Comparative Study of Local Government and Politics

Abstract

The present issue on Recent Changes in Urban Politics is published ten years after the formation of the Research Committee on Comparative Study of Local Government and Politics, one of the oldest and largest committees of the International Political Science Association. It provides an opportunity to look back at our experience during these years and to assess the impact of our work. In the past, the study of local politics had been confined by national boundaries. Even the most theoretically oriented studies did not aim at generalizations beyond the limits of a single national system. Local politics-unlike political parties, voting behavior, political culture, or nation-building-was not considered a proper subject for cross-national comparisons. Even when the term comparative was used in local politics, it referred to within nation rather than to between-nations comparisons (Clark, 1968). The result of this orientation was narrowness of theoretical perspectives as well as a tendency to present local political phenomena as if they were totally specific for every nation. A major reorientation came in mid-1960s with the launching of the International Studies of Values and Politics (ISVIP) project-a joint collaborative research program of interdisciplinary social scientists from India, Poland, the United States and Yugoslavia to explore the interaction of social values and developmental change in local communities (Jacob and Jacob, 1977: 231). This study was initiated in the early 1960s by Professor Philip E. Jacob, then at the University of Pennsylvania, and was organized in 1965 at an international round table meeting in Dubrovnik. In 1971 the international research was completed with