Theories of politics pdf

They have to do with the universalistic normative content of natural law and social contract traditions underpinning the institutional model of liberal democracy. It is this ontology of the socially embedded individual, the socially constructed nature of human subjectivity, and of social life as a unity of historically specific social practices that prevents the abstract values of rationality and mutuality which undergird the idea of democracy from being vetted also as instruments and procedures for attaining a democratic form of society.

Moreover, Marx holds that by forging the idea of legal persons as seemingly free and equal, and thus of bearers of equal individual rights, liberal constitutionalism mimics the contract relationship governing the bourgeois economy, thereby masking the structures of social inequality on which the system is based.

Indeed, deficiencies in the existing practice of democracy and the inability of the institutional paraphernalia of liberal democracy to embed a just society remain of core interest for critical theorists to this day, in the work of Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Amy Allen, Rainer Forst, and many others.

To be sure, critical theory inherits from Marx a commitment to democracy as a spontaneous self- organisation of the people.

However, this normative commitment does not transform into an ideological endorsement of democracy as a political system because the social theory through which the critique is conducted does not have a place for a socially unencumbered self and a rational society in its ontology — that is, democracy is not among the set of presuppositions from which the social world is viewed. That ontology is instead centered on the notion of human beings as social beings whose social essence is shaped by the ensemble of social relations — as I noted in the earlier discussion of Marx.

Thus, a distance is preserved between a normative commitment to a democratic society and an understanding of the socially constituted reality. Within such an understanding of the tasks and methods of Critical Theory, the fallacy of the democratic turn would not be related to the intrinsic qualities of liberal democracy as a political system or the emancipatory normative potential contained in the principles of equality and liberty, but rather in the nature of theory deployed in the analysis of society.

When critique is performed without attention to the historically specific power dynamics and social structures that underpin the institutions and enact the norms of liberal democracy, those institutions and norms become liable to serve the very interests which emancipatory critique is to unmask.

Adorno notes that the price of failing to perform a critique of ideology as a comprehensive analysis of the historical circumstances and structural conditions of oppression is twofold.

He credits this public with a capacity to hold state power accountable through the use of reason in a process of argumentation. Attention is shifted away from the processes of socialisation, of the social production of reasoning publics. Tellingly, Adorno and Horkheimer found the dissertation insufficiently critical of the ideology of liberal democracy, and rejected it Calhoun , 4f.

This philosophical construct becomes the social ontology from the perspective of which Habermas develops his critique of the dynamics of modernity. On this conceptual foundation Habermas then builds his diagnosis about the erosion of the democratic public sphere in the conditions of modern mass society in late capitalism.

It is worth noting that the very entry point of analysis — the bourgeois public sphere — presupposes an unproblematic co-existence between the dynamics of capitalism and those of democratic citizenship. In this account, under the impact of industrialization and the rise of consumerism in late capitalism, the concerns of efficiency that are central to the dynamics of economic production and administrative rule start to penetrate the cultural system, eventually stifling genuine democratic debate.

The active publicity of genuine democracy is replaced by the passive consumption of technical media of communication and entertainment. As a result, the separation between the private, public, and political realms on which classical bourgeois democracy had depended is lost. The public sphere becomes indivisible from the sphere of private conflict, which ultimately imperils democracy.

In this first comprehensive analysis Habermas articulates of modern society, it is the erosion of the structural conditions for democracy, understood as the autonomy of the public sphere, that marks advanced capitalism. The solution is implied in the diagnosis — a secure institutionalisation of the democratic public sphere must be provided so as to safeguard it from the perilous instrumental dynamics of modernity.

By the late s, the emancipatory ambitions of Critical Theory had entered an impasse, with Horkheimer and Adorno articulating a distinctly grim diagnosis of total alienation in the context of advanced capitalism Azmanova b.

This, however, would demand a thorough recasting of the intellectual apparatus of critique, which Habermas endeavours to accomplish in subsequent writing by drawing on Kantian moral theory, linguistics, developmental psychology, and systems theory. The project of emancipation comes to be centered on institutional tools and procedures for democratic citizenship, within an affirmative conception of historical progress Allen Legitimation Crisis [] delivers an important shift in the social ontology through which the critical enterprise proceeds.

