1. Conceptions of Democracy, Economic Success and Social Justice in Discourses on Metropolitan Governance: The Social Constructivist Challenge to the Public Choice School.
- Author
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Blatter, Joachim
- Subjects
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METROPOLITAN government , *DEMOCRACY , *POLITICAL doctrines , *SOCIAL justice , *ECONOMIC development , *METROPOLITAN areas - Abstract
In recent years, the public choice school, which has dominated the debate on metropolitan governance since the 1980s, is facing new intellectual challenges. Like the reformers during the first half of the 20th Century, many urban scholars and practitioners are again demanding more integrated governance structures for sprawling metropolitan areas. There are also fundamental differences between the early reformers and the current advocates of a new regionalism in metropolitan areas. The new conceptions can be seen as the latest step in a dialectic development of governance paradigms. Whereas the early reformers adopted a technocratic, "steering" perspective and proposed a consolidated regional city, the public choice advocates relied on an individualistic "choice" approach to propose decentralized and (territorially or functionally) fragmented government structures. The latest turn of the debate goes beyond a pure instrumentalist view on political institutions which is embodied in both traditions. Social constructivists understand the attempts for "boundary (re)drawing", which is at the core of all metropolitan reform plans, primarily as a process of constructing/ constitutionalizing individual and collective identities. This paper presents an analysis of distinct definitions of fundamental governance goals and the corresponding proposals for institutional design. Very different understandings of "democracy" can be described in Abraham Lincoln’s terms: Early reformers based their plans on a top-down perspective on democracy as "government for the people", rational choice advocates stress the bottom-up concept of "government by the people" and social constructivists focus their attention on "government of the/of what people" - an aspect which is gaining center stage in a world where socio-economic and cultural spaces of flows are superposing traditional spaces of place. The formula for economic success has changed from focusing on effectiveness (a concept based on welfare theory) over efficiency (based on political economy) to competitiveness (based on trade theory). Dominant definitions of social justice have been transformed from equality over equivalence to equity/difference. The paper uses those different definitions of core values and the corresponding proposals for institutional design to analyze the discourse on institutional reform in metropolitan areas in the United States from the 1950s to the year 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2002