Elitism and local government

Abstract

Examination of the structure of local government in Cowra, with consideration of the possibility of elitism, reveals the arena of local politics. One might ask if the structure is elitist or pluralist, but that question does not lead directly to fruitful answers. It rather poses problems, providing a base for exploration of power relations. The community power and local government literature offers some background on local power structures, but, unfortunately, the fields covered have not coincided, although there is a place for them to do so. The Australian local government system was cast in a British mould, and local power studies have been largely American. British and Australian local government studies have seldom sought to analyse power relations. They have rather explored democratic and administrative aspects of local government using the tools of political science. The British have debated the conceptual and empirical problems of local government as manifestations of the role of the state in capitalist society more often than they have tackled the problems of local power relations. The various approaches to the study of local government are, however, instructive in the way that they have defined its problems for study and formulated research agendas. Perspectives on local government Perspectives on local government fall very roughly into three camps: Marxist and Weberian in sociology, and those which focus more narrowly on political apparatuses and processes. The Marxist approach sees a problem of inequitable distribution of power and wealth as a product of local government being an arm of the state, through which a ruling class maintains its dominance.