services in the sameway across a national territory makes special demands
on any government at the local level. Effective, responsive local action can
be crucial to fit national services like schools, hospitals, and housing to the
diverse interests of people in different regions, neighborhoods or jobs.
Strong local government capacities can counter the social and spatial
inequalities characteristic of a capitalist society and discourage mobile
residents from further segregating into enclaves based on relative privilege
or disadvantage.
Second, strong local governments that have secured support from their
communities also furnish needed political resources for the far-reaching
program of an egalitarian welfare state (cf. Vetter 2002). The higher tax
extraction and far-reaching social aims of the Social Democratic welfare
state make greater demands on civil society than other forms of welfare
states. Local governments that mobilize support from civil society can
provide national policymakers with crucial allies in efforts to impose these
demands. When the leading national parties also maintain a strong presence
within the local political process, the central government has even
more reason to entrust central elements of welfare state administration to
localities.
A nonexclusive view of the relation between central and local power
helps to resolve how such a strong role for local government can go along
with strong national policy. Analyses of multilevel governance show that
what is given to the local level need not be taken away from higher levels.
Enhanced local powers could in certain respects reinforce supralocal
powers, as both higher- and lower-level governments undertake different
roles in an expanded state activity (e.g., Sellers 2002). To model such a
relation, control or supervision from above needs to be separated out from
local administrative and fiscal capacities for local governments.
Distinguishing the consequences of top-down supervision from capacities
at the local level helps to clarify how an egalitarian welfare state could
reconcile strong supralocal and local roles (Table 1). The highest possible