Abstract
Economic development directly manifests itself in the form of employment at the local level. This paper examines the ability of local politics to shape this development in a competitive federalist environment by examining how local party-political developments affect local economic development in Swiss small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs). Local economic development in the form of employment is a central local policy domain in federal and polycentric Switzerland. This paper argues that party-political influence is conditional on the characteristics of four distinguished economic sectors that differ in their dependence on the regional context. By analyzing the panel data of all Swiss SMSTs, the paper finds that local party-political developments only systematically precede growth in the residential economy, while regional processes determine the economic sectors in ambiguous ways. The grip of local politics on the development of export-oriented economies therefore is not guided by party-political development and more influential at regional levels.
Highlights
While regional development and multilevel governance often dominate the discourse on economic development (Ansell 2002; Tödtling and Trippl 2005), this economic development directly manifests itself at the local level in the form of jobs and local economic development, thereby remaining crucial for local politics
This paper examines the ability of local politics to shape this development in a competitive federalist environment by examining how local party–political developments affect local economic development in Swiss small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs)
This paper examines the relation of local party–political development and economic development in Swiss small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs)
Summary
While regional development and multilevel governance often dominate the discourse on economic development (Ansell 2002; Tödtling and Trippl 2005), this economic development directly manifests itself at the local level in the form of jobs and local economic development, thereby remaining crucial for local politics. The focus of this paper lies on a single functional category of municipalities: small- and medium-sized towns (SMSTs). SMSTs have traditionally been neglected by urban and rural research because they fall between the fields of regional/peripheral development literature, classical urban studies and research on agglomerations. As Bell and Jayne (2009, 691) argue in their plea for a greater focus on smaller cities, that SMSTs act as “important nodes in the networks between places of different scales, and they are seen to mediate between the rural and the urban, as well as between the local and the global.”. As Dijkstra, Garcilazo, and McCann (2013) show in a comparative study of EU15 countries, SMSTs are catching up with large cities in terms of population growth and economic performance. A better understanding of SMSTs is of theoretical relevance, it follows recent empirical trends
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