梦想的声音第二季歌单,共享单车沦陷城中村,溥仪的一生
According to (Oxford English Dictionary, 1933), democracy is "government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them. . . or by officers elected by them." It is the only system in which all the citizens are given an equal opportunity to participate in the political system irrespective of one’s background and status in society. Democracy provides an institutional framework for participation by all citizens in economic and political processes. The link between the two is so close that they are frequently used together by many scholars. There is a debate among scholars with regards to the nature of the relationship between decentralization and democracy. Some see democracy as a prerequisite for decentralization, but others think otherwise. The strongest theoretical evidence pointing towards the existence of a relationship between democracy and decentralization comes from Alexis de Tocqueville in his study of the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Along with Max Weber, Tocqueville was one of the first theorists to talk about the relationship between decentralization and democracy. Both of them base many of their arguments on the assumption that within modern states, bureaucracies tend to centralize. But while Weber’s submission for limiting the over-centralization of bureaucracy within a state is by strengthening parliament and creating a multiple set of bureaucratic structures that limit each other’s actions, the suggestion of Tocqueville points more toward the creation of a system of government within which local government is given a major role. In one way or the other, both democratic governance and decentralized government have been adopted by many countries over the past two or three decades. At the end of the 1990s, about 95 percent of the countries with democratic political systems had also sub-national units of government or administration. The center for Democracy and Governance of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has also written extensively on the concept of decentralization and democratic governance. It defines and explains the two distinct concepts as follows; (1) Decentralization is a process of transferring power to popularly elected local governments. In order to have significant autonomy decentralization requires the existence of elected local governments who are answerable to their constituents. This definition is more of political decentralization. Like Cheema and Rondinelli, USAID also identifies three types of decentralization namely: Devolution is “An increased reliance upon sub-national levels of governments, with some degree of political autonomy, that are substantially outside the direct central government control yet subject to general policies and laws, such as those regarding civil rights and rule of law”. Deconcentration is “The transfer of power to an administrative unit of the central government, usually a field or regional office. With deconcentration, local officials are not elected”. |
