The incidence of regional and metropolitan area intergovernmental relations is often explained in terms of efficiency gains for the participating jurisdictions (Stein 1990; Rusk 1993; Waste 1998; Katz 2000; Drier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2001). It is generally believed that local governments seeking to cut costs or provide a higher quality of services will look to other neighboring jurisdictions and private sector entities to partner with in the provision of goods and services. The economic rationale behind regional and intergovernmental cooperation is well understood. Not obvious are the political and professional motivations that influence decisions to cooperate and collaborate with neighboring jurisdictions.

We theorize that local officeholders view decisions to engage or not engage in intergovernmental cooperation as avenues for promoting their political careers. Two different theories that exist in the literature on intergovernmental cooperation lead to two distinctly different expectations about how intergovernmental cooperation affects electoral trajectories. In one view, local elected officials with ambition for higher office (especially higher political offices that represent a larger geography) may pursue intergovernmental relations as a way to promote themselves to a larger constituency. This view draws on the seminal work of Joseph Schlesinger on ambition theory. In a second view, intergovernmental cooperation reflects the goal of incumbents to protect themselves from electoral threats. In this view, a high incidence of intergovernmental cooperation leads to fewer, rather than more, challenges by quality challengers and is thus associated with fewer opportunities for incumbents at lower levels of government to realize their ambitions for higher office.

Maritime empires are based on ports, many of them beyond the bounds of formal empire, or only latterly incorporated into it. Such ports might be described as bridgeheads – base areas for deeper incursions into indigenous societies. In practice, of course, the greatest benefit was often derived from the bridgehead itself. Securing those ports in ways favourable to trade on British terms required a broad repertoire of techniques and a range of collaborators subject to varying degrees of state influence and control. Ronald Robinson’s ‘ideal prefabricated collaborator’ – the settler – was a vital agent even beyond the world of formal colonisation. To take one example, British community identity, preserved and manifested in Buenos Aires, underpinned the power of British merchants to protest against, and influence Argentine government policy. Michael Reimer’s Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807–1882 (1997) examined a different process, which saw incremental accretions to the power of a transnational foreign power base in the decades up to 1882. Sanitation and public order concerns led to the establishment of transnational bodies which arrogated, in part to consular control, the sovereignty of the Alexandrian authorities. The petty regimes established in the Chinese treaty ports took this process a step further. Partly based on precedents for foreign sojourner self-regulation in Qing imperial practice, small municipal administrations developed in the concessions and settlements of China as ports were opened to foreign trade and residence. As well as some absurdly tiny outposts there were British Municipal Administrations with tax-raising powers and a full panoply of municipal services in Hankou and Tianjin; Britons dominated an International Settlement administration at Xiamen (Amoy). But Britain’s Chinese jewel was Shanghai. The city’s International Settlement shared control of the city with a French concession and Chinese municipal structures but overshadowed this competition, dominating China’s biggest and most important port city and gateway to the world. Britons controlled the settlement. This essay looks at the settlement administration: the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), and its Shanghai Municipal Police force (SMP).

British informal imperialism in China developed a range of specific techniques for maintaining the new system set up after 1842. That year the Treaty of Nanjing opened the first treaty ports to foreign trade and residence, ceded the island of Hong Kong in perpetuity to Britain, introduced extraterritoriality and allowed for the posting of British consuls to the open ports working under a Superintendent of Trade in Hong Kong.

In this chapter we turn to the development of our subsystem thesis. The literature on policy subsystems has been undergoing something of a renaissance. In recent years, public policy research has begun portraying the relationships that frequently develop between agencies, interest organizations, and legislative committees in terms that suggest fluidity, dynamism, and openness to the larger political environment (see, e.g., Hamm, 1983; McCool, 1990; Jenkins-Smith, St. Clair, and Woods, 1991). Heclo (1978), for example, describes policy subsystems as loose issue networks (cf. Berry, 1989). Kingdon (1984) argues that we should think in terms of policy communities. Cohen (1986) describes systems of variable political control involving Congress, the president, the courts, and interest groups. Sabatier and Pelkey (1987) point to potentially competitive advocacy coalitions spanning multiple actors in a policy domain. Meier's (1985) synthesis of the regulatory literature treats subsystems as interconnected sets of dyadic linkages, which may be consensual or conflictual, between agencies, subnational units of government, legislative subcommittees, industry groups, interest advocacy groups, and assorted others. All of these views reject the classic depiction of policy subsystems as “iron triangles,” composed of informal, but durable, linkages between executive agencies, legislative committees or subcommittees, and special interest groups (Lowi, 1969; McConnell, 1966; Freeman, 1965; Cater, 1964; Truman, 1951).

Taken together, this recent work suggests that the “iron triangle” literature was seriously deficient in not recognizing the conditions under which the insularity of subsystems could be breached from the outside by the rise of new interest claimants and issues or from the inside by shifting alliances and loss of consensus.

Americans have a love–hate relationship with their government. They tell pollsters that they disapprove strongly of Congress as a whole, but vote to reelect their own members of Congress. They decry the role of special interests in influencing congressional decision making, but oppose public funding of federal campaigns. They believe that much of what the government does is unnecessary and wasteful, but demand that programs benefiting themselves be protected. The policy subsystems that we analyze in this book contribute to this ambivalence about our political system. They are viewed as insulated from popular control, self-serving, and a major contributor to the country's runaway deficits. At the same time, they are given responsibility for designing and implementing policies in response to public problems.

MYTHS ABOUT FEDERAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS

Given this ambivalence, it is important to separate the real problems from the mythology associated with policy subsystems. Perhaps the biggest myth is the contention that policy subsystems in general are a major contributor to the federal deficit. The fact is that a very small number of domestic programs account for virtually all of the growth in domestic spending. Figure 8.1 shows that three programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – are responsible for the vast majority of the growth in domestic spending during the 1980s. These three programs account for 85 percent of all growth in spending for domestic financial assistance programs from 1983 through 1990.