Local authorities in England and Wales are (from smaller units upward): some 9,000 parishes and town councils; scores of district, borough, and city councils; and dozens of metropolitan boroughs. There is a tendency in all countries to rely more upon such unions where the services are of a large-scale nature compared with the traditional units having responsibility. Local authorities are mutually independent: unanimity is required for joint schemes, which are amply permitted in the statutes. Even some counties are far too small for large-scale administration, while extremes of size in area and population may be encountered in each of the above-named classes of authorities.

The areas of local government in Germany include more than 11,000 Gemeinden (communities). Upward from the Gemeinden are the Kreise (equivalent roughly to counties in England and the U.S.); above those are the Regierungsbezirke (administrative districts), units of central government control and police authority. There are also numerous joint authorities for roads, schools, health, fire, agriculture, water, gas, and electricity. The Gemeinden exhibit an enormous diversity of area and population. There is a rather special kind of holding company local authority, the Amt, to administer the common affairs of some contiguous villages while they still remain separate Gemeinden. More-important area changes require parliamentary statute.

Whereas all other nations combine most local government functions in single compendious areas, the U.S. has distributed many of these—especially education, health, and parks—to special authorities. The area structure of local government in the U.S. varies in foundation according to the historical settlements. In the southern and south-central region, the chief unit is the county (or parish in Louisiana); in the north-central, the combined county and township; in New England, the town. The constitution of Alaska vests powers of local government in boroughs and cities. In some states, the people of each county may vote to divide the county into townships. In the early 21st century there were approximately 3,000 counties or parishes. The smallest had fewer than 100 inhabitants, the largest (Los Angeles county, California) more than 10,000,000.

Inset in the county is the city, with its own powers, in direct relationship with the state government. Sometimes both city and county conduct for two concentric areas many similar services with substantial duplication of staff and organization. Cities are the areas of the heaviest integration of local government services. As elsewhere, there is tension between city and county, and, after the 1930s, federal authorities became an important direct supporter of city unemployment, public works, municipal utility, and housing schemes. Towns, which are mostly but not exclusively semirural communities and are fairly populous in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and the north-central states, play the part of the counties elsewhere and have city functions and sometimes city status also. As parts of a township or a county, there are inhabited centres called villages or boroughs. The state legislature usually requires that such a subdivision reach a certain level of population before it may become self-governing.

In Russia the tsarist areas were replaced by territories, regions and oblasts, and districts (raions), cities and boroughs (within cities), and settlements and villages. At the top of the pyramid in the Soviet Union was the supreme soviet of the union republic. The upward relationship may be expressed in Lenin’s phrase “centralized supervision with decentralized activity.” Within cities of 100,000 or more inhabitants there were subordinate soviets, of which Moscow had 240. Cities of more than 50,000 and especially important places of lesser population received a status independent of the raion hierarchy and were directly subordinate to the republics. Attached to these cities were surrounding rural settlements which fully participated in the city government but possessed village soviets also. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the passage of the 1993 constitution saw considerable power devolve to local administrative regions. The creation of federal districts in 2000, however, represented a reassertion of control by the central government; presidential envoys in each district ensured that Moscow’s authority remained paramount at the local level.

Powers

Broadly speaking, the large geographic units in the hierarchy are concerned with financial and administrative supervision of the primary units, the provision of environmental and institutional and police services, and technical and financial supplements and assistance to the smaller authorities. Authority to act is always a combination of specific grant and general grant by the central authority, sometimes with modifications by the administrative supervisory authorities and the courts.

In Great Britain the specific grant of power is supreme. Powers are granted to the various classes of local authorities by general statutes or by special addition to individual local authorities in private or local acts. The powers granted by general statute are either permissive (e.g., administering libraries) or compulsory (e.g., administering schools or hospitals). The powers appear in the great statutes such as the Municipal Corporations Act (1835) and the Local Government Acts of 1933 and 1972. The permissive powers offer remarkably wide opportunities for initiative. Where local authorities petition Parliament for private acts, they may obtain the opportunity to pioneer, if they prove desirability and financial capacity, and successful administration is sometimes followed by granting extension of powers to all authorities.

In Germany the municipalities are given by the constituent statutes a general authority to do whatever is proper for the good of the municipality. However, what is proper is legally challengeable by citizens and administratively by the central departments. Initiative is limited by the claims of other communities, private enterprise, and the state organs. In Germany from 1890 on, the cities proceeded remarkably with municipal enterprise.

In the United States counties have specific grants. The cities receive their powers in the charters. These are stated specifically, but in broad outline, while additional powers are granted from time to time.

The Soviet constitution granted to all local authorities the power to “direct the cultural, political, and economic construction of their respective territories” and the power to make decrees within the laws of the union and the republic. The local governments were generically unbounded in these powers, but in all they were minutely subject to central plans. With the exception of the brief interlude between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of the 2000 constitution, this broadly remained true in the Russian Federation.

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The powers actually exercised by modern local authorities in the early 21st century were immensely in advance of anything known in the early 19th century. Then the main services were road construction and maintenance, policing, public assistance, the removal of health nuisances, and perhaps fire fighting and public education. In Great Britain the work of the local authorities came to include the modern social services and municipal enterprise. In other countries the situation was similar or was becoming so. The powers usually exercised by local authorities included education up to high school and technical schools (in the U.S. sometimes colleges and universities); public health in a variety of environmental and personal services; housing provision and management; town planning, zoning, and building regulation; poor relief and, in the U.S., local administration of social security services; parks, open spaces, and playgrounds; agricultural improvement and land drainage; roads and bridges; streets; public lighting; fire fighting; policing (larger authorities only, except in the U.S.); lower-instance justice; foods and drugs and weights and measures inspection; enterprises supplying gas, electric power, public transportation, and water; and land purchase.