In this revised version, society stands as a unity of formalised and relatively autonomous, though inter-connected, economic, administrative, socio-cultural and legitimation systems or subsystems of action, each contributing to social integration and with relative functional autonomy from each other.

This would allow him to present the political institutions of democracy and liberal constitutionalism, due to their presumed autonomous status, as vehicles of emancipation. Let us recall that for Marx, as for the first generation of Frankfurt School authors, rationality itself had been a problem i. These conditions refer to maintaining the autonomy of the public sphere a sphere outside of the institutionalized political system as a space of free opinion- and will-formation e.

He holds that the contradictions of advanced capitalism could be brought to consciousness and thematised and thus addressed under conditions of substantive democracy — i. The matrix of emancipated social existence is unencumbered communication. In turn, this solution is enabled by the distinction between communicative and strategic forms of rationality and action.

The substitution of the critique of capitalism as a social formation with the philosophy of language has significant consequences for the critical enterprise. The historicity of this sphere rests solely on intersubjective communicative procedures which face practical limits in scope and scale. In his monumental work Between Facts and Norms b [] Habermas reinforces his reliance on the properly institutionalised public sphere as he seeks to realize social freedom through law, thus viewing democracy not as a form of society, but as a form of political system perfectly compatible with a capitalist system of social relations.

Habermas replaces the Marxian critique of the process through which notions of democratic citizenship render legitimacy to exploitative dynamics in the private sphere with an effort to construct a philosophical formula through which the tension between the sphere of social existence and that of political membership is conceptually resolved. The solution comes in the formula of the co-originality between private and public autonomy within a properly articulated and institutionalised system of rights.

Thus, while for Marx and the early Frankfurt School authors the combination between liberal constitutionalism and democratic citizenship had been part of the problem insofar as it serves capitalist reproduction, for Habermas liberal democracy is part of the solution, as he deems the procedures and institutions of liberal democracy as able to safeguard social solidarity from the systemic logic of economic and administrative efficiency.

At best, this strategy can contribute to the democratization of the political organization of capitalism — making capitalism more inclusive. However, we have no solid reasons to believe that the democratization of capitalism will amount to a radical social transformation — that is, a transformation of the very system of social relations. In elaborating his model of deliberative liberal democracy, Habermas retains the commitment to emancipation that has been constitutive for Critical Theory.

Moreover, Habermas does not stipulate a substantive ideal of democracy that could become an object of ideology- construction. No norms of justice are offered a priori; democratic publics are not only to validate binding norms, but to generate these through actual processes of reasoned argumentation. The quality of democracy stands as a matter of the quality of the process of reasoned deliberation. Henceforth, the task of democratic theory is to articulate the mechanisms and conditions for such a deliberation Azmanova , , However, as Habermas subordinates, and thus trivializes, the critique of capitalism within the larger framework of a critique of the democratic public sphere — whose emancipatory power is conceptualised with the tools of philosophy of language and linguistics — he removes social analysis from political theory.

Capitalism is reduced to a market economy and the critique of political economy all but vacates analysis. This deprives critical social theory of the conceptual tools it needs to scrutinise the socio-structural dynamics of domination that embed and condition the very creation of the social subject.

The project of emancipation as democratisation of the entire social order, as conceived by the founders of Critical Theory, is reduced to a project of the proper institutionalisation of the public sphere.

With this, the status of democracy changes: it becomes a political project, not a form of society. Through the democratic turn in Critical Theory, thus performed, the enterprise of Ideologiekritik transforms from a scrutiny of the historically particular social conditions of injustice and the forms of consciousness these conditions engender into liberal-democratic ideology-construction.

Autonomy, social cooperation and mutuality are no longer just ethical values a valuational frame of reference -- they are also elements of the social ontology a description of the human condition from which the critique draws its fundamental presuppositions. In other words, autonomy, social cooperation and mutuality are deemed to be features of unencumbered anthropological communicative reason which is in turn an enabling condition for democratic reasoned argumentation — a precondition for democracy.

Theory thus already presupposes what it tries to demonstrate analytically and achieve politically. When democracy and its attendant rational and sociable subjects becomes both a normative ideal and a component of the ontology, the ensuing circularity forecloses the critical enterprise. Democracy as an ideal and an enabling condition for attaining this ideal becomes immune to critical scrutiny -- democracy becomes an idol.

