One of the signal trends in the recent study of governmental institutions
has been a growing comparative scrutiny of processes at the local,
regional, and metropolitan levels. A host of studies from a variety of
perspectives have converged on the importance of institutions and agents
at the level of localities and regions for carrying out all manner of public
ends (Ostrom 1990; Putnam 1993; Savitch and Kantor 2002; Sellers 2002).
In the face of this trend it seems all the more remarkable that local government
itself, one of the most consistent institutional features of democracies
around the world, has received such scant systematic attention.
Constitutional protections for local government have now spread to many
more countries than provide for federalism itself. Yet even systematic
comparative studies of decentralization have remained confined to differences
in federal or other institutions above the local level (e.g., Elazar 1995;
Rodden 2004; Schneider 2003; Treisman 2000) or ignored local institutions
altogether (Lijphart 1999). Despite several theoretical or inductive typologies
(Hesse and Sharpe 1991; Lidström 2003; Mouritzen 2003; Page and
Goldsmith 1987; Vetter 2002) and a growing number of comparative case
studies (e.g., Savitch and Kantor 2002; Sellers 2002), this field still lacks the
sort of deductive, encompassing international classifications that have
grown to dominate comparative accounts of party systems, interest intermediation,
and executive–legislative relations.