Administrative Supervision

Abstract

This chapter examines the supervision of local authorities’ actions by upper levels of government. The starting point is that all regional or national authorities exercise a certain type of administrative control over the activities of local governments. However, there is diversity among systems both in the scope (legality v. expediency) of supervision and in the tools (a priori v. a posteriori) that they use for this control. The empirical analysis concentrates on the first aspect and shows both that most European countries limit the supervision to controlling only the legality of local acts and that there have been barely changes over time in this dimension of local autonomy. A closer look to country specificities shows, though, how along these positive values and remarkable stability a subtle trend towards a growing supervision on financial management stands out as an emerging pattern in a non-negligible number of the cases analysed.