In his book, David Berman advocates the merits of local autonomy in the wake of increasingly complex, at times murky, relationships among all levels of government. As an experienced scholar of intergovernmental relations, Berman marshals an impressive array of historical evidence and demonstrates that many intergovernmental conundrums are neither as new nor unique as often portrayed. Throughout the work, he assumes the local perspective and places local politicians in the context of the larger U.S. federal system. The perspective provides an advantage to the argument, yet he remains careful to identify competing perspectives and tensions among governmental actors.

Berman's advocacy for local control rests on a normative underpinning that local governments, being closest to their citizenry, will be most responsive to their demands. The author cites James Bryce's The American Commonwealth (1889) to advance his claim that local government can pro-vide effective government and that when a service can be discharged equally well by a local or national jurisdiction, the local jurisdiction should prevail (pp. 3–6). Berman brings Bryce's normative claim into the context of twenty-first-century governance and builds an interesting foundation with a superbly integrated mix of scholarship from history, law, and public choice economics. Berman then analyzes the inter-governmental dimensions of public authority, revenues, state incorporation of subnational governments, and state assumption of local responsibilities, as well as of local governments themselves.

The historical development of local politics and the embedded politics of home rule is first-rate. Although Berman states that much of his attention will be on intergovernmental politics following the New Deal, he presents a very interesting explication of political demands for local governance in Chapter 4. Beginning with Jefferson and de Tocqueville's biases against cities, Berman presents the development of city-state politics with cogent, and compact, historical illustrations from New Jersey's gyrating political machines of the 1870s and New York's Radical Republicans in the 1860s (pp. 57–58). His skill at presenting supporting evidence and drawing the reader from the early nineteenth century through the Progressive Era demands for Home Rule is a genuine strength throughout the book.

Following the historical development, Berman renews a call for home rule with analyses of the four dimensions of intergovernmental relations—authority, revenue, takeovers, and restructuring. In Chapters 5 through 8, he isolates the particular conundrums facing local politicians as they attempt to fulfill state and national program mandates with limited, in some cases severely constrained, tax and revenue authority. Among the four dimensions, Berman's case for local control is strongest in Chapters 5 and 6, which focus on government authority and revenues respectively. The case for local governments pursuing their endeavors and responding to voters reflects a credible normative foundation from Bryce and a straightforward theoretical perspective from Charles Tiebout. Berman details the pattern of state preemption and resource constraints that at a minimum channel local governments' activities and at a maximum proscribe localities from responding in areas in which they have legitimate interests. He demonstrates how city responses to the “galloping federalism” of the 1960s left them ill-equipped to contend with the “fend-for-yourself” or “shift-and-shaft” federalism of the 1980s and 1990s. The imposition of federal and state man-dates have constrained local authority in both policy processes and outcomes, while the traditional status of localities as state corporations has left states without resources with which to fulfill imposed policies, let alone their own endeavors.

Berman's argument becomes somewhat less convincing in the later chapters regarding state takeovers of failing governments and state-enforced restructuring of governments. To his credit, he concedes that localities can create their own misery through resource mismanagement (p. 127); he nevertheless suggests that states can overstep appropriate boundaries and create undue political friction. In these chapters, he might have explored some interesting scholarship presenting evidence that states will work with municipalities to avoid bankruptcy or to re-create governments such that county and city leaders are not held accountable for their incompetence (e.g., Mark Baldassare's When Government Fails, 1998).

The two issues that may vex the book's claim for home rule are race and class, and these receive scant attention. These issues would complicate Berman's analysis but not necessarily undermine his argument. By engaging Nancy Burns's The Formation of American Local Governments (1994), Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996), and Peter Drier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom's Place Matters (2001), Berman would have responded to the factors that have undermined local democracy and led to calls for federal and state intervention in local politics. In fairness, these two issues are huge, and the author may have discerned them to be beyond the book's scope. He writes that the rights of minorities and the public response to various disadvantaged groups would likely lead to a response from state and national elected and judicial officials. And he argues reasonably that such a reactive response is preferable to an intermingling of proactive state policy prescriptions without either state-provided resources or local authority with which to finance and administer services (p. 156).

Local Governments and the States presents an impressive array of historical analyses, evidence, and illustrations that Berman uses to develop a thoughtful commentary in support of local control. The straightforward writing and well-integrated evidence make the book accessible to undergraduate students, and it will also be of substantial interest to graduate students and scholars of subnational and intergovernmental politics.