This risks making the enterprise of the critique of ideology complicit in moral and ideological justifications for that social order whose injustices and contradictions are meant to form the object of critique. In other words, the democratic turn in Critical Theory has not only deserted the critique of capitalism as an organizing pillar of social criticism.

Enters Ideologiekritik-cum-ideology- construction. Once democracy is equated with the emancipatory project itself, the concept can no longer perform the aporetic work of disclosure.

In the context of the early twenty-first century — a time beset by the rise of autocrats professing to salvage democracy -- the challenge is to keep our faith in democracy without elevating it to an idol. To stay the course between dogmatism and scepticism, democratic theory needs to preserve the contestability of its core concept — that of democracy -- and deploy it in the aporetic project of critique. This contestability, I have suggested, is not just a matter of maintaining the definitional openness, or indeterminacy, of the notion of democracy.

Rather, it consists in on-going scrutiny of the work this notion does in view of the goals of emancipation. In order to leave the space of reflexive contestation open, a distance needs to be maintained between the normative goals of theory, the social ontology from which theorising proceeds, and the requisite tools of analysis. When these are equated, the ensuing circularity vitiates the rigor of the analysis: in this mode, a theory can do little more than supply normative validation of its object of analysis, thereby becoming a vehicle of ideology construction.

Enhancing in this way its own credentials, democratic theory is prone to operate in the manner of a political theology committed to the fostering of democracy as a civil religion. If this is the aspiration of democratic political theory — then we know what road to take. Such a critical effort cannot only seek to disclose the ways in which capitalism imperils democracy, but must also clarify the ways in which liberal democracy as a political system hampers or enables capitalism as a social system.

To the extent that democratic politics concerns institutionally mediated expressions of broadly shared preferences, democracy as a political system functions on the terrain of socially produced subjectivities. The dynamics of capital reproduction affect, even if they do not constitute, the democratic subjects.

It is in this way that liberal democracy becomes not only hostage to the exploitative dynamic of capitalism but also complicit in these dynamics. Even in conditions of fully democratised capitalism, when the structures of private property of the means of production and the attendant asymmetries of power are eliminated, democratic citizens can remain fully committed to the process of capital reproduction with all its deleterious effects on human beings, their societies and their natural environment.

That we are all equally complicit in, and equally damaged by, these dynamics is not much of a consolation. This means that political theory should remain committed to the normative ideals of democracy without burdening democratic politics of inclusion and equality with the task of radical social transformation. If it is to discern the path for such a transformation towards a more just society, critical political theory should aim to develop as a sociologically informed critique of the historically specific social order we inhabit.

For truly democratic politics demands a truly democratic society. A reader, London: Routledge, pp. Allen, Amy : Emancipation without utopia. Subjection, modernity, and the normative claims of feminist critical theory, in: Hypatia 30 3 , pp. Allen, Amy : The end of progress. Azmanova, Albena : Critical theory. Azmanova, Albena : Empowerment as surrender. How women lost the battle for emancipation as they won equality and inclusion, in: Social Research 83 3 , pp. Azmanova, Albena : Relational, structural and systemic forms of power.

Novum organum scientiarum, Cambridge University Press. Billig, Michel : Ideology and opinions. Studies in rhetorical psychology, London: Sage Publications. Calhoun, Craig : Introduction. Habermas and the public sphere, in: Calhoun, Craig Ed.

Cook, Deborah : Critical stratagems in Adorno and Habermas. Theories of ideology and the ideology of theory, in: Historical Materialism 6, pp.

Grammaire, Saskatoon: HardPress, Engels, Frederick []. Habermas contra Adorno, in: Historical Materialism 11 2 , pp. Does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? Does urban politics constitute the necessary fusion of theory and practice? If so, practice of what kind, and whose practice?

As editors, it was incumbent upon us to provide some direction to our contributors on how to address these issues. In very different ways, it is clear that all were able to meet the challenge. Here, we flesh out our thoughts as they evolved over the past couple of years. Such guidance was, of course, given with the recognition of the impossibility of value-free social science, so we take as given the idea that empirical theory will be infused with normative influences and do not try to force a strict separation.

