Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

This paper deals with two questions on the relations between the size of political systems and political trust. First, does citizens' trust in national elected officials differ from their trust in local elected officials? Second, what is the relationship between citizens' trust in elected local government officials and the size of local government units? These questions were answered on the basis of survey data from Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom. We found that trust in local officeholders is typically and often considerably higher than trust in national politicians. Moreover, the evidence from these four countries suggests that size of municipality has a modest negative effect on political trust. Further evidence suggests that this negative effect is the result of a tendency of citizens in small municipalities to be more satisfied with their local government than residents in large units. This further evidence also shows that whatever its origins (intensive personal relations or a dense network of civil organisations) social trust is not vital for an adequate understanding of political trust.

After a brief look the most important characteristics of Swiss municipalities, this paper describes the municipalities' organization according to the principles of direct democracy and means of decisionmaking. Drawing on empirical findings, it then examines size effects more closely. Whether legislative decisions are taken in a direct democratic assembly or in a representative parliament largely depends on the size of a municipality: smaller municipalities have an assembly, larger ones a parliament. By contrast, direct democratic instruments such as initiatives and referendums are not necessarily more widespread in larger municipalities. The use of initiatives and referendums is higher in larger municipalities, but assembly attendance and election turnout clearly decreases with increasing municipal size. The strength of the size effect varies considerably depending on the different variables of direct democracy under scrutiny.

This paper undertakes an analysis of five forms of local nonelectoral participation in three European countries. The primary question of interest is whether or not there is any systematic relationship between these forms of nonelectoral participation and the size of local political – administrative units. It is argued that, to the extent it is reasonable to expect size to be relevant, the nature of the relationships is likely to vary from one form of participation to another. Analyses are based on survey data collected during the 1990s in each country by means of logistic regression with a common set of variables. Although the findings vary somewhat from one country to another, and are not always in keeping with theoretical expectations, they nonetheless indicate that size does indeed appear to make some difference, even after controlling for the effects of individual characteristics. The effect of size, in other words, is not merely a byproduct of the compositional characteristics of the individuals living in different sized municipalities, as is sometimes suggested.

This paper reviews local election turnout for the period since the 1970s in five European countries: Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It explores especially the relationship between size of municipality and turnout in local elections. The author seeks to explore this issue in the light of Dahl and Tufte's 1973 classic study Size and Democracy (Stanford University Press) which claimed that citizens' motivation to participate is greater in small governmental units than in large ones. This study confirms the Dahl and Tufte hypothesis, in that turnout is consistently higher over time in small municipalities in all the countries reviewed, although the strength of the relationship varies between the different countries. The paper also shows that other factors, such as the type of electoral system used or whether voting is compulsory or not, also have an effect on turnout.

Policy analysis is driven by a dominant normative stance that conflates the notion of social welfare with some notion of collective good or, even more restrictively, strictly utilitarian notions of aggregate benefit. In this paper, we suggest how this perspective leads to a strongly aggregative analysis that masks concerns of actors in their unique contexts. We examine the policies of the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Los Angeles, California, USA and argue that they have strongly furthered the status quo at the expense of communities. We illustrate alternative models for analysis in the hope that this type of dialectic might lead to a more inclusive model of rationality. We also hope to take the conversation deeper into notions of justice and not farther away from them, as some attempts to broaden the discussion by appealing to notions of democratization, civic governance, or modernization naively do.

Many post-Soviet central governments have assigned numerous policy responsibilities to local governments, but have simultaneously constrained local autonomy in an effort to ensure that local governments pursue central objectives. In this paper, I examine the interplay between local autonomy and central control in one post-Soviet central government—Ukraine—by examining the case of small-enterprise privatization. Shortly after Ukraine's independence, the central government transferred ownership of state-run small enterprises to local governments, but required that local governments meet annual privatization targets set by a central agency. Some local governments have met the annual targets, while others have lagged behind. The results of an empirical analysis of local privatization levels indicate that central control mechanisms currently have limited influence over local decisionmaking. The results demonstrate that, instead, local elections have increased the influence of local groups whose interests do not always coincide with those of the central government. In response, the central government has instituted several changes to the intergovernmental finance system that are likely to increase central government authority and continue to move Ukraine towards a system in which local governments carry a heavy service-delivery load with limited autonomy.

The move towards workfare and active labour-market policies is often alleged to be closely associated with the decentralisation and localisation of welfare delivery and agencies. In the United Kingdom, the New Deal for the young unemployed was designed to introduce local flexibility and discretion in delivery to mainstream labour-market policy. We use case studies of five local areas to examine the extent to which the programme has actually been decentralised and benefited from ‘local flexibility’. We categorise the arguments for policy decentralisation under four main rationales—improved policy learning and adaptation, stronger partnership building, more innovation, and greater resource targeting—and examine the achievements and limitations of the programme under each. We argue that, although the contractualism of the New Deal has allowed a certain degree of local discretion and cooperation in delivery, there have been strong standardised bureaucratic and financial constraints on the real extent of territorial flexibility. Although the limited decentralisation achieved has yielded some of the predicted benefits, the centralised nature of labour-market policy in the United Kingdom is proving resistant to change and, paradoxically, the programme is producing uneven results across the country. To conclude, we consider whether more local flexibility would be sufficient to improve the performance of the programme.