Fragmentation in Local & State Policymaking
School of Public & Global Affairs
Northern Illinois University
April 11, 2024
Who do local governments serve?
Two opposing views
Creatures of the state
- Legally defined
- Corporate rights
- Top down
Creatures of the public
- Culturally defined
- Associational rights
- Bottom up
Which side you come down on has implications for both how you view local government and how you view state intervention in local affairs.
Before we proceed…
A few definitions
Fragmentation
The number of distinct units of local government within a given area.
Concentration
The distribution of service delivery and/or revenue generation responsibilities.
Decentralization
The degree to which the state has delegated authority to local governments. One end of a spectrum with centralization.
Additionally
Fragmentation or concentration may be horizontal or vertical
- Horizontal: the number of units within the same tier of local government (e.g., the number of municipalities in a particular area)
- Vertical: the number of tiers of local government
It is possible to have a high degree of fragmentation and a high degree of concentration at the same time
- Or any other combination
Implications
Much research has been conducted on the horizontal elements
- Institutional reform vs. Public choice
Much less work on the vertical arrangements
- Separation of production from provision
Centralization v. Decentralization
A trend toward state centralization over time
- Some empirical work documenting this but it varies considerably by state
- Local practitioners report a trend toward centralization
How does this manifest?
If not in the relative size, what then?
Regulatory space
- States are not necessarily supplanting local service provision
- Rather, they are regulating what can and cannot be done at the local level
Preemption
The use of coercive methods to substitute state priorities for local policymaking (Goodman, Hatch, and McDonald III 2021)
Preemption examples
- Minimum wage
- Fair scheduling
- Project labor agreements
- Prevailing wage
- Paid sick leave
Note: none of these are about the balance of service delivery or revenue generation between state and local governments.
Why is this happening?
Plenty of empirical evidence
- Some policy domain specific explanations
- Politics
On a normative level, we are seeing conflict over who local governments serve
- For many decades, the creatures of the people view prevailed
- Now, some states are reasserting their view that local governments are creatures of the state
Implications of preemption for local governments
Loss of autonomy
- Local governments exist to implement state delegated authority
- States have the right to re-evaluate that authority at any time
- Importantly, this is service delivery/revenue authority and regulatory authority
Difficulty responding to resident demands
Complexity in delivering services when policy implementation is full of compliance checks
Implications of preemption for local government research
How do we think about the previous literature on local government fragmentation and concentration when (some) states preempt away meaningful differences between local governments?
- What value is there in a fragmented metropolis if all local governments are doing the same thing?
- How would we identify any differentiation?
Questions?