New-Style Councils, New-Style Councillors: From Local Government to Local Governance

The aim of this article is to contrast an empirical study on the changes in the attitudes and behaviors of local politicians with recent literature on local governance. To undertake this task, the article brings together the results of about two hundred in-depth interviews with local councillors from nine Catalan local councils over two different periods of time: 1986–1987 and 1998–1999. Through comparison with the results of the interviews carried out in the '80s and '90s, the work confirms a tendency toward change, which with a few slight adjustments, can be made to fit with those academic contributions that claim the appearance of certain strategic, pluralist, and relational styles of government.     

General-Purpose Local Government Defaults: Type,Trend, and Impact

Local governments default on bonds when they fail to comply with the monetary and nonmonetary aspects of the debt contracts. Analyses of defaults have relied on reports from credit rating agencies, which include only rated bonds undergoing monetary defaults. Using a unique and comprehensive dataset of defaults, we examine all general-purpose government defaults from 2009 to 2015 and find defaults to be more common than previously reported. We present a typology of defaults and characteristics of defaulted bonds. Most defaults occur among nongeneral obligation bonds and did not affect the yield of future, unrelated credits of the same issuer, providing support to the credit segmentation hypothesis.     

Beyond Enforcement: Welcomeness,Local Law Enforcement,and Immigrants

Studies of local law enforcement actions toward immigrants show that while some cities engage in enforcement, many others do not. The extent and determinants of enforcement have been assessed, but these studies have not evaluated the full range of practices, including welcoming practices, toward immigrants. This article introduces the concept of “welcomeness,” develops a framework for measuring it, and, using a nationwide survey of local police departments, examines how widely departments are welcoming (or unwelcoming) to immigrants. The data show that many police departments have consciously and deliberately developed practices intended to foster positive relationships between the police and immigrants and to encourage immigrants to call the police for assistance.

Practitioner Points

• Welcomeness encompasses a range of practices toward immigrants that are often intentionally created, thoughtfully implemented, and found in a variety of communities.
• The dimensions of welcomeness provide a framework for police departments to assess their practices and provide a model for police departments that want to engage positively with immigrants.
• Welcoming practices may improve interactions between police officers and immigrants and may improve immigrants’ perceptions of local law enforcement.
• Welcoming police departments often have a deeper commitment to community policing.

     

Local Autonomy, Local Democracy and the 'New Localism'

Most studies of local autonomy and local democracy fail to distinguish adequately between the two terms. As a consequence, there is an assumed bilateral relationship between them in which changes in one are always deemed to affect the other – particularly in policy formulations. This article develops a stronger analytical distinction between them by considering local autonomy in three separate ways: as freedom from central interference; as freedom to effect particular outcomes; and as the reflection of local identity . Each of these conceptualisations raises different challenges for local democracy and its relationship to broader forms of democratic practice. When used to analyse the recent emergence of the 'new localism' as a policy approach within Britain, this separation also shows significant limitations in current policies towards democratic renewal and central policies that are supposedly focused on outcomes rather than processes. Although localities are being afforded some autonomy, most initiatives are not supporting the enhancement of local democracy.     

地方政府创新的驱动模式——地方政府干部视角的考察

由地方政府推动的创新是一个国家政治体制改革的风向标,地方政府创新的发展特征可以展现出这个国家的政治文化和政治发展活力.以"中国地方政府创新奖2007-2008"年度20个地方政府创新获奖项目为研究单位,通过问卷调查收集和分析地方政府干部对本地政府创新项目的认知和态度,从创新动因、创新动力和阻力、创新价值取向、创新的参与性和可持续性五个方面出发,得出研究结论:由地方政府推动的改革创新具有突出的"低风险取向",创新过程中公共参与不足,地方领导的"精英作用"和基层政策空间是推动地方政府创新的主体力量,创新的可持续性也主要取决于能否获得体制内的认可和支持.本文的研究方法和研究结论为观察和判断中国政府改革和政治发展提供了新的视角和信息.     

Local government in Europe: Retrenchment,restructuring and British exceptionalism

This article compares the strategy of British governments towards elected local government following the onset of fiscal stress in the mid‐1970s with those of two other western European countries with a unitary system of government: France and Sweden. The conclusion reached is that, notwithstanding different national configurations of central‐local government relations and the distinctiveness of the British strategy, there are similar policy and institutional outcomes in each case. In so far as such outcomes are taking place irrespective of the party political or ideological complexion of governments, they are consistent with a neo‐Fordist interpretation of local government restructuring.     

