Towards a territorial political capacity approach for studying European regions

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a framework for studying the territorial political capacity of regions in Europe. The proposed framework identifies three main dimensions of territorial political capacity. Mainly material indicators include institutions and institutional resources. Mixed material and constructed indicators centre on causal mechanisms of party and leadership capacity. Mainly constructed indicators are drawn from territorial praxis. Understanding a region requires combining different levels of analysis and distinctive ways of knowing; broad-based (quasi-statistical) variables facilitate comparison, while the focus on resilience and capacity requires primary data collection, drilling down into the practices of comparable panels of actors. This article discusses this framework in relation to four European regions that were the object of empirical investigation in 2012–2014: namely Brittany (France), Andalusia (Spain), Wallonia (Belgium) and Wales (United Kingdom). It contributes to the conceptualization of comparative territorial capacity, in a manner distinct from, but largely consistent with the Regional Authority Index.

KEYWORDS:

• Devolution
• regions
• Europe
• capacity
• comparison
• decentralisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Leverhulme Trust International Network grant (IN-2012-109) on ‘Territorial Governance between Convergence and Capacity, 2012-2015’.

2 Formal network analysis uses software packages such as Ucinet, Pajek and Gephi, to connect graphically the actors of a given territory or policy (Ward, Stovel, and Sacks 2011). Such analysis was used by John and Cole (1998), for example, to demonstrate variation between political leadership configurations in French and English cities. Such social network analysis lies beyond the scope of this paper, but represents a promising area of further investigation and research.

3 The NVivo cluster analysis feature identifies clusters of similar words. We selected 5 clusters for the case of Andalusia. This NVivo feature uses Pearson significance tests to identify the correlations between specific words in a cluster. In the word map, the most cited words are graphically enlarged.

4 ‘Andalucía’, ‘andaluz’ and ‘andaluces’ are translated into English as Andalusia, Andalusian and Andalusians. ‘Autonomas’ and ‘comunidades’ are translated into English as autonomous and community, and ‘junta’ as the regional government. The ‘diputacion’/’dipucationes’ are the provincial government(s), while ‘ayuntamiento’ and ‘ayuntamientos’ are translated as local authority/authorities. ‘Sevilla’ is translated as Seville, ‘competencia’ as competencies.

5 ‘Partido’ and ‘partidos’ are respectively translated as party and parties. The PP and the PSOE are not captured by this word cloud, as it excludes words with fewer than 5 letters. For the record, the PP (Popular Party) was cited in every interview, with 130 references; the PSOE was cited in 23 out of 25 interviews, with 123 references.

6 ‘economia’ and ‘economica’ are translated as economy and economics; ‘empleo’ as employment and ‘trabajo’ as work. ‘deficit’ and ‘recortes’ are translated as deficit and cuts. ’fondos’, ‘medidas’ , ‘financiacion’ and ‘recursos’ are translated as funds, measures, finance and resources.

7 Though there is no formal hierarchy in the clusters, word frequency demonstrates the saliency of specific themes.

8 The precise questions asked were: 1. ‘What are the main traits of the Welsh/Breton/Andalusian/ Wallon policy style?’ (designed to capture routines and practices from the past) 2. ‘ How best would you characterize current relationships between the main actors within your region?’ (designed to provide perspectives on intra-regional relationships).

9 In the case of two regions - Brittany and Wales – longitudinal comparison was possible, as these questions had been asked in previous surveys by the PI. Results are presented in Cole and Stafford (2015) and Cole and Pasquier (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust grant (IN-2012-109) and Collegium de Lyon (Senior Fellowship, 2014).