ABSTRACT
Local government and local politics provide us with an important insight into the diversity of the institutional compromises of various democratic systems as national governments grew in order to meet rising expectations and to enlarge the economic role of the state. Territorial democracy was, and remains, a more difficult problem for French institutions than for British. The acknowledgment that the communes are ‘small republics’ was only the first in a long series of political compromises that have kept local politics and communal demands at the forefront of French politics. The national and local electoral systems, the relationship of national and local parties, and very different orientations of national and local party leaders, serve to attenuate local issues and to isolate local politics from higher level decisions. The interpenetration of politics and administration, in turn, leads to complicite and the balancing of national and local interests by the major departments of national government.
