LOCAL OPTION. In its application to the drink trade, local option may be described as a policy of decentralization which transfers the question of the continuance or non-continu ance of the common sale of alcoholic beverages from the central authority to the registered electors in each local area. It is local self-government with a difference. In ordinary matters of local government the self-determination of local communities is achieved indirectly through a popularly-elected local authority. In the case of local option the action of public opinion is direct. Initiative rests with the local electors and decision is reached by a popular vote.
Under local option the power to grant or not grant licences for the sale of alcoholic liquors is transferred from the licensing jus tices (acting as the statutory representatives of the central author ity) to the electors of the local area, who register their decision at a poll taken for the purpose. Local option laws differ in character and in scope in different countries. In most cases they are purely suppressive. in character and the options offered are restricted to the two alternatives of licence or no-licence. In a few cases a third option of limitation is offered, while in one or two instances (e.g., in South Australia) a right to increase the number of licences is conceded. This latter right is rarely exercised. The three-fold form of local option (i.e., no-licence, limitation and no-change) was at one time generally favoured in Great Britain and in certain of the British dominions, but in recent years the "limitation" option has declined in favour and local option policy has tended more and more to revert to its original form of a direct veto upon the grant of licences.
The history of local option is in large part one of American experience. It was in the United States that the policy originated and it was there that it made its widest appeal. It grew up in the United States "as a kind of natural fungus upon the licence sys tem stock." The original licensing laws were State laws applicable to the whole of the territory of the State, but the actual adminis tration and use of the State law was left to the local authorities who not only granted the licences, but in many cases fixed (or supplemented) the amount of the licence fee, the proceeds from which went in whole or in part to the city or county revenue. In these local autonomous powers lay the germ of the modern local option policy. The development of the policy was at first indirect. In 1833 the State legislature in Georgia gave to the local courts in two counties the right to grant or to withhold retail licences. As
the members of the courts were popularly elected the right con stituted a form of indirect local option. A few years later (in 1838) two other States (Rhode Island and Connecticut) transferred the power to grant or not grant licences to the towns. Another State (Illinois) followed by empowering both counties and towns to suppress the liquor trade on the petition of a majority of the male inhabitants. And so the movement spread, developing rap idly from its initial form of an indirect restraint to its modern plebiscitary form of direct popular veto. Local option in the United States, although in its earliest stages a regulative system, quickly became in intention and effect a purely prohibitionist policy. It prepared the way for State prohibition into which it at first slowly and then rapidly developed. National prohibition su perseded both of these devices for a time; since repeal state con trol appears to be favoured over local option in most states.
In the British Isles local option as a political issue dates back to 1857, when the United Kingdom Alliance first launched its "Permissive Bill." The only statutory recognition that the policy has received in the United Kingdom so far is contained in the local option sections of the Scottish Temperance Act of 1913, which came into force in 1920 with results which, if useful, have been inconsiderable. Local option has found a large place in the liquor laws of the British dominions, especially in Canada, where, how ever, it has since been largely superceded by provincial-wide experiments in prohibition (now for the most part replaced by provincial schemes of public management and control, in some of which the principle of local option is recognized).
In Europe generally, with the exception of Norway and Sweden, local option has made little progress. In Norway and Sweden it has operated chiefly in restraint of the grant of licences in rural communes, in which licences were always few and in many cases non-existent, and in an indirect and non-plebisci tary way (i.e., by use of the ordinary machinery of parochial government). In 1894 a direct power to veto the retail sale of spirits was for the first time conceded to the Norwegian towns, with the result that when, during the later years of the World War, national prohibition was resorted to, there remained only 13 towns in which the retail sale of spirits was still allowed. Following the recent repeal of prohibition of spirits in Norway, the right of local option has been restored.
(See also TEMPERANCE; PROHIBITION; GOTHENBURG LICENSING SYSTEM; DISINTERESTED MANAGEMENT.)