A comparative analysis of the decision-making process in six local government councils in Sydney

Abstract

The thesis compares decision making in six suburban local councils in Sydney: Bankstown, Burwood, Ku-ring-gai, Leichhardt, Liverpool, and North Sydney. Three types of political issues or decisions are distinguished: distributive decisions, or ’doing favours’ (parochial or individual-oriented and particularistic); regulative decisions (rule-bound and affecting larger categories of people through precedent), and redistributive decisions (affecting broad categories by redistribution of wealth). Sydney suburban councils are basically administrative bodies. However, much of local politics involves disputes over what would normally be classed as administrative decisions; that is many local political issues are distributive. In the six councils, elections are often characterised by very localised personal support for candidates and by parochial or distributive issues rather than issues of policy. Local interest groups are mostly organised at the neighbourhood level and press parochial interests. Many aidermen pay more attention to individual constituency pressures than to council officials. In making decisions, aldermen are often highly susceptible to pressures from within their own ward. A description of actual decisions in the areas of planning administration and budgetary decision making shows that distributive issues are common-place, often in areas of administration that are intended to be regulative. Distributive decision making tends to be found more in larger councils; in poorer areas where service needs are greatest; in areas undergoing rapid development (often the outer suburbs); and in councils with Labor Party control. There are some similarities between these aspects of local politics and the politics of the American urban machine. The notion that the middle class adopt a ’public-regarding’ ethos as distinct from a working class ’privateregarding' ethos has some relevance in accounting for the incidence of distributive politics, in the way it helps account for machine politics. Some explanation is also found in differences in local political cultures. These stem from peculiar local factors as well as from differences in social attitudes supposedly held by broad categories of the population. It is concluded that while local councils are not an ideal form of government for making some types of administrative decisions, there is some value in enabling a degree of personal intervention in rule-bound administration, and in ensuring that very immediate and important parochial interests are properly represented. There is great value in retaining a system of government that permits the occasional expression of broader choices about important policy matters, through local elections and community group activity. Show more