There isn¡¦t any clear definition on the discussion of Local Democracy. There are some similar concepts that are easily confused with us, such as local government, local autonomy, localism, and local democracy¡Ketc. Therefore, it¡¦s necessary to clear and find out the relationship among them. In addition, the dichotomy of democracy in the UK polity is particularly conspicuous in relation to local government. Consequently, The challenge is that how we apply the theories to the reality.
I will use the approach of historical institutionalism to illustrate the development of UK local democracy. Meanwhile, it¡¦s reasonable to base a normative theory of local government or local democracy on the concept of ¡¥limited democracy.¡¦ In the light of the complexity of local government levels, I will focus my study on England. Case study and document analysis will be the research method of this essay. The process of history should be included six stages. I will make a brief analysis on the institution, actors, and events of each stage. After that, I will synthesize the path and its relationship with the change of voters¡¦ attitudes.
The research results included: As for UK polity, although local democracy is the catch phrase of New Labour¡¦s programme for local government, it should not be an unfamiliar concept. The concept of local democracy doesn¡¦t necessarily equate to local autonomy; to some extent, the interdependence between them cannot be ignored. The path of UK local democracy tends to step from the theoretical model of localism to economy and efficiency. When we observe the low turnout of UK local election recent years, the voters¡¦ apathy has been a social normal phenomenon. The reality seems to undermine the immutable and sacrosanct place for democracy in the institutions of local government. However, are the things ostensibly unreasonable really bad? From the enlightenment of the approach of historical institutionalism, the voters have been incorporated into UK polity. Under the constraint of UK polity, they play the role of ¡¥maximizing satisfiers¡¦, unless major issues. In a word, if we want to learn from the lesson of UK local democracy, we have to rethink it again and again. And then, we may have an audit of the health of local democracy in Britain
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0827103-133627 |
| Date | 27 August 2003 |
| Creators | Hsiao, Tze-Yin |
| Contributors | Chueiling Shin, none, Da-chi Liao |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0827103-133627 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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