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Recent decades have seen a strengthening of local autonomy in many European states. At the same time, local governance capacities were strengthened through intermunicipal structures and territorial consolidation to prepare local authorities for additional tasks. In this paper, we assess what citizens think about strengthening local autonomy and strengthening inter-local cooperation. We argue that citizens' attitudes towards local autonomy and inter-local cooperation are a function of their behavioural, emotional and ideological connection to the local. Using data from a population-based survey in eight West European metropolitan areas in France, Germany, Switzerland and the UK, we show that local autonomy and inter-local cooperation supporters have divergent ideological positions concerning the allocation of political authority across state scales. Inter-local cooperation is supported by voters of new progressive left parties but opposed by right-wing nationalist partisans—who in contrast favour local autonomy. This suggests that the demarcation–integration divide which structures citizens' attitudes towards international integration also matters for subnational and local governance reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on policies seeking to address social inequalities in metropolitan areas, where the allocation of resources to places with needs often clashes with the politics of redistribution in fragmented local government systems. Scholarship on metropolitan governance has yet to overcome the opposition between proponents of consolidation and defenders of polycentrism. The crucial open question is whether and how intergovernmental cooperation and revenue-sharing can redress spatial equity in institutionally fragmented metropolitan areas. This article addresses this question by exploring the determinants of social expenditures in the 630 municipalities of seven major metropolitan areas in Switzerland, where revenue-sharing systems are common. The analysis shows that intergovernmental grants make a significant but limited contribution to reducing the mismatch between needs and resources in fragmented and decentralized metropolitan areas, depending on the redistributive efforts made by higher state levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As cities grow and expand, governance networks advocated by the “new regionalism” have become increasingly important for policy making in metropolitan areas. This article examines media reporting about governance networks and the effect this reporting has on democratic accountability and legitimacy. We use data from a standardized content analysis of newspaper coverage about metropolitan policy making in four European metropolitan areas (Zurich, Berlin, Paris, and London), as well as survey data on citizens’ attitudes. We find that the leading newspapers adequately cover governance processes and pay attention to both governmental and nongovernmental actors. Media content is correlated with citizen perceptions of democratic legitimacy, meaning both trust in government as well as satisfaction with democracy. We argue that there is a communicational dimension of public accountability that is important in upholding the democratic quality of “new regionalism” and of governance networks more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-use policies have long been recognized as important driving forces of urbanization, but little research has been conducted on the interrelationship of actors, policy decision processes and changes in the built environment. In this paper, we use the advocacy coalition framework to analyse policy decisions that affected the development of the built environment in three Swiss municipalities between 1970 and 2007. We found that all three municipalities experienced the same major policy changes, namely a new definition of the role of urban management (1970s); the adoption of an environment- and problem-oriented approach in land-use planning (1980s) as well as an increased emphasis on public participation and intra-municipal coordination (1990s). Although national laws and actors have shaped the crucial driving forces of urban change, local actors, their coalitions and the local distribution of resources crucially determined these decisions in the study period. Our findings suggest that a stronger focus on local actors, their coalitions and resources could greatly improve our understanding of spatial development processes in Switzerland. For instance, as land ownership turned out to be a crucial resource, Swiss municipalities could benefit from engaging more actively in the land market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to their nodal position in economic and social development, metropolitan areas give impetus to globalization. In turn, they are themselves transformed by this process. However, the question of how metropolitan areas transform by participating in the process of globalization is subject to debate. Based on case studies of two Swiss metropolitan areas (Berne and Zurich) and two policy domains (public transport and urban foreign policy), we argue that the rescaling process in metropolitan areas depends on the global competitiveness pressure the cities face and on the meaning that political actors give to these global pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing on area-wide policy coordination in metropolitan areas, this article examines the democratic consequences of the supposed shift ‘from government to governance’. In the first, theoretical, part it draws upon the debate on old and new routes towards regionalism in order to identify four different types of metropolitan governance. It then develops two working hypotheses – an optimistic and a pessimistic one – in order to analyse the implications of various types of metropolitan governance on inclusiveness, modes of decision making and democratic accountability. In the second part, these hypotheses are tested on the basis of comparative case studies on twenty schemes of area-wide policy coordination in five Swiss metropolitan areas in the fields of water supply, public transport, social services for drug users and cultural amenities. The results suggest that ‘governance’ is superior to ‘government’ in terms of inclusiveness, that it cannot be seen as significantly linked to the fostering of deliberative decision making, and that it can present serious flaws in terms of accountability. It is noted, however, that a shift ‘from government to governance’ does not intrinsically imply democratic drawbacks. Contextual factors play a strong conditioning role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]