Territorial scale, understood as the level at which political authority is organized, exercised, and contested, is an important dimension of modern politics: political choices concern not only what governments should do, but also at which level decisions should be made. This workshop addresses the ”politics of scale”: it examines how political actors strategically use and contest territorial scale, how citizens form preferences over the appropriate level of authority, and how these dynamics shape policymaking, political conflict, and democratic governance. Bringing together currently fragmented debates, the workshop develops a shared research agenda on territorial scale as the subject of political contestation.
Three lively but largely separate debates all pivot on territorial scale, though from different angles and rarely naming it as such. First, scholarship on the geography of discontent links regional decline, place-based resentment, and urban–rural divides to political dissatisfaction (Rodríguez-Pose 2018) and support for populist radical-right parties (Arzheimer and Bernemann 2024; Ziblatt et al. 2024). However, it says less about whether such attitudes translate into preferences over the territorial level at which political authority should be exercised. Political entrepreneurs may mobilize territorial grievances by presenting political problems in territorial terms and linking them to claims about where authority should reside. Second, research on democratic backsliding recognizes subnational governments as drivers of democratic retrenchment (Grumbach 2022), while a growing literature examines how citizens respond to democratic norm violations and under what conditions they are willing to tolerate them (Wunsch 2025). Yet how these two dynamics intersect across levels remains less well understood. How do political actors use different levels of government to advance or resist democratic backsliding, and which level do citizens hold responsible for democratic performance? Third, research on multilevel systems shows that the territorial dispersion of authority enables venue shopping (Pralle 2003), blame shifting (Hinterleitner et al. 2023), and policy learning (Shipan and Volden 2021). Yet these strategies are seldom studied together as manifestations of a broader politics of scale that shapes democratic governance and policy outcomes. Bringing these debates together, the workshop develops a shared perspective on territorial scale as an object of political contestation.
- Arzheimer, Kai, and Theresa Bernemann. 2024. “‘Place’ Does Matter for Populist Radical Right Sentiment, but How? Evidence from Germany.” European Political Science Review 16 (2): 167–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773923000279.
- Grumbach, Jacob M. 2022. Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. Princeton University Press.
- Hinterleitner, Markus, Céline Honegger, and Fritz Sager. 2023. “Blame Avoidance in Hard Times: Complex Governance Structures and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” West European Politics 46 (2): 324–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2064634.
- Pralle, Sarah B. 2003. “Venue Shopping, Political Strategy, and Policy Change: The Internationalization of Canadian Forest Advocacy.” Journal of Public Policy 23 (3): 233–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X03003118.
- Rodríguez-Pose, Andrés. 2018. “The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter (and What to Do about It).” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 11 (1): 189–209. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsx024.
- Shipan, Charles R., and Craig Volden. 2021. Why Bad Policies Spread (and Good Ones Don’t). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108956123.
Wunsch, Natasha. 2025. Democratic Commitment: Why Citizens Tolerate Democratic Backsliding. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198902768.001.0001.
- Ziblatt, Daniel, Hanno Hilbig, and Daniel Bischof. 2024. “Wealth of tongues: Why peripheral regions vote for the radical right in Germany.” American Political Science Review 118(3): 1480-1496. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423000862.
1: Who strategically mobilizes territorial scale, and why?
2: When and how do political actors (re-)scale policies, conflicts, or responsibility?
3: How do citizens form preferences over the appropriate level of authority; what explains variations?
4: Who gains and who loses from particular territorial arrangements, and why?
5: What are the consequences for democratic backsliding or resilience, policymaking, and conflict?
1: Agency and strategies of (re-)scaling, such as venue shopping, blame shifting, or policy learning
2: Citizen preferences over the appropriate level of authority
3: Responsibility attribution, trust, and satisfaction with multilevel democracy
4: Distributional and policy consequences of territorial scale
5: Democratic backsliding, resilience, and political conflict across levels
6: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods designs as well as conceptual approaches to scale
7: Single-country designs with meaningful subnational variation and cross-national comparison
8: Contributions on democratic, hybrid, and authoritarian regimes
