Devil in Details: Beyond Deceptive Comparisons of European Local Governments

Abstract

This chapter’s main claim is that scholarship has failed to fully develop the practical implications of the diversity of local state society networks. Our analysis of the comprehensive survey of the perceptions of members of these networks in Europe has shown their remarkable differences and some interesting commonalities, mainly along a clear evidence of their dimension of coherence. Only very few dimensions in specific countries and along a few policy fields follow expected patterns. The absence of a clear influence of state and administrative traditions from the set of possible determinants of network diversity presents relevant theoretical and comparative challenges to current knowledge in European local government research. The chapter puts into perspective existing classifications of local state-society relations as well as of local government systems to explore their complementarities and explanatory capacity in drawing a more accurate landscape of European local governance.