Elite governance at the city level: the case of urban regimes
Urban regime theory (URT) has its roots in Charles Lindblom’s neo-pluralism (Lindblom 1977: 175). In coming to terms with obvious flaws in the classical pluralist approach, he recognized that governments in capitalist countries need the economy to be successful and that in a market system, decisions are taken by business in which government plays no role:
Any government official who understands the requirements of his position and the responsibilities that market orientated systems throw on businessmen will therefore grant them a privileged position.
He does not have to be bribed, duped or pressured to do so... He simply understands... that public affairs in market orientated systems are in the hands of two group leaders, government and business, who must collaborate and that to make the system work government leadership must often defer to business leadership.This passage reflects the assumptions upon which Stephen Elkin (1986) draws in his discussion of the city regime. The emergence of growth machine and urban regime theories may also be interpreted as a revival of the community power debate of the 1950s and 1960s around the question of: who runs cities?
Elkin (1986) develops the concept of the city regime from his identification of systematic bias towards business in US city government. The systematic bias, which he identifies, does not arise as a consequence of immutable economic determinants, but rather through political and institutional structures, which privilege the economic domain. For Elkin (1986: 18), City politicians, administrators and political institutions are systematically biased in favour of business interests. The dispersal of political power is a consequence of the ‘division of labour between state and market that is manifest in cities’. There are two interdependent structural considerations to take into account here - the notion of representative government and the private ownership of productive assets by the business community.
Public officials cannot control economic performance at the local level. The city government can, indeed must, ‘induce’ but not ‘command’ economic behaviour. The objective of Elkin’s research is to demonstrate that the system is skewed against the emergence of policies which are concerned with broader social issues and that the city government is required to labour on behalf of the business community. This represents a structural failure of popular control. Business domination is facilitated by three principal factors. First, the relationships between city government and the business community are defined by the need for cities to raise credit in private markets. Credit is linked directly to the perceived economic prospects of the city. Hence antipathy towards business would be an immediate invitation to ‘fiscal trouble’. Secondly, the balance of forces is weighed towards business interests by virtue of the non-dependence of capital in the locality. Thirdly, local politicians are also dependent upon privately backed electoral coalitions, which must maintain a ‘sufficient flow of benefactions’. While Elkin (1986: 30-88) does not detect systematic bias among bureaucrats, he argues that parochialism and self-interest among those concerned with economic development leads them to favour business in that area. The key policy arena around which growth alliances of this type form is that of land use. This is based upon the assumption that land and property values are the key indicator of the ability of the city government to obtain credit. The overall conclusion to be drawn from Elkin’s work is not that elected officials are dominated by business, but rather that they have a mutual interest in economic growth.The public policy literature adopts diverse conclusions in assessing the comparative utility of URT. There is a broad spectrum of opinion, from those who argue that if properly adapted it represents a suitable framework (Stoker and Mossberger 1994), to those who consider that the concept may highlight the need for a focus on the phenomenon of partnership, but that it does not adequately explain this in the UK or European context (see Davies 2001). The dependence of city governments upon business interests and hence the issue of whether there is a need for an urban regime, ultimately rests on the degree of the city’s reliance on local capital in order to discharge its responsibilities. In political systems characterized by strong party discipline and centralized systems of local government finance such as the UK, the need for urban regimes only emerges in city’s featured by brute scarcity or the need to fund large scale projects such as Manchester’s successful bid to host the Commonwealth Games.
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- Political transformation: towards multi-level governance
- Classical elite theorists such as Gaetano Mosca (1939: 50), argue that the history of politics has been characterized by elite domination:
- As a large city and the heart of an empire, Rome was full of courts.
- City-states
- National elite power studies
- THE LOCATION OF LEGAL ACTIVITIES IN THE CITY OF ROME
- Conventions in case names
- The West European feudal system that followed the collapse of the Carolingian empire - itself a short-lived attempt to impose order on the disorder resulting from the barbarian invasion that had destroyed Rome - was decentralized even by the standards of similar regimes elsewhere.