Networked Hegemony and World Hierarchy: Exploring the Top 1% Global Urban Governance and Corporate Command

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Urban Markets

Abstract

While existing research on transnational municipal networks (TMNs) establishes that cities with high participation rates—such as members of C40 or ICLEI—typically rank within the top 4% of the global economic hierarchy, this study proposes that such a correlation may overlook a deeper, more concentrated structural reality. We hypothesize that the true "voice" and agenda-setting influence in global governance are not just mere participants, but ensconced within the "secretariat cities": the administrative hubs that headquarter and steer these global organizations. To test this, we will execute a two-mode network analysis to map the relationships between "tie-sending" secretariat hosts and "tie-receiving" member cities across a dataset of over 10,000 cities and 100 governance networks. We intend to merge these institutional data with economic power rankings of 12,000 cities—derived from corporate headquarter-branch linkages—to investigate the overlap between political and economic centrality. Our analysis seeks to determine whether cities with high out-degree centrality (such as Brussels, Bonn, and Barcelona) collectively mirror the core-periphery structure of the world economy. Specifically, we aim to examine whether the most central secretariat nodes overlap not just with the most economically successful urban places, but with top 1% of cities that structurally anchor the global economy via corporate ties. By doing so, we will explore whether the institutional landscape of these large municipal governing networks reinforces the dominance of Global North power centers and what this extreme concentration of influence means for stratification in the global communication of policy ideas. It further allows us develop new perspectives on, and scrutinize existing, concepts of global urban hierarchies

Authors

• David A. Smith, University of California-Irvine

• Benjamin Leffel, Assistant Professor of Public Policy

• MIchael Timberlake, Emertus Professor, University of Utah