Central Controls and Local Budgeting Behaviour

Despite the increasing awareness among students of urban and local policy-making of the importance of central controls and regulations in shaping local policies, empirical research in this area still tends to treat local authorities as if they were more or less isolated, self-sufficient decision-making units. Attention has largely been confined to what David Easton calls the intrasocietal part of the system’s environment in searching for determinants of local decision-making behaviour, while extrasocietal forces – factors outside the geographical boundaries of the local system – have been treated only marginally or neglected altogether. The growing concern about the increased interdependencies between national and local authorities and – assumedly – the decreased autonomy of local government, has so far only led to rather general comments on the nature of these relationships in the empirical literature on urban policy-making. This lack of concern about the wider political context within which the local government operates may be due to the fact that most empirical studies of local policy-making have been limited to local units within one country

Autonomy · Central government · Context (archaeology · Economics · Empirical evidence · Empirical research · Geography · Interdependence · Local government · Political science · Politics · Public economics · Test (biology · Law · Local Government Finance and Decentralization · Public Administration · Public Policy and Administration Research

• Local Government Equality

  Open Access•Rune J Sørensen•Journal of Theoretical Politics•1991

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