Strategic action in hard times

Abstract

The institutions of federalism are thought to aid local officials in responding strategically to economic decline, but those making this assumption tend to overlook the fact that local officials must first deal with serious local barriers to strategic action. Recent studies, based on urban regime theory, suggest that four local factors in particular have an impact on strategic policymaking: coalitions of public and private actors, a transformation of the coalition after the onset of decline, intergovernmental relations, and the sequence of decisionmaking. This study explores the extent to which these factors were associated with strategic responses to decline in four deindustrialized cities in Germany and the United States. All factors are found to contribute in an interdependent fashion to higher strategic capacity, but of critical importance is the sequence of decisionmaking, because it exaggerates the impact of structures. Thus, local coalitional decisionmaking processes are clearly of central importance for advancing federalism theory. The study also reveals weaknesses in the urban regime approach, which should focus less on simply identifying coalitions and more on explaining variation in coalitional decisionmaking and on how coalitions transform themselves in response to changed secular conditions.