The danger to democratic norms aside, this chapter demonstrates that state government is also a needless source of additional regulation, additional taxation, and inefficient duplication of functions – in short, a waste of taxpayer money and a pointless burden on the citizenry. Yet, many of the specific functions currently performed by state governments are essential. The abolition of state government would therefore require the redistribution of those necessary functions between the national government and the local governments. This chapter demonstrates that such a redistribution would be administratively workable. To show this, it formulates general criteria for deciding which functions should go where and offers illustrations of how those criteria might be applied to specific functions in practice.

This chapter is about how police officers engage with sex workers when they are not enforcing anti-prostitution laws against them. By focusing their enforcement efforts on low-tier sex workers, the police help create a space for the middle tier of China’s sex industry – entertainment venues and their hostesses—to thrive. I find that law enforcement officers engage actively and in myriad ways with the sex industry when they are not focused on arresting sex workers. Some of their actions are purely extractive interactions. Yet other police behavior, while still self-serving, also benefits sex workers. Making sense of police actions in this context requires shifting our framework from exclusively viewing police as powerful figures in relation to sex workers to also viewing them as street-level bureaucrats who are accountable to the local government and the vast police bureaucracy of which they are at the forefront. This approach provides a different perspective on police officers, underscoring their weakness within China’s bureaucratic system rather than their strength in relation to the sex workers. Their vulnerability vis-à-vis the state even affects how they engage with sex workers and underscores conditions under which the job security of frontline police officers in fact depends on a cooperative local sex industry.

The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.

This chapter seeks to debunk the myth that rural disadvantage does not exist, or is unworthy of investigation, because rural populations hold disproportionate political power. Noting other scholars’ efforts to challenge common assumptions regarding rural voters’ inordinate power in legislatures and the Electoral College, the chapter takes an alternate approach by exploring widespread challenges rural local governments have encountered in the face of economic transformation over the past several decades, which, for some regions, has come with regional depopulation, high rates of property vacancy, broad socioeconomic distress, and strains on municipal and county budgets. Officials in distressed local governments often struggle to provide even the basic services needed to keep a community afloat, such as enforcement of the building code. Rural local governments’ struggles challenge the stereotype of the overly empowered, enraged, conservative rural voter holding the rest of the country hostage to his political whims. The story this chapter tells is one of a shrinking public sphere, the limits of law’s efficacy in places with few resources, the role property plays in regional prosperity, local efforts to work with little to achieve what they can, and the national abandonment of places no longer deemed useful for extractive purposes.

The rough chronological boundaries of this chapter will be 1800 and 1921. These are defined by the structure of the United Kingdom, which itself defined the key questions in constitutional history that were discussed in this period. In 1800 the island of Ireland, all thirty-two counties, joined Great Britain, which had been formed in 1707 by the Union between Scotland and England. This was the period of the maximum extent of the United Kingdom. In 1921, following the negotiations at the end of the Irish War of Independence, the island of Ireland was partitioned, twenty-six counties forming the Irish Free State and the six remaining counties in the north-east constituting Northern Ireland. The government of Northern Ireland was subject to a scheme of devolution under the Government of Ireland Act of 1920. This had provided for both northern and southern parliaments, only the former was established.1 It remained in place until the imposition of direct rule in 1972. The nineteenth century, therefore, was an age of two unions and this had huge significance for constitutional developments.2 Not only were the Unions themselves matters of great controversy but the three kingdoms, four nations, posed immense problems in relation to questions of church and state, local government, the land and the issue of the extension of the franchise. The constitutional development of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland was complex. The Union state incorporated several constitutional traditions and understandings of the constitution, and a range of challenges to its integrity. The British constitution, most often seen in terms of an English constitutional tradition, was thought of by contemporaries implicitly and explicitly in a comparative context.

No account of the ‘rise of the modern British state’ would be complete without an appreciation of the ways in which local institutions, constitutional principles and precedents, laws – and ultimately governance – evolved. Prior to the twentieth century, locality defined the overwhelming majority of British subjects’ lived constitutional experience: the shire rule of Anglo-Saxon ealdormen, medieval corporations and county corporates, fourteenth-century Quarter Sessions, the empowered Elizabethan parish, and then the explosion of ‘ratepayer democracy’ in the nineteenth century featuring municipal corporations and county councils, Poor Law unions, and ad hoc statutory bodies (including school boards, public health authorities, and improvement committees) of all kinds.

This chapter analyses the policies of populist radical right party-led local governments in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland. It assesses the extent to which their party ideology is evident. The analysis concerns three forms of policy: policy agendas, budgetary spending and policy designs. Each enables a different form of comparison to be made, through which the impact made by the parties and its cross-national variation is assessed. First, analysis of agendas reveals their policy priorities once elected into local government. These are compared with mainstream parties in similar contexts. Second, analysis of budgets shows the extent to which these priorities were realized in the form of spending. Comparison here is made with the preceding mainstream party-led local government in the same context. Third, analysis of their policies’ framing of target populations, policy tools and policy rationales demonstrates the varying extent to which they generate social constructions that align with party ideology. The leadership of local government by populist radical right parties in Western Europe is shown to lead to contrasting degrees and forms of policy impact.

This chapter provides an explanation for the different approaches to local government taken by populist radical right parties in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, and their different degree of radicalism. It conducts a systematic exploration of the process by which these parties govern at the local level. The empirical basis for this analysis is interviews with 57 local government actors, semi-structured in order to investigate the two overarching themes that are theoretically expected to influence their approaches to governing. The chapter unveils the mechanisms through which moderation is imposed (or radicalism is facilitated) by, first, various institutional constraints, and, second, cross-level party linkages. As a final step, it reconstructs the process by which each populist radical right-led local government responded to the European migration crisis during the 2010s. The institutional constraints and cross-level party linkages particular to each of the four cases can explain the varied (multi-level) governance configurations that emerge, and as a result the varying degree of radicalism in their approach.