Empirical theory seeks to explain observed phenomena, usually by establishing a number of conceptually linked and generalizable causal relationships about how some factors affect or cause phenomena to occur. Most of the urban political theories or theoretic propositions collected in this volume fit this general notion of empirical theory. Such theories are, however, highly diverse, varying along several key dimensions. Some maintain a high degree of abstraction from direct observation, while others closely ground the abstract in the concrete and empirical.

Some proceed largely inductively, building from empirical observation to hypotheses, while others are more deductive in nature, deriving hypotheses logically from an initial set of non-observable axioms. Theories in the volume also differ in their explanatory scope. Marxism employs considerable abstraction, deduces hypothesis from axioms about the nature of capitalism, and purports to explain much of the urban condition and society at large.

Urban regime theory, in contrast, focuses on the concrete existence of specific local governing coalitions, generates hypotheses rooted in empirical observation of such coalitions, and offers an explanation only for how local political arrangements mediate larger-order forces rather than for those forces themselves. Or, it may draw on and adapt political theory at large to help us better understand urban political phenomena. And, there are grey areas.

For example, urban regime theory, probably the most influential approach in the field since the late s, owes many intellectual debts and is thoroughly cosmopolitan. In his extensive body of work see Orr and Johnson, , Clarence Stone credits many influences; from the political classics of the community power debate and neopluralism through to the sociologists Max Weber, Philip Abrams and Charles Tilly, who clarified his thinking respectively on social stratification, the nature of structure and agency and what he sees as the loose connections between the economic, political and ideational spheres.

The urban is politics in miniature and this creates a particular kind of political system rather than a mirror image of other levels …. The particularity to which regime theory points is the form of coalition arising from the need to mobilise governing resources at the urban scale.

This definition could be applied at the urban scale. The differences are partly methodological in that we can more easily study regime formation, maintenance and collapse close up; and partly analytical in that urban regime theory makes specific propositions about the development of urban governing regimes.

It purports to explain why regimes are rare and difficult to mobilise, the conditions in which they are likely to emerge, how power is pre-empted and governing agendas constructed by actors with divergent but congruent interests. Thus, it purports to explain from the bottom-up why governing coalitions are likely, but not certain, to be biased against the lower classes.

Each proposition is grounded in broader social science traditions, but at the same time hinges on conditions pertaining at the urban scale. Peter John again helps us when we think about the distinction between the urban and the non-urban. Propinquity is a particular characteristic of the urban space, which does not usually apply at other scales of governing or when comparing the urban with the rural.

Alongside inexorable urbanization, this policy is imperative for the sustenance of ever growing mega-cities. Urbanization, then, refers not only to the growth of cities, particularly in the developing world, but also the organisation of social life. It is an ongoing feature of contemporary capitalism affecting both cities and the countryside in equal measure. In this interpretation, the urbanization of the rural has been occurring at least since the beginnings of the enclosure movement in England in the 15th century, which later gathered unstoppable momentum.

It became a grotesque feature of so-called socialism in the USSR, where the forced collectivization of agriculture effectively proletarianized the rural population. Seen this way, the urban is both form and process. And, as Katoaka argues in chapter 5, following Lefebvre, it is also a matter of identity, disposition, psychology, culture and lifestyle.

Admittedly, we risk concept stretching in characterising the urban so expansively. Nevertheless, we believe that it is possible to assert convincingly that society is increasingly urbanized and at the same time delimit the concept. We do not claim that the urban encompasses every dimension of human experience. Nationalism, supra-national political institutions, parties, religious identities and the rise of social movements and environmentalism come to mind as features which, if they are at least part-constituted in the contemporary urban experience, are certainly not reducible to it.

With that qualification, we suggest that to study the urban is, in many ways, to study the motor of contemporary human development. One important question addressed by the book concerns the scope of politics, both as discipline and practice. Thus, is politics about the institutions of government, or more recently, governance? Can any debate in any context, public or private, about what a person or group ought to do, and how, be considered an instance of politics?

Is politics a universal feature of all human societies, or is it bookended historically; for example, by the rise and eventual fall of class societies? Is politics essentially the same thing now as it has been throughout history? Perhaps of greatest interest for our purposes is what it means to talk about a discipline of urban politics different from, say, sociology or economics? Such a question could easily lead to a lengthy discourse - indeed another book - on the historical conditions in which disciplinary silos evolved, their merits and limitations.

