Local Political Control Research Articles

Decentralization and public services: the case of immunization

This study examines the impact of political decentralization on an essential public service provided in almost all countries: childhood immunization. The relationship is examined empirically using a time-series data set of 140 low- and middle-income countries from 1980 to 1997. The study finds that decentralization has different effects in low- and middle-income countries. In the low-income group, decentralized countries have higher coverage rates than centralized ones, with an average difference of 8.5 percent for the measles and DTP3 vaccines. In the middle-income group, the reverse effect is observed: decentralized countries have lower coverage rates than centralized ones, with an average difference of 5.2 percent for the same vaccines. Both results are significant at the 99 percent level. Modifiers of the decentralization-immunization relationship also differ in the two groups. In the low-income group, development assistance reduces the gains from decentralization. In the middle-income group, democratic government mitigates the negative effects of decentralization, and decentralization reverses the negative effects of ethnic tension and ethno-linguistic fractionalization, but institutional quality and literacy rates have no interactive effect either way. Similar results are obtained whether decentralization is measured with a dichotomous categorical variable or with more specific measures of fiscal decentralization. The study confirms predictions in the theoretical literature about the negative impact of local political control on services that have public goods characteristics and inter-jurisdictional externalities. Reasons for the difference between low- and middle-income countries are discussed.

Governing Structures and Structured Governing: Local Political Control of Public Services in Denmark

Decentralization to local government increases flexibility and responsiveness, and, by implication, policy diversity. However, a local governing structure is but one of several institutions that structure government. Central policy makers are not absent simply because policy authority formally rests in local governments. Government regulation, collective agreements, and professional norms also matter. Furthermore, other institutions, such as the organization of producer and provider roles, may be more important. Diversity in local services cannot be

Governing Structures and Structured Governing: Local Political Control of Public Services in Denmark

Governing Structures and Structured Governing: Local Political Control of Public Services in Denmark

A Clash of Vulnerabilities: Citizenship, Labor, and Expatriacy in the Cayman Islands

In this article, I examine the stalemates produced in the Cayman Islands, a major center for offshore finance and tourism, by globalizing processes that have encouraged the valorization of transnational mobility, commodification of labor, and exclusivity of citizenship. I argue that globalization takes form in the Cayman Islands through the channels carved out for it by local state interests and regulation that have defined citizenship as a terrain for competing entitlements between expatriate workers and enfranchised permanent residents. Caymanians struggling to retain local political control over their labor market only further its incorporation into the global economy while expatriates can find their exit from Cayman stymied by the localization of labor markets elsewhere, [citizenship, transnational, labor, offshore finance, tourism]

Can Politicians Bargain with Business?

These authors examine the capability of local government to influence economic development by formulating a framework that treats state-business relations as a bargaining process. This framework suggests that governmental influence is tied to the distribution of bargaining advantages along three dimensions of a liberal-democratic political economy: market conditions, popular-control systems, and public-intervention mechanisms. The authors offer an explanation of how characteristics of these dimensions strengthen or weaken city governments in dealing with private enterprise; experiences of U.S. and Western European cities are drawn upon to illustrate this. They conclude that differences in bargaining resources accounts for wide variation in local political control of business development.

Studies on North Africa–Introduction to A New Series

The shadow of islamic fundamentalism hovers over all of North Africa, notwithstanding the profound differences between the historic fates of the various Maghrebin countries.Algeria suffered by far the longest and most disruptive colonial period, In fact, Algeria had been colonized by the Ottoman empire before it had begun its French colonial period in 1830. A prolonged and brutal war of conquest was eventually followed by the establishment of a large European population, which acquired effective local political control under the Third Republic. Result: pre-colonial social institutions were largely destroyed, and Algerian society consisted mainly of a pulverized and oppressed rural proletariat. There were exceptions: a Muslim bourgeoisie survived in some centres such as Tlemsen, Constantine and even Algiers itself vigorous local institutions survived in the Berber hills and a few other places. But all in all, one could say that there were neither traditional institutions nor any Algerian nation.

Local Authority Spending Cuts and Local Political Control

The aim of this Note is to examine recent local authority expenditure cuts in relation to Saunders's dual-state thesis. Saunders's model has important implications for the long-standing debates on local autonomy from central government and on the party effect in expenditure patterns. The extent to which local political control is a mediating factor in the nature and severity of spending cuts is analysed with reference to a case study of two districts in the Greater Manchester area.

Commercial Specialisation and Adapation of Ethnic Groups

With the expulsion of Ibos from Northern Nigeria and Asians from Uganda, the intriguing question of ethnic commercial specialisation and adaptation has increasingly occupied the minds of many scholars. One aspect of economic continuity from the pre-colonial period onwards has been an ethnic dominance in certain occupations and enterprises. Although some groups have lost their traditional commercial specialities, others have continued to be disproportionately influential in a particular sector, and have often maintained an effective monopoly, despite major changes in commerce and local political control. During the November 1972 African Studies Association meeting in Philadelphia, these developments were analysed by a panel organised by Barbara Lewis of Livingstone College. As she pointed out in her paper on ‘The Adaptation of Commercially-Specialised Ethnic Groups to Colonial and Post-Colonial Political Economics’:

The arts in Africa, the visual and the aural

For the purposes of this paper the title Arts in is interpreted as the Arts of indigenous Africans only. Of all the people living south of the Sahara, over eighty per cent, four out of every five persons, still live in the country and not in towns or industrial areas. Consequently, about four-fifths of all African arts can still be classed as rural. As with folk arts the world over, African rural arts play an important part in creating public opinion and upholding social disciplines. The arts of the urban minority cannot yet be considered to be the norm but rather the abnorm, and should be treated separately. Unlike their rural relatives, African town dwellers enjoy a highly disorganised social and ''family life, regardless of the nature of local political control, either indigenous or expatriot. Sociologists have found for example that the various anti-social activities of both Negroes and Africans are equally high in places as diverse and as far apart as the island of Jamaica, Accra, Lagos, Kampala, and Johannesburg. Urban arts of the present day do not yet have the same integrating effect upon African social life as the rural. In normal circumstances, Whites throughout Africa appear to prefer various aspects of the urban arts which are closest to them and which they find entertaining. They tend to encourage, almost exclusively, imitation of Western urban habits and recreations. They have not as a rule the slightest contact with African folk arts which are considered by them to be primitive and pre-civilised. This paper should therefore be read in this context.