Assessing the new political culture by comparing cities around the world

Abstract

This chapter examines evidence for the New Political Culture (NPC) ideas in Chapter 2, primarily with urban data for countries participating in the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation (FAUI) Project. 1 Our Chapter 2 propositions, combined with data for more than 7,000 cities, help us locate social and political differences with a theoretical framework that captures and explains many of them. For instance, why do welfare states grow or decline, who votes for left parties, where is environmentalism successful, why are women included or excluded from politics? Many narrow theories, considering 94a single topic or country, propose answers to such questions that fail when considered elsewhere. What conditions or assumptions are critical to make underlying processes operate? Many theories implicitly assume a context of class politics. This chapter thus contributes to the sociology of knowledge as well as to political analysis by showing how different cultures redefine legitimate rules of the game-for several social science theories as well as political leaders and citizens. Some critical and illuminating cases are presented in boxes throughout the chapter. Note that while the NPC propositions taken together provide a theory of major change, each proposition can be tested separately; we do this below, and find that some hold powerfully, while others do not. Results by individual proposition are summarized in the Conclusion.