Relational Leadership,Storytelling, and Narratives: Practices of Local Government Chief Executives

This article examines the storytelling and narrative practices of an elite group of public administrators in the United Kingdom: local government chief executives. The authors do so through the lens of relationality, exploring the collective dimensions of leadership. The focus on leadership and stories embraces the narrative turn in public administration scholarship. It responds to calls for research examining the distinctive settings of everyday leadership action. The contribution to theory is a qualitative understanding of the relational ways in which stories and narratives are used in the practices of public administration leaders. The article analyzes four ways in which such leadership is accomplished: inviting an emotional connection and commitment to public service, making sense of organizational realities, provoking reflections on practices and assumptions, and managing relations with politicians. The authors offer an appreciation of how relational leadership influence can be generated by expressive narratives and storytelling rather than stemming from bureaucratic authority.     

优化地方行政级次推进地方政府管理体制创新

现今中国“金字塔”型行政级次使得地方政府职能定位不清,政府职能转变滞后;增加行政成本、降低行政效率、极大地影响地方政府机构改革的成效。而要顺利、有效地推进地方政府管理体制创新,行政区划体制的改革,尤其是行政级次的优化设计势在必行。减少中间层次,扩大管理幅度,构建扁平化地方行政级次是我国地方行政级次改革的根本方向。改革过程中必须坚持与其他改革措施协同配合,共同推进;要因地制宜,因时制宜;避免形式化。     

Comparing Local,National and EU Knowledge: The Ignorant Public Reassessed

Empirical research has repeatedly confirmed the political ignorance of ordinary citizens, but democracy prevails. This article offers a new perspective into this paradox by arguing that typical political knowledge indicators are inadequate because they only measure national‐level knowledge. The study makes two contributions. First, it compares national, local and European Union political knowledge. Second, it does so with a nationally representative dataset, which comes from a survey from Finland (n = 1,020) devoted solely to political knowledge. Two questions are posed: Are the sociodemographic determinants of knowledge the same on all levels of politics? And is public ignorance equally widespread on all levels? Challenging some established findings, the study shows that people in rural communities know more about local politics than urban counterparts, that women know more about local politics than men and that young people are equally knowledgeable about the EU as older people. The results thus indicate that people are to varying extents knowledgeable about varying aspects of politics.     

Contemporary Challenges in Local Government: Evolving Roles and Responsibilities,Structures, and Processes

Editor's Note: The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2014. This article is the first of several that will appear during the next year about the council‐manager plan to commemorate ICMA's 100th anniversary. Three contemporary leadership challenges face local governments today. The first encourages department heads to more actively work the intersection between political and administrative arenas. The second promotes collaborative work, synchronizing city and county boundaries with problems that have no jurisdictional homes. The third argues that citizen engagement is no longer optional—it is imperative—and that connecting engagement initiatives to traditional political values and governing processes is an important mark of successful community building. These three leadership challenges stem from a widening gap between the arenas of politics and administration—that is, between what is politically acceptable in public policy making and what is administratively sustainable. The gap is fueled by conflicting trends experienced locally and common internationally. Failure to bridge this gap between political acceptability and administrative sustainability results in decreasing legitimacy for governing institutions and increasing challenges.     

Social Context,Institutional Capacity,and Police Services: A Local Public Economies Perspective

This article examines levels of policing services, focusing on an assessment of resources and their measurement for municipalities. Two measures of policing levels assess the reliability of the findings across alternative measurements. Social and institutional characteristics are explored to evaluate alternative explanations in policing efforts. The article presents four decades of census data for municipalities in metropolitan areas. The central finding is that unequal levels of policing are prevalent across American municipalities. An additional finding is that social and institutional contexts affect policing, based on a pooled time‐series analysis of municipal governments. Although its main contribution is to local public economies research, the research also integrates the social and institutional literatures to identify factors in the allocation of resources to policing.     

Temporary Staff,Contractors, and Volunteers: The Hidden Workforce in Victorian Local Government

Theories of strategic Human Resource Management (HRM) emphasise the need to understand and effectively manage the workforce, and to align HRM practices with organisational strategy. Local government in Victoria was radically revised in 1993–94 with forced amalgamations, and later the introduction of Best Value Principles. Alongside this have been changes to council workforces. This article explores the composition of these workforces, and seeks to understand if strategic HRM practices underpin their management. It reports that in addition to the ‘known’ and ‘managed’ internal workforce, many councils have an external workforce which includes temporary staff, independent contractors, those working for external contractors, volunteers, work placement students and trainees. There is little evidence that theories of strategic HRM have been used to produce workforce planning strategies and policies relating to these staff, or that their management has been strategically aligned and reviewed to align with council strategies and business plans.     

Decentralization,Local Government,and the Welfare State

Despite growing interest in decentralized governance, the local government systems that comprise the most common element of decentralization around the world have received little systematic attention. This article, drawing on the first systematic index of decentralization to local government in 21 countries, demonstrates a close relation between Social Democratic welfare states and an intergovernmental infrastructure that in important respects ranks as the most decentralized among advanced industrial countries. This empowerment of local government in these countries was less an outgrowth of Social Democratic welfare state development than a preexisting condition that helped make this type of welfare state possible.