For us, simply, politics is what our contributors have made of it. Thus, it is about the study of government, institutions and public engagement in dialogue and partnership with, or against, government. It is about the dynamic relationships between peoples, conflictual or otherwise.

The volume shows that the field of urban politics cannot do other than address questions of livelihood and reproduction, space and migration and the web of relationships between state, market and citizen. Thus, inevitably, it transgresses other disciplines. Centrally, of course, urban politics is and always has been about power; its genesis, its acquisition, its forms and its uses.

Urban politics as practice Another question posed to us concerned the relationship between theory and practice in urban politics. On a broad canvas, this question is about the orientation of the discipline toward social questions and the role of urban scholars as practitioners and activists.

Inspired by the urban movements and crises of the late s, the Council of University Institutes for Urban Affairs was formed in Boston in , succeeded by the Urban Affairs Association in The UAA is very clear that the urban field is both academic and professional, the Association welcoming faculty, students and professionals alike to its conferences and offering a platform to all. The mission of urban studies, then, is to engage in a critical dialogue with public policy and intervene widely in public discourse.

There are, of course, very different ways of fulfilling this injunction; from researching and writing about practice, to engaging in practice as participant-observers; as policy makers, dissidents and activists. All the contributors to this volume can credibly claim to have engaged with practice in one or more of the senses described above. As this is a book about theories, however, they were charged with demonstrating how theory characterizes and explains empirical events.

We asked them to explore the main theoretical claims and controversies in their deisgnated area and ascertain how far these theories improved our understanding of urban political life — and thus, by implication, our capacity to engage effectively with it. Theories of urban politics addresses the relationship between theory and practice in this specific sense but we also hope that the book will find a wide readership beyond the faculty and influence debates, discussions and activities in the public arena.

While this is a second edition, it is also a comprehensive re-write. The current volume includes a mix of new contributors and contributors to the first edition. Previous contributors were invited to prepare new chapters on a different topic, thus ensuring that where chapters from the first edition have been retained, they have passed to a new author with a new perspective.

Readers will notice that some chapters from the first edition have disappeared altogether, while others remain in a different form or are more or less completely new. The editors are responsible for the cut, which hangs on our judgment about the state of the discipline today and the challenges it faces. For example, regulation theory is now subsumed into the chapter on Marxism, because it has declined in influence since Pluralism and elite theory are integrated into the community power debate; not because they are less important, but because we had to recognise claims from newer approaches.

On the other hand, chapters on urban social movements and leadership are retained intact because both themes have the same, or greater, prominence than in Themes rising up the agenda, in our judgement, include globalization and urbanization and postmodernism. In addition, we decided that overview chapters would be appropriate in opening and closing the volume We asked Peter John to begin by explaining why it is important and rewarding to study urban politics, and Clarence Stone to conclude by outlining the key research questions confronting urban scholars.

All contributors consider cross-national issues. Anglo-American issues feature strongly in most chapters, but many delve into broader literatures. Thus, we believe that the volume has global reach, pointing to challenges that will occupy scholars the world over in years to come.

Inevitably, there is overlap between some of the contributions; for example between community power and regime theory and Marxism and postmodernism. However, where overlap occurs, we do not see it as duplication; rather, we believe it casts an interesting light on different interpretations and styles.

Whereas Theories 1 comprised 14 chapters, Theories 2 has In a volume of around the same length, we have inevitably sacrificed depth for breadth.

However, we believe the result bears us out, offering a wide ranging examination of theories, controversies and challenges but in sufficient depth for a robust evaluation of the relevant perspectives. In different ways, every chapter covers three specific issues: explication and critique of the dominant theoretical approaches, the application of theoretical approaches in conceptualising and researching the empirical world, and areas for future theoretical development and research.

The core of the book builds around three classic issues in the study of urban politics: Who wields urban political power, the nature of urban governance, and how urban citizens both affect and are affected by these dynamics of power and governance.

