This chapter analyses the policies of populist radical right party-led local governments in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland. It assesses the extent to which their party ideology is evident. The analysis concerns three forms of policy: policy agendas, budgetary spending and policy designs. Each enables a different form of comparison to be made, through which the impact made by the parties and its cross-national variation is assessed. First, analysis of agendas reveals their policy priorities once elected into local government. These are compared with mainstream parties in similar contexts. Second, analysis of budgets shows the extent to which these priorities were realized in the form of spending. Comparison here is made with the preceding mainstream party-led local government in the same context. Third, analysis of their policies’ framing of target populations, policy tools and policy rationales demonstrates the varying extent to which they generate social constructions that align with party ideology. The leadership of local government by populist radical right parties in Western Europe is shown to lead to contrasting degrees and forms of policy impact.

This chapter provides an explanation for the different approaches to local government taken by populist radical right parties in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, and their different degree of radicalism. It conducts a systematic exploration of the process by which these parties govern at the local level. The empirical basis for this analysis is interviews with 57 local government actors, semi-structured in order to investigate the two overarching themes that are theoretically expected to influence their approaches to governing. The chapter unveils the mechanisms through which moderation is imposed (or radicalism is facilitated) by, first, various institutional constraints, and, second, cross-level party linkages. As a final step, it reconstructs the process by which each populist radical right-led local government responded to the European migration crisis during the 2010s. The institutional constraints and cross-level party linkages particular to each of the four cases can explain the varied (multi-level) governance configurations that emerge, and as a result the varying degree of radicalism in their approach.

Integration into the democratic system may induce the moderation of radical parties. This chapter assesses the extent of mainstreaming of populist radical right parties that follows their entry into local power. It does so through analysis of their discourse before and after attaining the leadership of the local government and considers four dimensions of mainstreaming. First, programmatic expansion and the relative salience of issues outside of their ideological core. Second, de-radicalization, in terms of the positioning towards and framing of the issue of immigration. Third, a softening of anti-establishment discourse and behaviour, considering both conflicts with other political actors and institutional reforms. And fourth, the self-presentation as normal and responsible, as opposed to a prior reputation for extremism and/or incompetence. To analyse changes across these dimensions, it draws from a range of data sources: council meetings, Facebook posts and newspaper articles. The chapter reveals cross-national differences in the extent of mainstreaming and suggests that institutional and party-strategic differences are crucial determinants of the extent and form of such change.

This chapter provides the theoretical underpinnings for an analysis of the impact made by populist radical right parties in local government. This theoretical framework is grounded not just in theories particular to the party family, but also ones more general to the analysis of party politics and institutions. Four main questions are addressed. First, regarding the policy goals of the populist radical right: what do they want? Second, regarding partisan influence over government policy, do parties matter – even in local government? Third, regarding the mainstreaming of the populist radical right, are they tamed by power? And fourth, regarding the strategic uses of local government made by parties, are such localities laboratories of radicalism? Before the subsequent chapters analyse the different routes taken by populist radical right-led local governments in Western Europe, this chapter provides several explicit expectations for how their impact is likely to vary cross-nationally according to two main factors: institutional constraints and central party strategies.

This concluding chapter discusses the findings of the study and its contributions to the analysis of populist radical right parties and their impact on (local) government. It goes into further depth regarding the novel perspectives it offers regarding the study of three topics in particular: the policies of populist radical right parties in government, party politics at the local level of government and the threat to liberal democracy from populist radical right parties, as well as the restraints imposed upon them at the local level of government that mitigate such a threat.

The entry of populist radical right parties into positions of power has generated anxieties regarding the potential consequences for liberal democracy. Yet while these parties have also gained control of local governments, activities at that level have been largely overlooked. This longstanding neglect is surprising when we consider the development of populist radical right parties in Western Europe, which has been a provincial phenomenon from the beginning. Prior to their breakthrough on the national stage, crucial strategic innovations and electoral successes took place at the local level of politics. This chapter introduces the topic of populist radical right parties in local politics and positions the book in existing debates on their impact on government and strategies for governing. It provides a clear conceptualization of impact, in both indirect and direct forms, and summarizes the various strategies that they have pursued in government. It then outlines the various forms of populist radical right-led local government, distinguished by the radicalism of their impact and the involvement of the central party. The chapter ends by presenting a plan for the chapters to follow.

This chapter introduces the cases of populist radical right parties in local government in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland that are the empirical focus of the book. It outlines the contextual background to their entry into local government, showing the multiple pathways they took to attain power. To do so, the chapter first considers long- and short-term contextual factors that led to an increased demand for populist parties in localities that had previously been strongholds of the centre-left. Then the chapter turns to the electoral campaigns, and the internal and external supply-side factors behind the populist radical right successes. It also considers the strategic position of these localities for the central parties, and the central-local party relations during the campaign. Finally, it details the election results and the subsequent formation of governments, including the formation of coalitions and allocation of executive responsibilities. Ultimately, the chapter shows the different forms of ‘local power’ that populist radical right parties held after their election victories in these cases and the reasons behind the cross-national differences.

