New Regionalism and Territorial Inequalities: An Empirical Assessment in Swiss Metropolitan Areas

The relationship between institutional fragmentation of urban regions and inequality in government service levels is subject to a long-running debate. On the one hand, neo-progressive reformers argue that fragmented municipal institutions produce a systematic mismatch between fiscal resources and public needs and thereby perpetuate income inequality. On the other hand, public choice scholars hold that polycentric government is more responsive to residents’ needs, and that issues of income distribution can be addressed by voluntary inter-municipal agreements. However, recent research in the so-called ‘new regionalism’ suggests that network-based governance is particularly ill equipped to address issues of re-distributive policy. This paper aims to bring a new perspective to this debate, based on a comprehensive analysis of the seven largest metropolitan areas in Switzerland. More precisely, we explore the inter-relationship between institutional fragmentation of metropolitan areas, municipal resources, residents’ political preferences, inter-municipal relations and municipal social policy efforts. Empirically, the analysis draws on municipal level data on socio-demographics, fiscal resources, partisanship in national elections, as well as municipal expenditures in 482 municipalities for the years 2000 and 2010. The results show that institutional fragmentation of urban regions is not per se conducive to territorial inequalities in government services at the metropolitan level. Rather, the relationship between municipal resources and social policy efforts is mediated by the political preferences of the municipal electorates, and interacts with the workings of inter-municipal resource equalization schemes. In the conclusion, we discuss the policy implications of these findings, as well as their significance in the context of the international debate on regionalism in metropolitan areas.