Differentiation and Reintegration: Interpreting Local Government Reforms in the Age of Governance

How to get a suitable theoretical framework for making comparisons between changes in the structures of local government and governance? Since political actors love to talk about “modernising” local government and political scientist talk about local government reforms as attempts of “modernisation”, one way of approaching the question could be to ask what “modernisation” means. Political actors probably won’t be very eloquent on this, presumably referring to vague normative notions of efficiency, responsiveness or capacity of action or simply to the need of securing economic competitiveness and social integration. According to social theorists, modernisation is about social differentiation. Thus, local government reform and emerging patterns of local governance should essentially be about differentiation – but are they? – Yes and no, I will argue in this paper. Differentiation is not the whole story. Local government systems are indeed becoming more complex in the attempt to cope with a more complex social environment and to fulfil the functions democratic systems are expected to fulfil. But that is differentiation of a very special kind. It is a plurification of institutions for integration, intended to sustain coherence in the complexity of governance. The mentioned vague normative notions invoked by political actors serve as semantic devices to get at least some orientation in dealing with the relationship between institutional patterns and normative criteria of democracy.