This chapter analyses how the geographical scale of the local and the institutional forms of local government have become increasingly significant in understanding the politics of race and ethnicity in contemporary Britain. We suggest that the areas of settlement of migrant communities and minorities are key to understanding the evolution of the invariably unfinished politics of race. These localities, we argue, are characterised both by ongoing mainstream institutional responses to migration and community formation and the struggles, social movements and antiracist solidarities, exclusionary closure and boundary-crossing moments of dialogue, selective ethnic advance and systemic racial disadvantage, individual stories of success and failure. Through exploring these everyday expressions of racialised politics on the ground, we can begin to rethink the processes that have helped to frame the emergence of a new politics of race, shaping how new forms of political mobilisation, engagement, and disengagement are likely to emerge over the coming period.

This book has asked whether and why Sunni secondary cities in the Middle East have a higher propensity for unrest and ideological-political activism than capital cities. Taking Tripoli in northern Lebanon as a microcosm of the crisis of Sunnism in the broader Middle East, the book tells a story of urban violence in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Throughout the Tripoli case study, this book identified a feature of secondary cities that I call city corporatism. The root of violence in secondary cities is that these cities often see themselves as united during national turmoil, as a base for one political faction, generally the opposition.

The book identifies four causal mechanisms that jointly explain why urban violence erupts in secondary cities: external meddling; the personal ambitions of local elites; local residents’ willingness to join the fighters; and the existence of competing, or hybrid, Lebanese sovereignties. Each mechanism helps explain why Tripoli has been prone to violence in recent decades.

The 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri unleashed a political earthquake in Lebanon. Tripoli and its surroundings became a Sunni base for the Future Movement, led by Rafiq Hariri’s son Saad and other neoliberal elites from Lebanon’s nouveaux riches political class. For the first time, Tripolitanians rallied around a political party based outside their own city.

Many Tripolitanians supported the Future Movement in 2005 because they hoped that Saad Hariri, with his personal wealth and connections to Saudi Arabia, might bring investments to marginalized areas in northern Lebanon. However, these expectations were not met.

The Future Movement was an elite-based party, and its strategies of outreach to the poor had severe shortcomings. It used divisive sectarian (anti-Shiʿi) electoral strategies in Tripoli and empowered Sunni radicals, leading to a spiral of violence. Sunni hardliners gained prominent roles in Tripoli after Hizbullah and its allies turned their weapons inwards in Beirut in May 2008. However, this sectarian resource was insufficient to help the Future Movement maintain its popularity in Tripoli in the long run.

Men are overrepresented in positions of political leadership around the world (IPU Parline 2020). This overrepresentation is particularly stark in right-leaning political parties, while women come closer to (though rarely achieve) parity with men in left-leaning parties (O’Brien 2018). This inequality in political representation threatens citizens’ support for democratic governance. Both trust in government and engagement with government are tied to the presence of descriptive representatives who share one’s traits, such as gender, in elected offices (Atkeson 2003; Childs 2004; Reingold and Harrell 2010; Schwindt-Bayer 2010). Thus, the absence of equal descriptive representation diminishes government trust and citizen political engagement, contributing to the crisis of representative democracy. Furthermore, unequal political representation also compromises the representativeness of government outcomes. The traits of elected officials, including gender, shape the issues addressed by governments and the direction of policies produced by governments (Childs 2004; Clayton, Josefsson, and Wang 2017; Holman 2014; Schwindt-Bayer 2010; Swers 2013). Consequently, the lack of equal descriptive representation for men and women in governments across the world yields policy outcomes from governments that do not reflect the will of all of their citizens, contributing to the crisis of representative democracy.

Drawing upon a study of the labor movement’s challenge to inequality in Los Angeles from 1992 to 2008, this chapter presents a critical analysis of the city as a site of solidarity. It shows how, to build local labor law, the labor movement must promote solidarity not just among workers but among different progressive movements, which become interlinked around campaigns to reshape low-wage work, while also promoting related goals: including immigrant inclusion, expanding affordable housing, and promoting environmental justice. As such, the chapter is fundamentally about the role of solidarity in efforts to build decentralized power in a political context where there is an absence of political opportunities for moving labor policy, specifically, and progressive social policy more generally at the national level. Building decentralized power as a way to rebuild labor law, this chapter suggests, requires conceptualizing solidarity as a local, city-wide project, with two related components: one is inter-movement solidarity, which is solidarity between labor and allied movements; and the other is intra-movement solidarity, which is solidarity among workers fighting for better lives. The chapter argues that, while both visions of solidarity are necessary to build local labor reform, there are tensions between the two that must always be managed.

This chapter explains how governance, especially local governance, happens in China. It expands upon China’s hierarchical political structure and its environmental governance system, highlighting the local environmental protection bureau (EPB)’s low rank and dilemma of having two principals—upper-level EPB and local government. Utilizing field interviews with key local actors and referencing public and internal policy documents, Shen lays out a broad range of factors considered when superiors make promotion decisions, such as competency, performance, and character factors. Crucially, Shen finds that local political leaders are expected to implement critical policies like economic growth steadily and incrementally during their tenure, with later years’ performance being more critical for promotion evaluation. The chapter concludes by exploring the pathways through which local leaders influence regulatory stringency to promote different priorities and targets, with promotions in mind.