Municipal Government Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Modern states have, in general, two or three levels of local self-government: The municipality is usually the lower tier, and the region or province is the middle level of government. Portugal has three levels, while many other countries in Europe and South America, for example, only have two subnational tiers of government. Countries differ from each other in the number and size of municipalities. Portugal and the United Kingdom have on average larger municipalities than France, for instance.

History And Organizational Structure

Municipalities date back to the Roman Empire and developed unevenly across Europe during the Middle Ages, according to the political and social conditions of each historical period. At the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, municipalities expanded their powers and resources to face the industrial revolution and the exponential growth of urbanization. In the last decades of the twentieth century, municipalities underwent a new wave of institutional changes, a shift from traditional and hierarchical forms of municipal administration to networks of local governance, a process that can weaken local political accountability and policy coordination.

Municipalities typically have an executive (a council, a mayor, or both) and an assembly that controls and scrutinizes the activity of the executive. The assembly is usually directly elected by proportional representation by local residents, and its members elect the executive council and/or the mayor. In some countries, both organs—the executive and the deliberative—are directly elected. As a result of this diversity of institutional forms, there are numerous models of municipal political leadership, and the way each model functions depends on a number of factors, such as the local political culture, the existence of a political majority behind the mayor, and the social and economic characteristics of the local community.

The recruitment of municipal councilors and mayors is conditioned by electoral rules, selection procedures, legal constraints, requirements for equal opportunities, and time. As a result of these factors, most countries tend to have municipal councils with an uneven social composition, with members drawn excessively from certain social classes.

Administrative powers can be defined in one of two ways: most commonly by the principle of general competence in which the municipality can do whatever is considered to be in the interest of the local community, or by the principle of specialty, in which the municipality does what is explicitly defined by law. Administrative competence and financial resources vary from country to country, depending on the degree of administrative decentralization and political devolution, but in all cases, the municipal government has fewer powers than the national government. For example, in Europe, the Nordic countries have a far greater share of public resources than countries in southern Europe. Nonetheless, they all provide urban and social services.

Relationship With Other Levels Of Government

Despite the autonomy of municipalities, they are under the control of the courts and under the tutelage of the central government, whose responsibility it is to verify compliance with the law. However, these control procedures are applied only afterward, and they are exclusively about the legality, not the merit, of political decisions.

The finances of municipal government usually come from within or from the state. Internal resources—generally favored—include local taxes, mainly taxes on immovable property, fees, revenues from municipal services, and loans. Transfers from the state budget can be made through a block grant, in which transfers are not assigned to specific expenditures. This allows elected municipal boards to decide what to do with resources. State monies can also be transferred conditionally, in which case the resources are assigned to specific expenditures.

Accountability, an important component of a fair municipal government, has two dimensions: internal accountability, carried out by the municipal assembly, members of opposition parties represented in the executive council, or an ombudsman; and external accountability, provided by a free press, citizen participation, and, ultimately, the courts.

Municipal or intermunicipal cooperation is a key feature of local government systems. There are basically two types of municipal associations: general purpose and specialized. In the first case, a board or third-party contractor implements specific municipal policies. In the second case, an association is created to carry out functions that the municipalities alone cannot do or are not interested in doing, for example, to use economies of scale. Municipal governments worldwide cooperate with each other, often through twin-city (or sister city) programs.

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