Apart from the first and the last, the chapters are organized under these three headings: power, governance, and citizens. He sets the scene for the rest of the volume by reflecting on the unique characteristics of urban politics; the rich literatures on power on one hand, the reach of the urban concept on the other. John offers a particularly insightful explanation of the value of urban research.

Urban spaces create propinquity and as such are more amenable to research than, say, national governments. They are also very numerous with hundreds of cities in any one country and thousands across the globe.

Numerosity allows for large n comparisons which would be very difficult or impossible at the national scale. Moreover, large n international comparisons are easier at the urban scale, allowing urbanists to explore the patterns and diversity of political life across the globe see also Sellers, John concludes that provided we are not downcast by neersayers, or tainted with an exaggerated sense of our importance, future scholars would do well to follow the path trodden by the many of the great political scientists of the 20th century who took urban politics as their starting point.

Part II: Power A preponderance of urban political theory has been devoted to understanding the nature of urban power: its production, distribution, exercise, and impact in its various faces. In chapter 2, Alan Harding discusses some of these greats, Dahl, Hunter, Polsby and Lindblom, in the context of the community power debate.

Harding takes us on a journey through the history of the debate, arguing that the work of community power scholars was formative of urban politics as an independent field of study. He demonstrates why the debate, much derided by commentators like Dowding , remains relevant today.

Harding argues that the influence of community power extends in scope well beyond the literature commonly branded as such; notably or notoriously the elitism-pluralism debate. Certainly, the concern with power at the urban scale, which was central then remains central now. Harding charts the influence of community power on the later scholarship of the s, 70s and 80s through the works of Lindblom, Peterson and Stone.

The influence of community power upon the latter is discussed by Karen Mossberger in chapter 3. Harding concludes that the challenge for the next generation of community power studies is cross national; to develop common theoretical and methodological tools, which enable us to overcome the ethnocentrism, of which approaches like regime theory have been accused. Chapter 3 tackles the subject of urban regime analysis, which, as Mossberger points out, has been one the most prevalent ways to study of urban politics for over two decades.

Regime theory portrays political power at the urban scale as characterized by neither pluralist fluidity and openness nor elite domination and control, while incorporating both political and economic influences on city politics. Mossberger focuses her discussion of regime analysis on the work of Clarence Stone, whose version, which he developed most thoroughly in his historical study of Atlanta, has been most frequently applied in urban research.

Another major thrust of work attempts to apply, with varying results, the urban regime concept to non-US contexts. Mossberger concludes by asking whether these conceptual and theoretical developments sound the death knell for regime analysis. Her answer is a qualified no. Regime analysis will continue to be important to urban political research, she predicts, but it may be seen as only one manner in which governing arrangements can be conceptualized, especially in a comparative context.

In chapter two, Harding explains that by the s, community power studies had fallen out of favour, with neo marxist and neo-Weberian approaches increasingly dominant. Mike Geddes charts the development of Marxist urban scholarship from this period in chapter 4. Geddes contends that despite the reverses experienced by the left over the past 20 years, marxism remains highly relevant for understanding contemporary urban capitalism and the tasks facing those, notably in South America, who would resist it.

He begins by exploring the period around the s during which marxist scholarship was at its most influential; particularly in the diverse works of Castells, Harvey and Lefebvre. Yet, he argues, if Marxism faces daunting challenges it still has much to contribute to understanding the trajectory of and modes of resistance to contemporary neoliberalism.

At the same time, it must prove itself equal the challenges of the day; not least urbanization and climate change. Post-Structuralism, she notes, consists of an interpretative practice, termed critique, which seeks to delve deeper into the complexities of the familiar and reveal how structures act not merely as explanations but rather as the very means by which the familiar become so. Since the urban is not determined by any single structure, she finds the study of the urban to be inherently post- structural.

Therefore her aim is to re introduce post-structuralism into urban political theory, and toward that end she offers four ways urban theorists can begin experimenting with post-structural critique.

Part III examines the diverse theoretical challenges posed by developments in contemporary urban governance, enhancing our understanding of institutionalisation, regionalisation and re-scaling, leadership, the reform of the urban bureaucracy and development and urbanization.

New institutionalism has become highly influential over the past decade, an example of theory from the wider field of political science prospering in studies of urban governance.

