Despite decades of steadily expanding federal authority, there is still a fairly well-defined division of labor among national, state and local governments. The latter, for example are chiefly responsible for law enforcement and criminal justice, land use, education (mostly), and so on.
In recent years, moreover, local government has been lauded for its effectiveness and responsiveness. Mayors have been told that they should run the world (maybe that’s why so many are running for president). In their excellent book, The New Localism, Bruce Katz and the late Jeremy Nowak declared that “power increasingly belongs to … the local level” because of regional collections of assets, institutions, and networks.
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