Characteristics of local government

Constitutional status

In the United Kingdom the local authorities are subordinate corporations formed by acts of Parliament or charters. Their powers and immunities derive from statute and judicial interpretation. They have many obligatory duties and a vast field of permissive powers. Each authority is independent within the sphere of power authorized by the central government; there is no hierarchy of authorities. Local councilors are freely elected and constitute the local executive as well as the legislature. There is no appointment or ratification of local executives by the central government, though certain important local officials require qualifications stipulated thereby. The local authorities combine many functions and are not, like school or sanitary districts in the United States, single function or authorities created for a specific purpose. Local finances—called rates—are locally raised in amount and appropriated in detail with little interference by the central government.

Though local authorities have considerable freedom to use their permissive powers, and even their obligatory ones, they operate within judicial controls lest they act beyond their powers or are negligent, and they are under continuous central administrative controls. A condition of local central partnership characterizes the system. The local units are powerful. They exercise an important influence over the central administration through their members of Parliament and through their increasingly large representation on advisory councils and committees officially attached to the several departments. The Local Government Association is a nationwide body that assists the different classes of local authorities.

German local government (omitting the Nazi era) attempted to unite the tradition of free and enterprising civic life with the full popular enfranchisement that came first only in 1919. Its hierarchical system, with strong central oversight reaching back to the 18th century, was a little eased during the Weimar period. The position of the local executive, whether Bürgermeister or Magistraz, which was ratifiable by the central government, was disrupted by the universal suffrage of 1919, which replaced the oligarchic three-class system. A very wide scope of authority was accorded to the Gemeinde (community), whether rural or urban, by the basic laws, such as the Prussian Stadteordnung of 1808, the Kreisordnung of 1872, and the Provinzialordnung of 1873. Though this authority came to be limited by financial stringency, German cities showed great enterprise and developed many utilities. The Nazi system in general kept the framework of areas and authorities but abolished all elections and substituted appointed councilors and executives dominated by Nazi officials. After World War II the several states were quick to revive local self-government, and the constitution guaranteed it. This system was extended to the East after the country’s reunification in 1990.

In the U.S. the main features of the constitutional status of local authorities are the variety of arrangements in the various states and the large degree of freedom of the local units, which derive from early English township forms reinforced by migration into new lands. Nevertheless, that freedom is subordinate and defined by state statutes and charters giving corporate status. The special charter, referring to individual cities; the general charter, which is a state-wide municipal code; and the charter, which confers status by classifying the local units for privileges, are various means of trying to give the local units a status which relieves them of the need for repeated application to the legislature, while subjecting them to a firm pattern of permissions and limits. Amendments, however, still require suppliancy to the legislature, and growth requires powers in addition to the general grant.

Home rule charters, granted by the state legislature, allow the city to draft its own charter by a local convention, sometimes requiring legislative ratification, sometimes not. Another system allows the local units to choose from among several forms of charter provided in a state general law. There is much independence and vigour, no hierarchy, little central administrative control, and much judicial control to hold the units within their charter and statutory position.

The local government system of tsarist Russia was one of absolute centralized hierarchy, executed through the governors of the 78 guberniya, with police, military, and taxation powers and the scantiest recognition of rights of local government. Provincial and village governments were dominated by the landlords who had an ex officio right to chairmanship of local administration, especially of the zemstvo, set up in 1864 to govern the provinces under strict control of the imperial governors. The zemstvo (with an indirect and unequal class franchise), nevertheless made progress in educational, health, welfare, and agricultural development in spite of tsarist control. The Soviet constitution of 1936 and the decree on the city soviets (1933) and specific economic and social planning decrees gave extraordinarily wide specified powers to the local units but very rigorously subjected them to hierarchical control of the next higher authorities upward to the central government of the various republics, and in some cases to the union itself. Authority and direction were heavily centralized and were animated in the last resort by the All-Union Ministry of State Administration and the public prosecutors. All units, from lowest to highest, were manipulated in unity by the ubiquitous activities of the Communist Party, the members of which were required by the rules to form cells for administrative “fulfillment.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, local governments in Russia enjoyed a brief period of devolved power, but the ascent of Vladimir Putin to the presidency saw a dramatic re-centralization of authority.

Generally speaking, then, local government as local self-government is discernible more fully in the British and American environment than elsewhere, to some degree in the German, and hardly at all in Russia. Yet centralization and control of units originally holding authority themselves are not inconsistent with vigorous first-line activity by the local units in the matters entrusted to them.