Crisis-driven reforms and local discretion: an assessment of Italy and Spain

Abstract

The recent and still enduring global economic and financial crisis deeply impacted the institutional framework in Italy and Spain by prompting a series of reforms, which ultimately re-shaped the local government features. Based on a qualitative comparative analysis of recent reforms, the author shows that (directly and indirectly) crisis-driven provisions have significantly impacted the local levels and changed the central/local relations in both countries. During the years of crisis, a decrease in local discretion in its three main facets (fiscal, administrative, and political/functional) has taken place. This outcome could both allow for a better understanding of how central and local governments have interacted during the crisis and to contribute to the formulation of more general considerations on local discretion and central/local relations in Italy and Spain.

Visions of Europe: emerging challenges for the European project in the aftermath of the 2014 European Parliament elections

“…Like other scholars (Bolgherini 2016;Fabbrini 2015), we interpret the period that followed the economic crisis as a critical juncture in the process of European integration -the third, according to Fabbrini, after the two that followed the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War. European integration has been considered as "perpetually in crisis" (Baglioni and Hurrelmann 2016, 104) and, indeed, a permanent status of crisis and the management thereof are a constitutional feature of democratic regimes (Urbinati 2013).…”

“…Second, and related, the austerity packages and structural reforms have led to a re-centralisation of a substantial amount of policy competences in a number of countries (Bolgherini 2016;Muro 2015 (especially in connection with the economic crisis) that could not be detected at constituency level. The study shows: the presence of unsatisfied political demands (high abstention rates) and voters' volatility in both countries; considerable territorial variation, in both countries, in the electoral performance of the two new parties across municipalities; and that the economic crisis had a marked (positive) impact on the electoral affirmation of the two parties, which, however, is differentiated across the two countries.…”

From the Change of the Pattern to the Change in the Pattern. The Trilateral Game in the Italian Intergovernmental Relations

“…Court litigations and strong political cleavages between political parties and different subregional areas also hindered the implementation process. To provide a portrait of this in fieri situation, three main regional strategies can be singled out: (1) a hard neocentralist strategy, supported by those Regions (e.g., Tuscany) that explicitly absorbed their provinces’ legal tasks; (2) a soft neocentralist strategy enacted by those Regions (e.g., Emilia‐Romagna and Lazio) that instead adopted a multilevel governance approach, which allowed them to preserve their provinces but strongly strengthened the regional steering and coordination power; (3) a maintaining strategy, supported by those Regions (e.g., Lombardy), which decided to preserve the previous arrangement and thus enacted only a limited reshaping of the provinces and empowered their municipalities (Bolgherini et al., ). Be it as it may, the new subregional governance, in particular the creation of supra‐municipal areas, has been promoted by some Regions with the aim of creating an intermediation with the municipalities.…”

“…Evolutionary Overlapping Authority Model in Italy 2001-2016 high degree of autonomy, even if under relatively strict time constraints(Bolgherini 2015;Bolgherini, Lippi & Maset, 2016;Di Giulio and Profeti, 2016). This law should pave the way to the major Constitutional reform of 2016, which should have replaced the Senate with a Chamber of the regions, entitle regions and municipalities with further tasks, eliminate the provinces and other multilevel arrangements.…”

Representing the Milan metropolitan region from a public policy perspective

“…In a European context characterised by "crisis-driven reforms" (Bolgherini, 2015) and "austerity urbanism" (Davies & Blanco, 2017), the agenda of metropolitan governance reforms may overlook other socially relevant goals, such as the regulation of territorial inequalities at the city-regional scale (see Sellers et al, 2017). For this reason, it is relevant to empirically explore the territorial effects of policy changes (see Artioli, 2016;Maggioni, 2016).…”