ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comparative study of the role of political parties in cities. The transformation from class politics to New Political Culture (NPC) politics explains the decline of voting or party identification and the rise of individualized forms of citizens involvement in local politics. In strongly partisan local systems citizens have little control over municipal administration; political parties control elections and do not allow direct democracy. Robert Merton and Raymond Wolfinger have argued that the machines integrated immigrants into local politics and provided otherwise unavailable social services. The data present an incomplete picture of Japanese and Australian local politics. The increasing prevalence of nonpartisan citizens and voters demonstrates that an NPC is emerging where parties are weakest and where citizens can exercise the most control over local politics. The local government has had little legitimacy and weak institutional and political resources; the national government and especially state governments had much more power and legitimacy than local governments.
