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作者

Stefan Wittwer

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue2,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

IntroductionWhile regional development and multilevel governance often dominate the discourse on economic development (Ansell 2002; Tödtling and Trippl 2005), this economic development directly manifests itself at the local level in the form of jobs and local economic development, thereby remaining crucial for local politics. This paper analyzes the ability of local politics to shape this development in a competitive federalist and polycentric environment by examining if party–political developments in the local executive can affect local economic development.The focus of this paper lies on a single functional category of municipalities: small- and medium-sized towns (SMSTs). SMSTs have traditionally been neglected by urban and rural research because they fall between the fields of regional/peripheral development literature, classical urban studies and research on agglomerations. However, as Bell and Jayne (2009, 691) argue in their plea for a greater focus on smaller cities, that SMSTs act as “important nodes in the networks between places of different scales, and they are seen to mediate between the rural and the urban, as well as between the local and the global.” Additionally, as Dijkstra, Garcilazo, and McCann (2013) show in a comparative study of EU15 countries, SMSTs are catching up with large cities in terms of population growth and economic performance. A better understanding of SMSTs is therefore not only of theoretical relevance, it also follows recent empirical trends.The vast literature on regional and multilevel governance discusses the importance of coordination and steering in upper level institutions (Pierre and Peters 2000; Savitch and Kantor 2002; Kantor 2006). With the increasing mobility of goods, people, and identities, local developments have an impact on and are impacted by developments beyond their territorial boundaries (Brenner 1999). The role of autonomous local municipalities in shaping local development somehow got out of sight. However, local autonomy remains a crucial feature of federalist and decentralized states where participatory processes (such as local elections) remain fragmented among local institutions (Kübler 2015) and local politics often respond to very local questions. Switzerland provides an ideal case for studying the relevance of local politics given its high fragmentation and local autonomy (Sellers and Lidström 2007). This paper views local politics as the political power constituted in the party composition of the local government in Swiss SMSTs. Different party compositions can lead the local government to take different concrete strategic and operational actions in local economic development. While this paper does not measure such strategies and actions, it is a first attempt to examine if a change in party compositions of local governments precedes changes in local economic development.Local economic development is an especially important policy field in Switzerland’s fragmented, polycentric urban structure that rests on autonomous municipalities. Municipalities have their own budget, bear many costs, spend money at their discretion, and guarantee the provision of local public goods for their inhabitants. This financial autonomy rests on the acquisition of raising sufficient income through taxation (Linder and Mueller 2017). Consequently, SMSTs compete with many other municipalities for jobs and capital. As a result, understanding the grip of local politics is also crucial for the field of economic development policy, which often takes a regional perspective. SMSTs, as units of analysis of regional economic and political importance, thereby offer an optimal case for studying the role of development in local party politics. If we find no evidence for the assumption that local party–political development precedes change in local economic development in SMSTs, it would be likely that there is also no impact in smaller municipalities of less regional importance.One crucial aspect of local economic development is local employment. Job growth leads to greater corporate tax income and can help to boost the importance of SMSTs in a larger region. However, SMSTs can have different types of economic specializations and develop differently. The absolute number of people employed could potentially conceal different mechanisms that underlie employment development. This paper therefore acknowledges the role of the characteristics of specific economic sectors by distinguishing between four sectors whose demand differs on their dependence on factors beyond their municipal border and, consequently, on the regional context.This paper argues that the impact of local party–political developments is conditional on the characteristics of the employment specialization. The more dependent the economic sector is on external demand, the more important spatial context characteristics are, such as proximity to a metropolitan centre or to prospering clusters. The more the economic sector relies on the demand of its inhabitants, the more important local characteristics are, such as political conditions, population size, or local economic conditions. The ability of party–political development to explain different local economic development therefore is supposed to depend on the degree of interdependence of economic sector development.We analyze panel data with a hybrid panel model to examine the temporal effects of local party–political development and other local and regional variables. The paper shows that it is crucial to differentiate between economic sectors to obtain a more nuanced view of local and regional factors that affect economic growth, as the results between the sectors vary considerably. A change in the party–political composition of local governments (i.e., an increase of left parties) only precedes growth of the residential economy. The effects of regional developments (measured as the development of employment in neighbouring SMSTs, cantonal growth, and the proximity to a metropolitan centre) are more ambiguous. While the development of employment in neighbouring SMSTs and the proximity to a metropolitan center have the greatest impact on the development of the heavily export-oriented knowledge-intensive business sectors (KIBS), the development of KIBS is not systematically related to cantonal growth, and regional developments also affect the other economic sectors. The results indicate that different party compositions in the local executive can lead to different local economic policy strategies that aim to support the residential economy. The paper does not measure different local economic development strategies and how they are related to political parties. However, we discuss how party politics in the residential economy can manifest itself in Swiss SMSTs and how politics’ local grip on the development of export-oriented economies (a) is not guided by party–political development and (b) is more influential by activity at the regional and urban level.In terms of the question of local “post-political consensual governing” (Peterson 1981; Swyngedouw 2009), the findings indicate that an economic sector’s degree of export orientation influences how local factors are able to shape economic development. Additionally, the findings contribute to the literature on multilevel governance by including spatial factors to address questions of local autonomy in a federalist and decentralized setting (Sager 2005; Koch 2013; Kübler and Rochat 2018; Wittwer 2020).The structure of the paper is as follows. The next section discusses the role of local politics in local economic development and derives the hypotheses. Then, there is a description of the data, the data-gathering process, and the hybrid within-between random effects model. Afterwards follows the presentation of the results of the analyses on four different economic sectors and a discussion on the role of local party–political strategies on economic development. In the conclusion, we sum up the paper and discuss its implications, contributions, and further steps of research.