Efficiency or Localism? The Drivers of Post-crisis Territorial Reforms

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics III & Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Societies
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics of Advanced Industrial Societies

Abstract

Europe is experiencing a wave of changes in the territorial distribution of authority and institutional functions in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, which pushed governments to reconsider their territorial organization in the name of efficiency and economies of scale. These changes in power dynamics have been attracting scholarly interest from across subfields (Eaton 2004, Brancati 2006, Elias 2009, Hepburn 2010, Hooghe et al. 2016), finding that variation in territorial governance is highly consequential in terms of who gets resources, who gets represented, and what dictates the power relations between levels of government. Against this backdrop, my project asks what explains territorial differentiation among regions, seeking to understand the multi-level dynamics that drive governance reforms.
I study the case of the Italian regional reforms, which were incited by the post-2008 crisis European Central Bank's call for institutional efficiency and the rise of anti-establishment rhetoric fueled by the populist party Five-Star Movement. These peculiar contingencies fostered a misinformation campaign that depicted the Province, the intermediary Italian institution that coalesces the needs of the localities, as the pinnacle of functional multiplication, financial inefficiency, and office-seeking politicians. Even though the provincial institution was responsible for a fraction of the state's administrative costs, this biased political discourse pushed the regions to reform and, in some cases, eliminate the provinces. This situation created many different institutional outcomes, further complicating the already administratively cumbersome and financially inefficient Italian governmental landscape to the point where the National Association of Italian Municipalities called it a 'state of institutional calamity.'
To shed light on the decisional processes behind each territorial reform, I analyze expert interviews, newspaper articles, and official transcripts of council meetings in four Italian regions: Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG), and Sardegna. By comparing the political discourses and processes behind each regional reform, I find that regions make decisions that perpetuate the socio-political regulatory modes rooted in historical legacies of associationism, public management, and identities dating back to Italian unification. To a lesser degree, regional decision-making on institutional design is also affected by actors pursuing programmatic agendas in line with their party ideology. In summary, rather than developing and implementing more efficient governance models, each region's territorial decisions can be explained by the identity of the parties in power and how these political actors maneuver within each region's historically and locally constructed socio-political norms.

Author

• Alberto Ganis, Portland State University