The United Kingdom and the United States have different systems of government. In the UK, the Prime Minister is the head of government, while in the US, it is the President. In Greater London, districts form the lowest level of local government and are responsible for most local government functions. In 2000, a new Greater London Authority (GLA) was created with limited revenue raising powers, but with responsibility for public transport, police, emergency services, the environment and planning across Greater London.
The GLA consists of a directly elected mayor and an assembly of 25 members elected by proportional representation. When it comes to politics, local and national levels are not evaluated independently. Instead, they are judged based on a comprehensive set of performance evaluations, democratic satisfaction or political trust. This means that local political support is also related to a more general attitude towards politics. This balance between local merits and national influence is affected in different ways by political sophistication and, to a lesser extent, by local roots. Political sophistication increases citizens' sensitivity to local performance, while local rooting modestly mitigates dependence on more general (national) orientations for political support.
The reorganization of local government in England has long been a goal of the center, among civil servants and the two main political parties. He is responsible for electoral arrangements (the review and implementation of the number and limits of electoral areas and the number of councillors) in local authorities in England. Studies suggest that the association between local political support and local political performance is likely to be stronger among people with higher education than among people with lower education. Many of these funding sources are mortgaged (restricted), meaning that they can only be spent in a very specific way; in essence, they are limited to going through the accounts of a city council on their way from the funding source to their intended destination. Research has shown that local political support is mainly related (in the case of local democratic satisfaction) or substantially (in the case of local political trust) to national political support. Other factors also hinder independent candidates and candidates from smaller parties, such as the electoral system, organizational capacity, the competitive political environment of the parties, the media's abilities to shape perceptions, and public funding, all of which affect the relevance, effectiveness, and growth of independent and small parties in local government. The relationship between trust in national and local political institutions is significantly mitigated by subjective local attachment and local political activism.
Regardless of whether it is rooted in local assessments or in a more general support syndrome, local political support will be important for the functioning of local democracy in general and for the local democratic accountability process in particular. First, while performance evaluations are the most important local driver of political support for both measures, performance evaluations are more important for local democratic satisfaction, input evaluations more important for local political trust. These studies propose two mechanisms in which local political support derives mainly from more general and nationally oriented political support. Since the nation-state remains the focal point of democratic attitudes, local and supranational political support cannot be considered in isolation from the multilevel structure in which it is embedded.
