Stefan Szücs

The Untouchables: Stability among the Swedish Local Elite

The development of local government from the 1950s to the late 1970s represents one of the most obvious efforts to modernize the political system during the 20th Century. The number of local governments was reduced from about 2,500 before the first reapportionment reform 1952, to 280 after the last amalgamation reform in the mid 1970s. This development paved the way for an increase in each local government’s revenue income base, as well as an expanding public sector, local party politicization and transformation from administration by laymen to administration by professionals (Stromberg & Westerstahl 1984). In Sweden as well as in the other Scandinavian countries, the modernization of the political system more generally has resulted in a development of a nationally regulated, but nevertheless locally governed welfare state (Szucs 1993, 1995, Stromberg & Engen 1996).1

Data and Methods

The task of understanding the relationship between the quality of work and the quality of life in a changing Europe and testing the theoretical model described in Chapter 2 required a variety of data to be collected, from a variety of different sources (e.g. survey data, secondary data, interviews, innovation groups and scenarios). All these data were analysed in order to acquire a full and comprehensive understanding of the quality of work and life. We believe that the multi-method approach used here greatly increases the reliability of our findings. This chapter provides detailed information on our data and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the various data sources.

Innovation Governance Nexuses: Mapping Local Governments' University–Industry Relations and Specialization in High Technology in Sweden

Abstract In this paper, we take as a point of departure an assumption that innovation governance matters as a local and regional policy instrument, and consequently we investigate whether local policy can be linked to local industry. To do this, we use Swedish survey data on policy and high-tech agglomeration at the level of municipalities and present evidence on innovation governance nexuses, i.e. locations with greater industrial specialization paired with stronger formalization of innovation governance. Theoretically, this paper follows the literature on regional advantage, but a novel approach is used in which innovation governance literature is linked to that advantage. The findings indicate that these types of policy instruments are useful by creating networks that channel and direct resource and knowledge flows, particularly at locations with higher education institutions.

Collaborative Strategies: How and Why Academic Spin-offs Interact with Engineering University Centers

This chapter follows the management and development of two KIE ventures that are academic spin-offs, in relation to collaborative strategies. The perspective is on how and why academic spin-offs continue to engage in collaborative strategies with engineering centers located at the university. The KIE ventures use the centers to access scientific and technological knowledge, as expected, but they also are interested in accessing other resources and networks to help further develop their research, product and market development. The key message is that networks with research centers at the university help shape the venture. Even after the founding phase, these KIE ventures can use collaborative strategies for research to access resources and ideas – involving scientific and technological knowledge but also market and business knowledge. The results of the chapter help us understand in particular how the venture needs to continue to access resources and ideas, even during the management and development phase of the KIE conceptual model. The KIE ventures are academic spin-offs, heavily involved in the development of technologies, and yet they greatly benefit from these university networks to access market knowledge from other, established firms, and to access business knowledge through the recruitment of experienced managers.

Quality of Life and Satisfaction with the Work-life Balance

In spite of an abundance of literature on the quality of work and the quality of life, we still know little about the relationship between the individual’s ability to balance working with other areas of life and overall life satisfaction. In particular, we have only limited knowledge of how work organizations, the working environment and the broader societal context affect this relationship. Paid employment is an important determinant of a high quality of life in Europe (Clark, 2001a, 2005). Working not only gives people an adequate amount of money to make ends meet, but it also offers them a clear time structure, a sense of identity, social status and integration, and opportunities for personal development (Gallie, 2002, 2007). However, with demands rising both at work and in the home (see Chapter 2), managing the interface between work and other life domains is becoming increasingly complex and difficult. As a result, people may feel less satisfied with their work-life balance and this, in turn, may affect their quality of life (Parasuraman et al., 1992; Rice et al., 1992; et al., 1999). There are signs that the ability to balance working with other life domains is becoming an important issue for individuals’ quality of life in Europe, and that its relevance to overall life satisfaction grows along with a country’s economic prosperity and welfare provisions (Szucs et al., 2008; Drobnic et al., 2010). The EU Social Agenda and the Lisbon Strategy have identified the compatibility of work and family life as a core value, one that is believed to have major influence on quality of life (European Foundation for Living and Working Conditions, 2005). It is therefore important to study both the relationship between working life and private life and the sources of work-life balance and well-being from a comparative European perspective.

Political Capital and How it Grows

Our inquiry and analysis in the previous chapter helped us to pinpoint three possible key components of political capital, which most clearly interact with successful democratic development across the 1990s. The analysis showed that a positive or stable development of democracy - including a large succession and choice of new local leaders in the more successfully developed Baltic new democracies — runs parallel with growing horizontal networks, increasing commitment to core democratic values and escalating local-global relations. In this chapter, we continue our search for a latent political capital by analyzing the correlations across cities between these factors in greater detail.

Conclusion: Democracy Needs Local Political Capital

This book began with the question “In what ways are local governing elites important for the success or failure of effective and sustainable democratic development?” The central question was explanatory and was aimed at ascertaining local governing conditions for the development of democracy. The assumption was that important determinants for democratic success or decline across the 1990s were based on the local governing elites’ political capital, that is, their ability to mobilize resources that are directly or indirectly related to the stable and effective development of democracy. The data comes from the international research program Democracy and Local Governance (DLG). It covers repeated surveys across the 1990s from between 15 to 30 top political and administrative leaders in over one hundred middle-sized European and Eurasian cities, collected by national teams who have contributed chapters for this book.

Introduction: Studying Local Elites and Democratic Development

In what ways are local governing elites important for the success or failure of effective and sustainable democratic development? In order to answer this question, we study the interaction between local elite change and general democratic development in seven European countries throughout the 1990s. Although we know a great deal about the importance of institutional conditions of democracy, manifest in mutual interaction among a separation of powers, a rule-governed state apparatus and long-term experience with political pluralism and growth of social capital (Tocqueville 1835, Dahl 1961, Dahl 1971:226, North 1990, Putnam 1993, Hadenius 2001, Rothstein 2002), we still know little about the political capital accumulated at the local government level (Bourdieu 1991:172, Mouzelis 1995, Szucs 1998a, Hadenius 2001:264). With the term political capital, we refer to the governing elites’ ability to mobilize resources that are directly or indirectly related to stable democratic development in differentiated, complex societies (see also Mouzelis 1995:201). Thus, our inquiry is about the specific local governing qualities that interact with national democratic progress and stability. Our longitudinal and comparative approach of analysis across cities in both advanced democracies like the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as five new democracies of the former Soviet Union, allows us to study universal characteristics of local elite change. Above all, it permits us to search for the components of a local political capital that are favorable for successful national democratic development, as well as to reveal the path for developing such political capital at the local government level.

Universal Change and the Conditions for Democratic Development

In the previous chapters, we have compared a wide range of European local elites across the turbulent 1990s. Country by country, we followed the native scholars’ own analyses of the development of the local governing conditions in relation to the general progress or decline of democracy. So far, the main purpose has been to describe and explain change in the composition and contexts of local elites, as well as their principles and practices for each of the surveyed nations separately. However, our central question of inquiry in the introductory chapter of this book about the interaction between local governing and national development of democracy remains unanswered. Our general assumption is that throughout the 1990s, changing governing characteristics of the local politicaladministrative elites influenced the democratic success and/or decline in a country. Hence, our aim in this chapter is not only finding those governing characteristics that have changed universally regardless of the country studied. Above all, it is to search for those governing qualities or components of a political capital that most clearly interact with democratic development, and therefore might explain why democracy succeeds in some European countries and declines or fails in others.