Some Social and Political Correlates of County Borough Expenditures: A Comment

Extract

James E. Alt ('Some Social and Political Correlates of County Borough Expenditures’ in British Journal of Political Science No. I, pp. 49–62) gives as his reasons for choosing to study county boroughs, ‘not only because of the fact that they are urban centres, the uniformity of their electoral procedure, the high level of competition (on terms of contested seats), their financial independence from other local authorities, and their service omnicompetence’. This is a standard explanation for the predominance in research on local government of the county borough to the neglect of other authorities. One positive gain of re-organization may be that future research will give a more rounded picture of local government performance and practice.

I am grateful to Mr. Brown for quoting enough of my correspondence to necessitate my writing rather little at this point. A great deal of research done on the American states suggests that such variables as party control of legislatures do not explain variations in spending very well. In Britain the assumption is frequently made that each local authority has so many unique features that to attempt to make broad-scale comparisons is either useless or impossible. My article was written to suggest that neither of these notions should be applied uncritically, at least to some services provided by English and Welsh county boroughs.