Jefferey M. Sellers

RE-PLACING THE NATION An Agenda for Comparative Urban Politics

As the world becomes more urbanized and the significance of governance and politics within cities and regions grows, comparative urban analysis has an increasingly prominent role to play in the comparative study of politics and policy. Realizing this potential requires a conceptualization of national institutions, societies, and cultures that does justice to both the persistence of the national and the influence of local and regional agents and structures. At the same time that comparative urban political analysis must separate out local agency from national institutions, it must also take account of the role that national elements play in local agency. The de-centered analysis that results departs from traditional nation-centered comparisons as well as from those centered solely on urban actors and institutions. With the growth of transnational influences, this type of analysis offers an increasingly appropriate way to scrutinize the politics of both countries and urban regions.

The Nation-State and Urban Governance Toward Multilevel Analysis

In recent international comparative studies of urban governance, the nation-state has usually figured as a direct influence on local government and politics. This article, drawing on case studies of a similar U.S. city and German city, demonstrates the need for a new, more sophisticated conception of the effects from national institutions. In the German city, a pro-business coalition carried out extensive social and environmental policies. In the U.S. city, a progressive coalition subordinated social and to a lesser degree environmental objectives to developmental aims. To account for these results, the author proposes and applies a typology of national institutional contexts. These contexts influenced urban governance not only through direct effects on the choices of local elites and activists but through indirect effects on translocal economies, urban economies, and local culture.

Metropolitanization and Political Change

Mit Beitragen von Jean-Pierre Collin, Melanie Robertson, Mathieu Charron, Jefferey M. Sellers, Melanie Walter-Rogg, Henry Back, Jacob Aars, Colin Rallings, Michael Thrasher, Bas Denters, Wilbert K.F. Rodenhuis, Daniel Kubler, Urs Scheuss u.a.

Public Goods and the Politics of Segregation: An Analysis and Cross‐national Comparison

Despite the persistent inequality of advanced industrial society, traditional class politics has receded as an influence on policy. One reason stems from the divergent ways consumption and property...

Federalism and metropolitan governance in cross-national perspective: the case of urban sprawl

In this paper, I employ a ‘bottom-up’ approach to analyze efforts to curb exurban sprawl in cross-national perspective. Based on local housing and environmental data in a total of eleven French, German, and US urban regions, the analysis demonstrates that policies and institutions addressed to urban governance made more of a difference for outcomes than did federalism and other aspects of vertical integration at the heights of national states. This result highlights the importance both of local policy determinations and of the supralocal institutional infrastructures in which they nest.

Place, post-industrial change and the new left

This article argues for the importance of place and policies addressed to it in recent post-industrial political transformations. My analysis focuses on the performance of Left parties in French and German cities with universities since the 1960s. Despite similar shifts in the occupational and sectoral bases of politics in the cities of both countries, these transformations followed divergent trajectories. In Germany decentralized policymaking, physical legacies of previous urban planning, and mobilization around land use and related issues gave rise to the most solid local strongholds of the Greens. In mid-sized and smaller cities, local constraints on growth itself resulted. In France centrally led expansion, less developed local policies and less planned urban structures contributed to emergent Socialist majorities and weaker, more contingent local Green performance. In both countries the environmental concerns and consumption interests linked to spatial amenities have given a new, altered significance to the geographic determinants of politics.

Metropolitan Inequality and Governance: A Framework for Global Comparison

Within interconnected regions like metropolitan areas, configurations of multilevel institutions, policies and governance practices comprise a regime of place equality. These regimes shape markets and intergovernmental relations among localities, and ultimately, local policy outcomes. In the model proposed by Tiebout, local voter choices and markets among places determine the allocation of public goods and tax burdens across the region. Under the conditions of territorial inequality that have become characteristic of metropolitan settlement, a regime based on this model offers advantages for relatively privileged communities and compounds the disadvantages of underprivileged ones. In other regimes, egalitarian or compensatory regimes impose equal conditions or compensate for local disadvantage. Place equality regimes are a critical but understudied component of welfare states, market capitalism and central–local relations.

Contested Metropolis: Inequality and the Multilevel Governance of Metropolitan Regions in the USA

Regimes of place equality in larger US metropolitan regions most closely approximate the Tieboutian model of localized public goods provision. A liberal welfare state, liberal market capitalism and institutional autonomy for local governments reinforce these regimes. This chapter provides an overview of place equality regimes in five US metropolitan regions and analyzes their local consequences. The analysis demonstrates marked fiscal advantages for more affluent communities and disadvantages for communities facing greater hardship as well as African American and immigrant communities. Partial equalization in public education finance and more general redistributive arrangements in greater Minneapolis and other regions reflect long-standing struggles over equity in this Tieboutian setting. Contestation between neoliberal and place egalitarian reform movements remains an ongoing influence on US place equality regimes.