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Devil in Details: Beyond Deceptive Comparisons of European Local Governments

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Perspectives on Local Governance Across Europe

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Sub-National Governance ((PSSNG))

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Abstract

This chapter’s main claim is that scholarship has failed to fully develop the practical implications of the diversity of local state society networks. Our analysis of the comprehensive survey of the perceptions of members of these networks in Europe has shown their remarkable differences and some interesting commonalities, mainly along a clear evidence of their dimension of coherence. Only very few dimensions in specific countries and along a few policy fields follow expected patterns. The absence of a clear influence of state and administrative traditions from the set of possible determinants of network diversity presents relevant theoretical and comparative challenges to current knowledge in European local government research. The chapter puts into perspective existing classifications of local state-society relations as well as of local government systems to explore their complementarities and explanatory capacity in drawing a more accurate landscape of European local governance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter was developed with the support of the Research Project “DECIDE - Decentralized Territorial Governance: coordination, capacity and accountability of governance arrangements in complex regional settings” (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-032502), funded by POCI-Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (FEDER), and by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal).

  2. 2.

    Networks with less than 20 valid answers were disregarded.

  3. 3.

    Alpha = 0.75 The autonomy index presents missing values in the case of four countries (Greece, Iceland, Latvia and Lithuania) and, therefore, those countries’ values are not considered for this specific index.

  4. 4.

    Alpha = 0.63 This index followed the same approach to the operationalization of the dimension of coherence as in Chap. 8 (Silva et al., 2022, in this volume).

  5. 5.

    Alpha = 0.83 in respect to the relevance of participation in the network and Alpha = 0.84 regarding the scope of the network.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Filipe Teles

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  1. Filipe Teles
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Correspondence to Filipe Teles .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Political Science, Technical University Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Björn Egner

  2. Institute of Political Science, Technical University Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Hubert Heinelt

  3. Department of Political Science and European Studies, Palacky University in Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic

    Jakub Lysek

  4. Department of Social and Political Science, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Patricia Silva

  5. Department of Social and Political Science, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Filipe Teles

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Teles, F. (2022). Devil in Details: Beyond Deceptive Comparisons of European Local Governments. In: Egner, B., Heinelt, H., Lysek, J., Silva, P., Teles, F. (eds) Perspectives on Local Governance Across Europe. Palgrave Studies in Sub-National Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15000-5_2

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