PURC examined the conditions for progressive urban regime change in a sample of 18 cities with over 20,000 inhabitants where social movement-led left coalitions reached city hall, giving the project a unique comparative scale in the literature on Urban Regimes and Radical Municipalism.
The research initiated with extensive secondary research in each case, combining academic and grey literature with analysis of journalistic and public administration documents on local politics and governance.
Alongside this, a review of the urban governance literature developed a comparative framework, centred on the role of capital mobility, fiscal capacity, civic capacity, council position, intergovernmental allies and city size in explaining stability and change in urban governance.
Second, a quantitative dataset was developed, operationalising the comparative framework using data from European (Eurostat, Cities and Greater Cities) and Spanish (National Institute of Statistics; Urban Atlas) institutional sources. This data was complemented by targeted expert interviews to help contextualise and interpret the comparative findings.
PURC’s main scientific achievement is an 18-case fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), which enabled a move beyond the use of in depth single case studies or small-n comparisons in the urban governance literature.
The main results are that civic capacity is a necessary conditions for the consolidation of progressive regime, and that no single factor is sufficient by itself. Instead, different combinations of political and economic conditions explained success in different groups of cities.
In smaller cities, strong council position and fiscal capacity compensated for weak support from allies at higher governance scales. In larger cities, intergovernmental allies were more important. Capital mobility mattered less than much of the urban political economy literature led to expect, the threat of politically motivated disinvestment was likely offset by Spain’s intergovernmental fiscal transfers.
These findings provide a clear explanation of the possibilities and limits of progressive urban governance in contemporary Europe. They also provide a framework that can travel to other contexts, to engage in larger scale comparisons. The projects general findings are published in an open access article in Urban Studies, which includes an extensive methodological appendix detailing details the project’s data sources, measurement decisions and calibration procedures.
