Voting Locally: At the Roots of Municipal Politics in Contemporary Europe

In this final chapter, we review the most important elements emerging from the empirical investigation conducted in the book, also discussing their implications for our understanding of the functioning of municipal politics. The evidence of our book highlighted, across Europe, the explicative role over electoral participation in municipal elections played by municipal size and, even more so, of the degree of urbanization of a municipality. Significant country-level variations emerged in this respect and we therefore proposed a typology of European countries, based on the impact that size and urbanization exert on turnout, as an analytical and theoretical tool for further investigations. Furthermore, our analysis revealed the importance of crucial contextual factors, belonging to both the national level and the local level, which lead us to ultimately answer to the initial question and hence characterize municipal turnout as mixed in terms of the alternative nationalization and localization frameworks. Finally, in this chapter we suggest two paths to preserve local level and enhance its turnout in an era of multiple challenges to democracies: to overcome the dichotomy cities/countryside by considering the degree of urbanization as a new perspective for shaping effective territorial policies, and to focus on the effectiveness of the citizens’ vote to preserve local democracy. In both these ways, municipal turnout will benefit.