Henry Teune

Local Government and Democratic Political Development

The spread of democratic ideas and the emergence of a global system have contributed to a resurgence of the local. One major form of decentralization in the twentieth century has been the breakup of empires into nation-states, the most recent example being the Soviet Union. The pressures for democratization have led to a new emphasis on local governance below the level of the nation-state. The rise of a global political economy provides localities with an alternative to national capitals. Although the patterns of local governance have similar features of provincial and local governments, the push for democracy will give local politics a greater role in the issues of peace and prosperity than has been true during the long recent period of the rise in authority of nation-states.

Decentralization and Economic Growth

This article addresses the question of whether political decentralization is compatible with economic growth. Although the so-called causes of economic growth are indeterminant, governmental centralization has clearly been associated with it for more than a century in industrialized Western democracies. Arguments have been made for the functions of government in facilitating and integrating national markets. The position of this article is that beginning in the 1960s governmental centralization began to shift its role from a contributing to a dampening factor in the processes of economic growth. In fact most of the Western democracies are attempting to reverse the long-term trend of central governmental concentration, whether or not this fosters economic growth.

Human Development in a Global Political Economy

In the spirit of the late nineteenth-century founders of professional social science, this is a call for communities of international scholars to join to create a new global political economy. The ingredients of such a political economy include a description and explanation of how it works, a theory defining and justifying what is “good” and “just,” an interpretation to make it understandable, and a developmental theory of how the system evolved and how it will change. Certain steps are outlined to achieve such a goal.

Philosophy and Religion David Easton (Ed.). Varieties of Political Theory. Pp. vi, 154. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

This is one of several published consequences of Professor Easton’s direction of his energies toward providing political science with &dquo;theory.&dquo; Although theory in other disciplines may have emerged slowly from an accumulation of research, political science can, perhaps, following Easton’s lead, accelerate the process by continual searchings of &dquo;theories&dquo; in related disciplines. The papers in this volume, excepting the editor’s, were presented at the American Political Science Association’s 1963 meeting in a panel chaired by Easton. All of the contributors are senior &dquo;theorists&dquo;-J. Buchanan, Parsons, March, Rapoport, Simon, ind M. G. Smith. Only Easton is a clearly identified political scientist. Most of the authors and ideas are familiar to those engaged in the intellectual changes within political science. The collection will reaffirm the impressions of some that &dquo;theory&dquo; means a lot of things. Simon, sensitive to the characteristics of theory as defined by philosophers of science, clearly argues that the form or structure of generalizations in political science will largely be dynamic, taking change into account and that the substance will