The Effects of Central Finance on the British Local Government System

The introduction of more rigorous policy analysis into comparative politics reveals an important discontinuity in empirical democratic theory. The problem is not an entirely new one, but the dilemmas presented in looking more carefully at sub-national political systems, and in trying to compare sub-national systems cross-nationally, lend new urgency to this issue. On the one hand, policy studies of budgetary change and resource allocation over time in industrial democracies show that change occurs very slowly; indeed, the budgetary performance of most such governments can be predicted with very small errors given modest longitudinal information. On the other hand, the institutional infrastructure of the industrial democracies is geared to making major shifts in political control, presumably in response to popular preferences and with some notion of desired adjustments in governmental performance: yet the choices actually confronted by governments almost never take such simple politically determined forms; policy choices instead take the form of relative gains and benefits, trade-offs in expected impact of marginal resource changes, and gradual increases as new expenditures and investments can be absorbed in the public sector.