Close Ties in European Local Governance

Linking Local State and Society

Filipe Teles, Adam Gendźwiłł, Cristina Stănuș, Hubert Heinelt, Filipe Teles, Hubert Heinelt, Adam Gendźwiłł, Cristina Stănuș

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030447939
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030447946
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book develops and tests a typology of local state-society relations. To deliver such a comparative study on institutionalized relations between local government and societal actors at the municipal level in Europe, the book identifies and classifies country-specific patterns of these institutionalized governance networks. This work explores the diversity within these institutionalized networks, approaching it from a strong comparative perspective that is anchored on a new typology allowing a more robust analysis of the identifiable patterns. It is a study with appeal to scholars and students of local government, public administration and political science as well as to those pursuing this debate and implementing similar agendas as practitioners.

© The Author(s) 2021

F. Teles et al. (eds.)Close Ties in European Local GovernancePalgrave Studies in Sub-National Governancehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44794-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Interactions of Societal Actors and Local Government in Institutionalized Governance Arrangements: The Book’s Scope and Content

Filipe Teles¹ , Adam Gendźwiłł² , Cristina Stănuş³ and Hubert Heinelt⁴

(1)

Research Unit on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policies, Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

(2)

Department of Local Development and Policy, Faculty of Geography and Regional Studies, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

(3)

Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania

(4)

Institute of Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

Filipe Teles (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Adam Gendźwiłł

Email: [email protected]

Cristina Stănuş

Email: [email protected]

Hubert Heinelt

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Local state-society relationsLocal governmentSocietal actorsGovernanceInstitutionalized governance networks

End Abstract

Interactions of societal actors in institutionalized governance networks with local government are one of the most common features of contemporary local governance. The multiple and diverse forms it can take provide relevant clues concerning different roles of local government in Europe, administrative, civic and political cultures, governance arrangements, decentralization processes, state–society relations, local practices in interest intermediation and political action. Comparative studies on this topic providing an in-depth analysis of institutionalized governance networks are needed.

The book will provide an understanding of the types of networks in a large number of European countries, their formal differences and partly also the motives for their creation. Given the comprehensiveness of subjects, dimensions, historical and political events to cover, this book will proceed by selecting the most relevant topics to address and identifying reasonable arguments in order to classify these differences between European countries but also policy domains. The comparative lessons and implications are particularly interesting not only for the scholarly debate but also for political practice. These are useful for those pursuing this debate and implementing similar agendas: local government associations, local authorities and professionals.

This book is focused on relations between (a) individual and collective or corporate societal actors and (b) municipalities, that is, the first tier of local government with a directly elected representative body as the crucial organ for taking binding decisions. This clarification might be necessary for readers who—due to particular circumstances in their countries—would probably look at this phenomenon from a legal perspective and regard local government not as a level of statehood but as means of self-administration and, in this sense, as part of the executive branch of a state.

In this book, organized interests—ranging from chambers of commerce and industry and so on to differently organized associations with various kinds of membership (from enterprises to elderly people)—as well as individuals engaged in the policy process are regarded as societal actors.

The focus on the municipal level of local government means that we will consider local representatives of state (national or sub-national) authorities or agencies only in cases where they are interacting with societal actors when representatives of municipalities are also involved. The focus on the local level also means that there are numerous cases of networks of each type and that the networks’ institutional design is adapted locally.

The book concentrates on institutionalized interactions between representatives of municipalities (mayors, councilors and members of the municipal administration) and societal actors. Consequently, those municipal committees which consist only of councilors who occasionally ask societal actors and experts for their opinion will not be considered.

Some local state-society relations have developed in the field of inter-municipal cooperation or reach beyond the border of just one municipality. These forms of organized interest intermediation at the inter-municipal level will be considered as well. However, as will be shown by the country chapters, most of the forms of local state-society relations considered here are located within the boundaries of one municipality.

The question of the size of the municipalities under study is defined precisely: Municipalities of all sizes should be included—providing institutionalized interactions between representatives of municipalities and societal actors exist. However, actually the number of smaller municipalities considered has been limited because, particularly in countries with two tiers of local government (municipalities on the one hand and counties, provinces, etc. on the other), some forms of local state-society relations are located at the second tier of local government. In these countries, only ‘cities with county status’, ‘kreisfreie Städte’, ‘unitary local authorities’ and so on which combine the competencies of both tiers of local government have been considered. These are usually urban centers and municipalities with a larger number of inhabitants.

