Citizens in the City-Regions

Abstract

Establishing democratic governance in city-regions would be facilitated if citizens had a political orientation that exceeded the borders of their own municipalities. Using citizen surveys in two Swedish city-regions, the article analyzes the occurrence of different forms of intermunicipal activism and then evaluates explanations for the observed variation. While traditional theories of public participation are shown to have some explanatory power, the integration of citizens into the city-region and their place of residence also turn out to be important. Furthermore, different forms of activism are explained by different patterns of explanations, suggesting that the complexity of the intermunicipal dimension of political participation must be taken into account when developing forms of city-regional governance.