Political cultures and local government

Americans are famously attached to their local governments -- seemingly much more than Canadians. I was reminded of this during our recent visit to the Chicago area. The greater Chicago area, known as Chicagoland to its inhabitants, boasts hundreds, if not thousands, of overlapping municipal governments, ranging from cities and villages, to townships, to school districts, sanitary districts, and counties. My hometown of Wheaton is located in DuPage County, but it is also located in Milton Township. The public school district is called District 200, whose boundaries do not quite coincide with the Wheaton city limits.

It is nothing short of remarkable that Americans, with their historic fear of overweening government, are seemingly content to live under myriad governments, whose overlapping nature rivals the various feudal fiefdoms of mediaeval Europe. Yet if the state of Illinois, whose capital city is "downstate" in Springfield, were to attempt to consolidate all of these into a Chicago megacity, there would be an insurrection.

By contrast, here in Ontario, we are rather accustomed to the provincial government embarking on waves of municipal consolidation every generation or so. Some three decades ago Preston, Galt and Hespeler were combined to make Cambridge. Fort William and Port Arthur became Thunder Bay. Then in the late 1990s a Toronto megacity was created by the Mike Harris government. And at the beginning of the new millennium the Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth became the new city of Hamilton.

It is difficult to imagine the residents of Cook County, Illinois, willingly becoming a Chicago megacity, requiring the extinction of Oak Park, Maywood, Berwyn, Cicero, Hillside, Evanston, &c., &c. What this would seem to indicate is that the autonomy of local governments has a firmer place in what might be called the unwritten American constitution than it does in Canada's. Thus while the written document indicates that the US is a federal system with only two levels of government, the unwritten constitution is more of a three- or four-level federal system. If Americans fear government, they appear to fear the local variety least of all.