In chapter 6, Vivien Lowndes, a leading exponent, explains the emergence and subsequent development of neo institutionalism in urban studies. Contrary to the inductive-descriptive approach of traditional institutional studies, the new institutionalism begins with theoretical propositions about the way institutions work, focusing in particular on the norms and rules governing political behaviour in given settings.

Institutionalism itself is a broad church, encompassing structure focused, cultural and rational choice explanations, which leads some to question whether it can reasonably be characterised as a single school of thought. But, Lowndes argues that the unifying proposition in institutional theory is the claim that institutions are the central component of political life and institutionalism of whatever kind the most efficacious means of explaining it.

She deploys three mini-case studies to demonstrate the versatility of institutional explanation in understanding political behaviour, the complexity of contemporary governance and the relationship between continuity and change at the urban scale. Challenges facing institutional theorists include the alleged incompatibility between its radically different understandings and the consequent methodological criticism that such a broad umbrella approach explains everything and nothing.

How, then, can we know the influence of institutions when we see it? Nevertheless, Lowndes concludes that the approach offers significant insights into the nature of political constraint and the differentiation of localities, and thus can offer fruitful advice to urban policy makers about the opportunities and constraints on change at the local scale. Since the first edition of Theories of Urban Politics was conceived over 15 years ago, interest in the possibilities and limits of urban governance at the regional scale has exploded.

The urban politics literature from the mids on is replete with analyses of regional-level governance. As Hank Savitch and Ronald Vogel demonstrate in chapter 7, however, regionalism has not been so much discovered as rediscovered, since such thinking and its critique dates back several decades. The chief contrast between old and new regionalism, Savitch and Vogel point out, is that the old regionalism sought to create formal governments on the metropolitan level to eliminate fragmentation, where the new regionalism stresses more informal modes of metropolitan governance to manage such fragmentation.

Persistent criticism of these regionalist visions has come from the public choice school. As Savitch and Vogel explain, this school embraces rather than condemns local governmental fragmentation, rejecting metropolitanism in favor of polycentrism.

Most recently, a fourth theoretical approach to regionalism has emerged. This approach, which Savitch and Vogel following others label rescaling or reterritorialization, develops a more comprehensive and sophisticated understanding of new regionalism, linking it with larger dynamics of state restructuring and global capitalism.

The starting point for Stephen Greasley and Gerry Stoker in their discussion of urban political leadership in chapter 8 is the chapter on leadership by Clarence Stone in the first edition.

Stone cautioned that adopting the Mayoral model would not necessarily result in strong local leadership.

Despite this caution, there has been a trend towards the elected mayoral system or other models of executive leadership. Thus,the overview and critique offered by Greasley and Stoker is particularly timely. They assess recent literatures on leadership, focusing on the relationship between three key factors: contextual influences on the performance of leaders, the characteristics of individual leaders and the distribution of decision making powers between leaders and others in the local political system.

The core theoretical concern for leadership studies is understanding the impact of individual actions in a complex social system. With respect to urban political leadership, this question manifests in the form of whether strong leader models make a positive difference in enhancing local democracy. In chapter 9, Anne-Mette Kjaer explores the use of governance theory in studying changes to the urban bureaucracy.

Thus, the task of the urban bureaucracy is coordinative; mobilising governing resources fragmented by these centrifugal trends. Hence, governance theory shares common cause with the concerns of leadership, institutional and regime theorists as well as a concern with the mobilisation of community and social capital. Kjaer draws attention to the many criticisms of governance theory, particularly the claim that network governance is in fact tightly controlled by national governments and the dispersal of state power upwards, downwards and outwards radically overstated.

Hence, one of the weaknesses in governance theory is that it does not adequately theorise the relationship between hierarchy market and network modes of social coordination.

Kjaer concludes by challenging governance theorists to think further about the conditions in which networks might function without hierarchical interventions, the implications of conflict for the management of networks and the relative prevalence of success and failure in particular modes of governance.

Nearly all extant urban political theory has been developed and applied in the context of the Western, or developed, world. The rapid urbanization of the developing world, driven in part by powerful forces of globalization, demanded attention be paid in this edition to urban issues in the non-Western context.

We have hence dedicated chapter 10, authored by Richard Stren, to this subject; to recognize the importance of this phenomenon and attempt to better understand it.