Analysis Of The Cooperative Relationship Among Local Governments In The U.S. Metropolitan Areas

The important features of U.S.A local governments are highly decentralized andautonomous. How do the local governments deal with the relationship among them? How tosolve the contradiction generating in local governments? These problems lie both in real lifeand academic field. This paper tries to probe into the way American metropolitan politicalfragmentation functions on the cooperative relationship among local governments bydescriptively analyzing the cooperative relationship among local governments in Americanmetropolitan area and combining with the case of the Southern California Association ofGovernments to investigate how do local governmental organizations solve the contradictionbetween metropolitan political fragmentation and local government commonality.This article stands on the perspective of the city politics, and chooses InstitutionalCollective Action theory as the main theoretical tool. It adopts case study methods inmethodology and takes the Southern California Association of Governments as an example.In the content arrangement, this study is divided into four parts. The first part is theintroduction which includes the origin of the study, theoretical and practical significance,literature review, study methods of this article, and the emphasis, difficulty and innovation ofthis study. The second part mainly introduces the effects of American metropolitan politicalfragmentation on the cooperative relationship among local governments by three steps. Atfirst, it describes the political fragmentation of American local governments through the datacollected from American census web site. Then it analyzes the fragmentation degree ofAmerican local governments. And finally presents the effects of the political fragmentationdegree of American local governments on the cooperation among local governments. Thethird part mainly analyses the difficulty of the cooperation among local governments, at thesame time, it explains the factors affecting the cooperation among local governments from theperspective of the Institutional Collective Action theory. There are various factors affectingthe cooperation of American local governments under the local government fragmentation. It is from the perspective of the Institutional Collective Action theory, in other words, it isfrom the five aspects of geographical factors, population size, policy objectives, policyentrepreneurs, compulsory or selective excitation to explain the factors affecting thecooperation among local governments. On this basis, exploring the condition of the success ofthe Southern California Association of Governments enlightens Chinese cooperation amonglocal governments. The fourth part is the conclusion part of this paper. The author will do abasic summary of this article, and look into the development of the cooperation amongChinese local governments.