The 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu wrote that governments are likely to be tyrannical if they are responsible for administering large territories, for they must develop the organizational capacity characteristic of despotic states. It was partly this fear that led the American founding fathers to provide for a federal system and to divide governmental functions between the government in Washington and the state governments. Modern technology and mass communication are often said to have deprived Montesquieu’s axiom of its force. Yet the technology that makes it possible for large areas to be governed democratically also holds out the spectre of an even greater tyranny than Montesquieu foresaw.

In all political systems the relationships between national and regional or state governments have been affected by technology and new means of communication. In the 18th century Thomas Jefferson—in arguing that local government, or the government closest to the people, was best—could claim that citizens knew most about their local governments, somewhat less about their state governments, and least about the national government. In the present-day United States, however, the concentration of the mass media on the issues and personalities of national government has made nonsense of this proposition. As several studies have demonstrated, people know much less about local government than national government and turn out to vote in much larger numbers in national elections. The necessity for employing systems for the devolution of political power is reduced when a central government can communicate directly with citizens in all parts of the national territory, and the vitality of subnational levels of government is sapped when public attention is focussed on national problems.

Another general development that has lessened the importance of regional or state government is the rise of efficient national bureaucracies. In nearly all political systems, there has been some tendency toward bureaucratic centralization, and in some cases national bureaucracies have almost completely replaced older systems of regional and provincial administration. In the United States, for example, complex programs of social security, income taxes, agricultural subsidies, and many others that bear directly on individuals are centrally administered.

Even in systems in which a division of functions between national and subnational governments is constitutionally prescribed, the prevailing trend in intergovernmental relations is toward increasing involvement of the national government in areas once dominated by regional or state governments. Thus, the original constitutional arrangements prescribed by the Allied powers for the West German republic in 1949 won general acclaim at the time because they provided for greater decentralization than had the Weimar Constitution; but, as soon as Germany was free to amend its own constitution, several state functions were reassigned to the national government. In the United States, also, the collapse of the doctrine of “dual federalism,” according to which the powers of the national government were restricted by the powers reserved to the states, signalled the end of an era in which the states could claim exclusive jurisdiction over a wide range of functions. Today, forms of cooperative federalism involving joint action by national and state governments are increasingly common. Such cooperative relationships in the United States include programs of public assistance, the interstate highway system, agricultural extension programs, and aid to education. In some areas, such as school desegregation, the national government has used broad powers to compel states to conform to national standards.

Nevertheless, efforts made to reinvigorate regional or state governments have met with some measure of success in countries such as France, Italy, and Belgium. Moreover, popular attempts to reverse the trend toward national centralization have persisted in regions with historically strong nationalist or separatist movements—for example, in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Quebec, and Brittany.

City and local government

Political scientists since Aristotle have recognized that the nature of political communities changes when their populations grow larger. One of the central problems of contemporary government is the vast increase in urban population and the progression from “polis to metro-polis to mega-polis.” The catalog of ills that have resulted from urban growth includes political and administrative problems of extraordinary complexity.

Aging infrastructure has become an issue of pressing national importance in the United States, with the major cities obviously suffering in this area. Grave social problems—for example, violent crime (especially that committed by youths in poverty-stricken areas), drug trafficking, unemployment, and homelessness—are concentrated to such a degree that they directly shape the environment in many large urban areas. The majority of cities are ill equipped to handle these problems without significant assistance from the national government. Yet, in the latter half of the 20th century, the tax base of many U.S. cities dwindled, with the flight of the middle classes to the suburbs and the relocation of industry. Largely as a result of this trend, political power began to follow wealth out of the cities and into adjoining suburbs, which in turn served to reduce the national government’s activism in the cities.

The metropolis suffers from several acute governmental and administrative failures. Responsibility for the issues that transcend the boundaries of local governments has not been defined, for representative institutions have failed to develop at the metropolitan level. In most cases, there are no effective governmental structures for administering area-wide services or for dealing comprehensively with the common problems of the metropolitan community. The result has been the appearance of a new class of problems created by government itself, including uneven levels of service for metropolitan residents, inequities in financing government services and functions, and variations in the democratic responsiveness of the governments scattered through the metropolitan area. The tangled pattern of local governments, each operating in some independent sphere, does not allow the comprehensive planning necessary to deal with the escalating problems of urban life.

Efforts to create new governing structures for metropolitan communities have been among the most interesting developments in contemporary government. In the United States these efforts include the creation of special districts to handle specific functions, area-wide planning agencies, interstate compacts, consolidated school and library systems, and various informal intergovernmental arrangements. Although annexation of outlying areas by the central city and city-county consolidations have been attempted in many cases, the reluctance of urban areas to surrender their political independence or to pay for central-city services has been an obstacle. The Los Angeles plan, by which the county assumed responsibility for many area-wide functions, leaving the local communities with substantial political autonomy, may represent a partial solution to the problem of urban-suburban tensions. In other cases, “metropolitan federation” has been attempted. One of the earliest and most influential examples of a federated system of metropolitan government is Greater London, which encompasses 33 London boroughs and places effective governing powers in the hands of an elected mayor and assembly. In Canada the city of Toronto and its suburbs adopted a metropolitan “constitution” in 1953 under which mass transit, highways, planning, and several other functions were controlled by a council composed of elected officials from the central city and surrounding governments; further restructuring and reform of Toronto’s government took place in 1998 and 2007. Cities in the United States that have undertaken various degrees of area-wide consolidation include Miami, Nashville, Seattle, and Indianapolis.

Most of the major problems of contemporary politics seem to have found their focus in the metropolis, and there is almost universal agreement that new governing systems must be devised for the metropolitan community if the problems are ever to be resolved.