sector agencies that are privately owned but with a majority of public sector
shareholders. Some organizations managing public housing are public and some
running planning, transport, and other services are private. The result is ‘‘a
diversity of organisations, many of which do not have genuine public status
(even though they may well operate on public funding) and whose integration is
highly problematic’’ (Borraz and Le Gale`s 2005 , 14 ).
The truth is that the complexity of local governance institutional arrangements
often belies understanding within countries and makes the task of comparative
study very taxing. The French case may be an extreme one but there is a substantial
element of institutional complexity built into virtually every system in the world.
In order to begin to address the issue of explaining diVerences the literature has had
to engage in some simpliWcations and has tended to focus on the formal elected
institutions of local government rather than the vast array of quasi-governmental
institutions that tend to surround it. While such a procedure makes sense, it does
leave you wondering if important elements of an understanding of the way systems
work are being left aside.
If you discount these concerns about capturing the complexity of diVerent
systems, the next problem is that there is clearly no consensus in the literature
on the basis for any institutional demarcations. In an overview of the main
classiWcation options that have been tried, Lidstrom ( 1999 , 100 – 6 ) identiWes a
range of criteria that have been applied.
TheWrst choice is whether to focus on historical or present-day criteria.
Historical heritage might lead in one direction in terms of the distinctions
drawn, while a concern with present-day realities might lead in another. The
former option could lead to the overlooking of recent developments. So again,
taking the example of France once more, since the decentralization legislation of
the early 1980 s, a system that before might have been described as having the
classic Napoleonic heritage of centralized control and strong oversight has given
way to a much more autonomous system with far more political clout and
technical capacity being held at the level of local municipalities. As Borraz and
Le Gale`s( 2005 , 12 ) exclaim, ‘‘France is no longer the Jacobin centralist state it
used to be.’’
On the other hand, if you take a current position as the basis of your classiWca-
tion, much depends on what you choose to focus on. If you take the overall scale
and capacity of a local government system, the size, budgets, and staVavailable to
municipalities, then the UK along with Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and
Denmark emerge as the strongest local authorities (Bours 1993 ). Using a criteria
of formal local government autonomy and freedom from central control, however,
neither Ireland, the UK, nor the Netherlands would reach the top table of European
local government. Indeed a standard lament of British commentators is that the
UK has the weakest local government system among Western democracies (see
Chandler 1993 ). Buried in this diVerence in categorization is a distinction between
498 gerry stoker