Example public administration dissertation topic 5:

A review of the changing nature of central-local power relations 1950-1974.

Commenting upon the changing relationship between central and local government, the Mayor of Lincoln, Alderman J.W.F. Hill (1946, p. 47) maintained at the Association of Municipal Corporations conference of 1946, that local authorities had ceased to be individual policy-making bodies and instead became mere local agents and managers for central government; the relationship between central and locality was becoming one epitomised by ‘reference[s] to control and direction. It is the language of principal and agent’. Using this contemporary opinion as its analytical starting point this dissertation charts the development and changing nature of central and local government relations in the period 1950-1974; a period that witnessed not only the creation of economic development regions but also the call for government to be reorganised on a series of city regions (the work of Derek Senior) and culminated in the largest structural and geographic reform of local government in England and Wales since 1888.

Suggested initial topic reading:

• Hill, J.W.F. (1946). Report of proceedings of conference on local government: September 25th – September 26th, 1946, (London: Association of Municipal Corporations).
• Senior, D. (1969). Memorandum of Dissent, Vol. II. Royal Commission on Local Government in England, 1966-1969, Cmnd. 4040 – I/1969.
• Hart, Sir W. (1966). The conurbations and the regions. Political Quarterly, 37(2), 128-138.