Over the past decade, more municipalities have been dispersed and replaced by special committees of the Ministry of Interior than in all of the State’s first fifty years combined. In 2006, over one hundred local authorities were involved in some type of recovery plan; and special representatives appointed by the Ministry of Interior were employed to oversee lending and the collection of taxes in dozens of others. The local authorities’ economic crisis was accompanied by a severe blow to basic civil rights, such as the withholding of workers’ wages for many months.
Thus, the financial crisis quickly became a democratic crisis. Today, dozens of local authorities are managed, or partially managed, by people that were not elected by the region’s residents. The severity of the representational crisis is enhanced by the disproportionately large number of Arab authorities that are managed by the national government.
This debate will focus upon the findings released in The Political Economics of Local Authorities by Prof. Avi Ben-Bassat and Dr. Momi Dahan in Sept. 2009. The discussion will be broadcast live (in Hebrew) on the IDI website.
Click here to read more about The Political Economics of Local Authorities.