Abstract
Hubert Heinelt and his colleagues at the Institute of Political Science — myself as part of the “gang” for only shorter periods of time — have done encompassing work on policy networks, especially at the local, the regional and the European level. They have also been concerned with the study of new forms of governance and, in particular, participatory governance and democracy. In much of that work and, of course, in the work of those from whom we had drawn our insights, the expectation has been that horizontally ordered political configurations would generally perform better than vertical ones either in terms of democracy and participation or in terms of economic efficiency and policy output.
A very first draft of this was presented at the General Conference of the ECPR in Potsdam, 10–12 September 2009; Section on Horizontalism in Local Governance; Panel on Horizontalism and Hierarchy in Central-Local Relations.
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Notes
- 1.
Nota bene, that in much of the literature, network — as an antipode to hierarchy — is synonymous with horizontalism, a conceptual confusion leading to distortions both in theoretical and in empirical terms.
- 2.
I have taken this from Chantal Mouffe’s “sacralisation of consensus” (cited in Davies 2005) used to describe New Labour’s governance agenda. Davies’ work on the role of conflict in local governance arrangements comes very close to my own thoughts on the subject. Unfortunately, I have come across his work only at the time of correcting the page proofs for this contribution.
- 3.
The book has been lauded as seminal, epochal, and path breaking (The Nation), and as a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto, and Weber (The Economist).
- 4.
See, for instance, in Putnam (1993: 23, 101–04, 107, 115, 124, 131, 142, 173–77, 179, and 181–82 pp.).
- 5.
One may think of phenomena such as communitarian markets, competition for clients among Third Sector organizations, the privatization of social services, private interest governments or New Public Management.
- 6.
An easily accessible and much quoted list of these and other principles is provided by Streeck and Schmitter (1985: 1–30).
- 7.
Compare this to the references made above to (system) trust and (system) power to gain additional insights about the pointlessness of the horizontalist expectation.
- 8.
That this applies to not only “community”, “market” and “state” but also holds for “association” has been shown by comparative research on business associability (Grote 2008; Streeck et al. 2006). Hierarchically structured associational systems tend to fare much better than horizontally fragmented ones, the subversive power of the Europeanization of politics and the internationalization of markets notwithstanding.
- 9.
The project, run together with Beate Kohler-Koch at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research in the years 1993–96 (Kohler-Koch et al. 1998), was able to lean on local research teams in each of the regions studied. Identical questionnaires were used by all groups both for identifying the most relevant organizations and for the subsequent survey of the regions’ action capacity. For earlier discussions of partial results, see: Grote 1995; 1997a; 1997b; 1997c; 1998b; 1998c; 2002.
- 10.
- 11.
Whether this be the result of actually exerted “system power” or of a “shadow of hierarchy” lurking in the background does not need to concern us here, because the members of our samples do not make such a distinction when asked to indicate organizations with which they exchange information.
- 12.
See Note 1.
- 13.
In a similar vein, Cooke and Morgan detect a “networking ethos of the region” (Cooke/Morgan 1990: 427).
- 14.
The marginalization of interest groups in the Baden-Württemberg ecology is also affirmed by Crouch. “It is Land and local government institutions, universities and other research institutes, rather than local associations, which are the main actors” (Crouch 2001: 219). In a similar vein, the region has been described as a case of “selective corporatism” (Jürgens/Krumbein 1991) or, similarly, of “enterprise-driven corporatism” pushing organized interests into marginal positions (Heinze/Schmidt 1994). Our data would confirm that interpretation. The status achieved by the Daimler-Benz Corporation figures significantly above the one of all interest associations taken together.
- 15.
But see, Raab and Milward (2003) for an attempt of shedding light on “dark networks”.
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Grote, J. (2012). Participatory governance reloaded — the horizontalist expectation1 . In: Egner, B., Haus, M., Terizakis, G. (eds) Regieren. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19793-7_4
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