Western European metropolitan areas by night (2014-2015; source: visualization by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center based on data from the Earth Observation Group, NOAA National Geophysical Data Center.
Which kind of citizens prefer which kind of institutional structures? This is the guiding question of my research on citizens’ perceptions of metropolitan governance reforms in European city-regions. Based on data from a unique survey of over 5,000 respondents from eight metropolitan areas in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, I have demonstrated that theories on citizens’ attitudes to European integration can also be applied to the local and urban scale. Like at the European level, conservative-nationalist voters as well as those who distrust their local representatives take a more critical stance towards the centralization of decision-making authority at the metropolitan scale. Citizens’ preferences for the centralization of decision-making authority, thus, hinge on similar factors across territorial scales.
In addition, when it comes to the specific design of metropolitan institutions, citizens want to be able to influence political decision-making, no matter how efficient an institution is at delivering public goods, and they demand more of these input possibilities the more decision-making authority an institution possesses.
Published works:
- Public support for metropolitan integration. Citizens’ attitudes in eight West European metropolitan areas, PhD thesis, University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts.
- “The importance of input and output legitimacy in democratic governance. Evidence from a population-based survey experiment in four West European countries,” European Journal of Political Research, with Daniel Kübler and Frank Marcinkowski
- “Citizens’ attitudes towards local autonomy and inter-local cooperation: Evidence from Western Europe,” Comparative European Politics, with Daniel Kübler
- “Who supports metropolitan integration? Citizens’ perceptions of city-regional governance in Western Europe,” West European Politics
- “Populism and the scales of statehood. Localism and populist attitudes in Western Europe,” European Political Science Review, with Daniel Kübler and Frank Marcinkowski.
Work in progress:
- “The legitimacy of the local state: Citizens’ perceptions of local democratic legitimacy in Western European metropolitan areas,” with Daniel Kübler [Presented at the ECPR General Conference 2020] [.pdf]
Michael A. Strebel 