(Page 9 of 38) - National Local Political Economies and Varieties of Capitalism: A Classification and Analysis of 21 Developed Democracies authored by Sellers, Jefferey.

are critical to an organized model built around control by parties. More fragmented local
governmental arrangements correspond more closely to the market-centered model. A strong
mayor could undermine the parties represented in a local council, even bypassing the mayor’s
own party (cf. Sellers 2002a, Chapter 4). For this reason, the indicator for mayoral selection
(Omlo06) rates systems for selection by the council as the most organized, followed by direct
mayoral election. Since this indicator is based on party control within local government,
appointment of the executive from outside rates lowest (Mouritzen and Svara 2002: 62-63).
Similarly, the rating of opportunities for council supervision over the local government
(Omlo07) classifies Mouritzen and Svara’s “committee-leader” model, followed by their
collective leadership model, as more organized than their strong mayor model. Because of
dispersed authority under collective leadership, and the capacities of a strong mayor to take over
from the council, their study generally found the parties on the council to be active and
influential in this order (259-261). In their council-manager model, built around an appointed,
expert manager as exclusive head of the executive, council members participated least in
executive decisions (261-262). Despite the appointment power of a council over a manager,
even the council under a strong mayor system often exercised more influence over the local
government.

Finally, governmental size matters. By comparison with a unified local government for

an entire urban region, a proliferation of local jurisdictions brings the same “joint decision traps”
(Scharpf 1990) to local cooperation as federal arrangements at higher levels. At the same time,
as public choice analysts in the tradition of Tiebout have argued, this fragmentation fosters
competition among local governments to satisfy the preferences of local residents (Bish, Ostrom
and Ostrom 1988). Within these smaller jurisdictions, moreover, smaller size can encourage the
greater responsiveness to individuals or groups within communities that is also part of the
market-centered model. Hence, jurisdictional size in relation to population and territory offers
an important indicator of state-society relations within communities as well as of fiscal
supervision (Omlo08, Omlo09).

This index for local government institutions bears a somewhat stronger relation to

supralocal politico-administrative relations than fiscal relations did (.58, p<.05). Without the two
identical variables, the local government scale correlates more modestly with organized fiscal
arrangements (.37, p<.05) but even more strongly with other supralocal ones (.75, p<.001). As it
did for the scale of statism and localism, federalism also bears little relation to these categories (-
.32 with the simple definition, -.17 with Lijphart’s more calibrated measure). Clearly
infrastructures of local government do not represent simply an outgrowth of decentralization at
higher levels of states.

Infrastructures of Local Government and Other Institutional Patterns

Beyond local government, a scale of infrastructures for local governance could add

indicators for such metropolitan cooperation, for relations within local civil society, for local
business-government relations and for local social movements. Much of the international
variations in these other dimensions, however, correspond to patterns in this local government
scale (Sellers 2002a). As a growing array of local case studies indicate, much of the contrasts in
policy and political performance that have usually been attributed entirely to differences in other