Mayoral scalar strategies and the role of the central state after the financial crisis

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about state rescaling, politics of scale and the rise of cities and regions in Europe. Little is known, however, about the impact of the financial crisis on these processes. By taking the view of city mayors, this paper presents a comprehensive and timely re-evaluation of central tenets of this literature in the turbulent aftermath of the financial crisis. The analysis shows the variegated pathways of state rescaling before and after the financial crisis, the multifaceted scalar strategies with which mayors have responded in different countries and cities, and the impact of such strategies on their perception of a centralisation towards the national state. The paper concludes by emphasising the continued dominance of the central state, whereas potentials for the rise of cities are rather to be sought at subnational than at European or global scales.

KEYWORDS:

• Mayors
• state rescaling
• decentralisation
• Euro-regionalism
• financial crisis

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the valuable contributions made by Marta Lackowska (University of Warsaw) in an early version of this paper. The author is also grateful for the comments made by Daniel Kübler, Hubert Heinelt, Mariona Tomàs, Lluís Medir, as well as the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The analyses presented in this paper draw from the two rounds of the POLLEADER survey, conducted in 2003/2004 and in 2015/2016 (see Heinelt et al., forthcoming), addressing all mayors of municipalities above 10,000 inhabitants (average response rate of 36.7% and 39%, respectively). The question wording and coding of the used items is presented in Appendix (Table A1).

2. The analysis is based on two survey items, asking for the perceived shifts of influence over the last decade, distinguishing two axes: (a) ‘regional’ and ‘national’ and (b) ‘local’ and ‘regional’ (see Table A1 in Appendix). Unfortunately, neither of the two surveys included an item on perceived power shifts on a direct axis between ‘local’ and ‘national’. Particularly for countries where regional authorities have no supervision over local governments, we must be aware that centralisation needs not to involve regions as intermediaries (e.g., Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Sweden; see Table 16.4 in Bertrana and Heinelt, 2011). Nonetheless, even in these countries, the regional level can serve as a benchmark against which the influence of local and national level is being assessed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oliver Dlabac

Oliver Dlabac leads the research group on local democracy at the Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau and teaches on decentralisation at the University of Zurich. He has published on local and regional democracy in Switzerland and is currently leading a research project on the democratic foundations of urban planning in the city regions of Birmingham, Lyon and Zurich.