Organized Interests and Their Interaction with Local Government—And the Question of How Democracy Is Understood

Although individual actors will also be considered as part of institutionalized interactions between representatives of municipalities and societal actors, empirically the latter are usually collective and corporate actors (in the sense outlined in Sect. “Measuring the Coherence of Societal Actors” of Chap. 3 in this book). This implies that we are ultimately dealing with organized interests and how they interact with local government in interest intermediation, decision making and partly also the implementation of decisions. Interest intermediation within interest organization and between them and government has been a ‘traditional’ topic of debates in political science for decades (for an overview, see Schneider and Grote 2006 or the contributions in Petracca 1992). The topic has been examined by proponents of pluralism, neo-corporatism and the policy-network approach. However, these debates have been focused mainly on societal processes at large and the national level of political systems. As will be discussed in greater detail in the next section of this chapter, these debates have dealt only marginally with policy making at the local level (as already argued by Cawson 1985). Nevertheless, some ideas developed in these debates were considered as starting points for the work carried out so far by the authors of the contributions to this book—as will be outlined in the following section.

However, one issue in the debates among proponents of pluralism, neo-corporatism and the policy-network approach, as well as those of governance, has served as a starting point for the common work presented in the book—namely the relationship between organized interest and democracy or, more precisely, the understanding of democracy.

Particularly proponents of neo-corporatism, but also those interested in policy-networks and governance arrangements as empirical phenomena, are in danger of not being critical enough to recognize the ‘democratic deficits’ and limitations of citizen participation as a core element of democracy in their objects of investigation (for this criticism see, for instance, Dahl 1994; Bekkers et al. 2007). This danger has been emphasized in scholarly as well as political debates against the background that nowadays political systems in the ‘Western World’ have been characterized as a ‘post-democracy’ resulting from the complexity of modern society (Zolo 1992) and are sometimes considered as a ‘crisis of egalitarian politics and the trivialization of democracy’ (Crouch 2004: 6).

Nevertheless, the authors of the contributions to this book agree that a democratic political system has to ensure ‘a degree of participation so great and so fairly spread about that no one feels neglected and everyone feels, with justice, that his viewpoint has been pretty fairly attended to’ (Dahl 1971: 112). However, they also agree with the dictum of Schmitter (1993: 4) that a democratic political system is not to be conceived of as one ‘regime’ ‘but as a composite of “partial regimes”’ because it consists of a complex web of various forms of participation. This also means that in a democratic political system ‘citizenship, its most distinctive property, is not confined to voting periodically in elections. It can also be exercised by [—] joining associations or movements, petitioning authorities, engaging in “unconventional” protest, and so forth’ (Schmitter 1993: 4). To put it precisely, in this book we are not focused on the use of ‘citizenship […] confined to voting periodically in elections’ but on its exercise ‘by […] joining associations or movements’ and engagin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Interactions of Societal Actors and Local Government in Institutionalized Governance Arrangements: The Book’s Scope and Content
• 2. Diversity in Local State-Society Relations: A Typology to Grasp Differences in Institutional Networks
• 3. How to Measure the Autonomy, Coherence and Relevance of Local State-Society Relations
• 4. Local State-Society Relations in Austria
• 5. Local State–Society Relations in Flanders (Belgium)
• 6. Local State–Society Relations in Croatia
• 7. Local State-Society Relations in the Czech Republic
• 8. Local State-Society Relations in England
• 9. Local State-Society Relations in Finland
• 10. Local State-Society Relations in France
• 11. Local State-Society Relations in Germany
• 12. Local State-Society Relations in Greece
• 13. Local State–Society Relations in Iceland
• 14. Local State-Society Relations in Ireland
• 15. Local State-Society Relations in Italy
• 16. Local State-Society Relations in Latvia
• 17. Local State-Society Relations in Lithuania
• 18. Local State-Society Relations in the Netherlands
• 19. Local State-Society Relations in Norway
• 20. Local State–Society Relations in Poland
• 21. Local State-Society Relations in Portugal
• 22. Local State-Society Relations in Romania
• 23. Local State-Society Relations in Spain
• 24. Local State-Society Relations in Sweden
• 25. Local State-Society Relations in Switzerland
• 26. Local State-Society Relations in European Countries: Main Findings
• Back Matter