish electoral system.

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The Institutional Expression of Subnational Democracy

................................................................................................................ The core of sub-central democracy since the founding of Belgium is the municipalities and the provinces: in 1830, there were originally nine but there are now ten provinces following the division of the province of Brabant; the originally 2,498 municipalities of 1830 have been reduced to the present 589 following amalgamation in 1976. The federalization process affected these local governments as major competencies were transferred to the regional level. For local governments the regions are the equivalent of central government since they are competent for policy domains highly related to local problems such as spatial planning, housing, education, or infrastructure. In fact all important ‘local’ problems are interwoven with regional policies. The regionalization process has led the regional level to absorb evaporating state power and this meso-level was the lower limit for decentralization. That is why the regional governments are an essential part of the patterns of subnational decision-making. Regionalization reinforced ‘political localism’ and regional governments are the new spider in the web. This bottom-up perspective guides us through the following four aspects: the institutional framework, subnational politics, subnational citizenship and participation, and aspects of subnational governance.

The institutional framework of local government (i) The survival of the provinces For a very long time the law on the provinces restricted the freedom of the directly elected provincial councils. Until 1984 they were only entitled to be in session for two weeks. The fact that the governor, an official originally appointed by the central government, presided over the executive, expressed the fear of the central government of a strong meso-level. The governor still presides over the executive of the Flemish provinces but is now appointed by the regional government. The governor acts on behalf of the central governments for disaster management, police, and for administrative supervision on municipalities and provinces. The Walloon government chose to separate the functions so the executive of the Walloon provinces is presided over by an elected politician (Valcke et al. 2008). Two trends put severe pressure on the provinces: the amalgamation of municipalities (enlarging their scale and capacities) and the creation of the new regions. Nevertheless, several attempts in the 1980s to abolish the provinces as a political level failed as all the established political parties see the provinces as an important

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provider of elective mandates and the provinces can mobilize enough support to counter their abolition. Regionalization affected the roles and the position of the provinces. One of the traditional competencies of the meso-level was the oversight of municipal decisions. The Flemish government has deregulated administrative oversight drastically and has transferred all the remaining oversight on local government to the governor. The Walloon government adopted another approach, keeping the provinces in charge of a vast bureaucratic system of administrative supervision. The Flemish government, secondly, uses the provincial level as the upper tier of local government for some sub-regional European or rural development programmes and for spatial planning. Although the political importance of this development should not be exaggerated, the provincial profile in the Walloon Region did not change much: the provinces act merely as the upper tier for some supra-local infrastructure and services. The administrative organization of the provinces and the municipalities are now look-alikes in both regions: the provincial and municipal decrees can be read as copies of one another, making clear that the regional governments consider the provinces as ‘local’ government. Despite these changes, the Flemish provinces are still quite distant and marginal in public debate and in citizens’ perceptions. The pressure of the last decades, however, encouraged the provinces to modernize their organization. This activated the power struggle with the municipalities in trilateral trade-offs with the Flemish government with regard to decentralization. Some provinces try to take up the role of pivotal administration for rural areas, with smaller municipalities. This also stimulates a debate on core tasks: some say that the provinces take advantage of the weaker capacities of those municipalities. The provinces in the Walloon Region keep up their more traditional tasks and the Walloon government overrules the provinces when it comes to policy programmes for rural areas, which are predominantly from the region.

(ii) The municipalities and political autonomy There are 589 municipalities. Tables 3.1 and 3.2 illustrate the regional differences: smaller and more rural in the Walloon Region, bigger and more urbanized in Flanders, big municipalities in the Brussels Region. The fetish of political autonomy is at the core of Belgian local government. It stems from the Middle Ages, when cities were literally fighting for their rights. The territorial integrity of these place-bound communities was also the foundation upon which the newly emerging Belgian state was built. The Belgian constitution guarantees local self-government: municipalities (or provinces) can take whatever initiative they want as long as this is beneficial to local (or provincial) interests and as long as no other government has assumed legal responsibility for the concerned

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Table 3.1 Municipalities in the three Belgian regions Regions

Flemish Region Brussels-Capital Region Walloon Region Belgium

Number of municipalities

Population average (inhabitants)

Surface average (km2)

Population density (inhabitants/km2)

308 19

19.621 52.987

43.9 8.5

446.9 6233.8

262 589

12.962 17.735

64.3 51.8

201.6 342.4

Source: Dexia (2006). De financie¨n van de lokale overheden. Brussels: Dexia, p. 6.

field of action (a negative definition of autonomy). The regions cannot change this constitutional safeguard but of course regionalization has affected the substance of this autonomy as the regions centralized a lot of local matters, redefined the role of local governments, or extended those roles to new fields of political action (mainly on environmental policy, traffic policy, social policy, housing, spatial planning, and cultural policies). Next to disposing of self-government, the local governments also function in arrangements of co-governance (with earmarked granting from the centre) and as mere agents executing administrative tasks assigned to them by the federal, regional, and community governments. The stereotypical complaint of local governments is that local autonomy has deteriorated. Seen from a broader perspective there has been a vast expansion of local tasks but the networking with regional governments has also been intensified giving way to new forms of functional supervision and of ‘political localism’ for all important matters that affect local policies.

Table 3.2 Sizes of municipalities in the three Belgian regions

>100,000 40,000–100,000 20,000–40,000 10,000–20,000