ABSTRACT
Within nation-states policy-making and administration on a range of significant issue areas takes place at sub-national level. There may be a number of tiers of government co-existing with that of the central or national administration. A wide range of territorial units-states or provinces, regions and various levels of local government such as counties, cities, districts and small-scale parishes and communes-have been established in different countries and play an important role in the political life of their societies. A tradition of local self-government goes back to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries or even earlier; for example, monarchs granted cities the power to run their own affairs in a number of European states. In liberal democracies the existence of active sub-national governments with their own powers was seen as an
important means of maintaining democracy and in sharp contrast to the centralisation of authority seen in autocratic states. After both the Second World War and the collapse of communism in Europe after 1989, emerging democracies sought to establish a pattern of decentralised government as a vital part of their new constitutional structures.
