Grounds of democracy: Public authority and the politics of metropolitan land use in three societies. (Volumes I and II)

This dissertation employs a study of local land use policymaking and politics in a French, a German and an American metropolitan area--Montpellier, Freiburg im Breisgau, and New Haven, Connecticut--to examine patterns of public authority in these three societies. I argue that the recent rise of systems of local land use management has in each setting influenced both the ultimate course of land development and the conditions of power in this arena. The divergent managerialist formations of institutions and norms follow patterns I label personalized officialist in Montpellier, organizational officialist in Freiburg and pluralist in New Haven. These patterns entail different consequences for the democratic character and legitimacy of processes as well as for the substantive results of policies.;The main body of the dissertation analyzes the different institutional and social bases of these patterns in policies and politics. This analysis draws mainly on the results of standardized interview questions posed to the principal elites and activists in each metropolitan area, and on statistical sets of land use controversies compiled on the basis of these interviews. The first part of my account demonstrates that institutional practices related to managerial policymaking in local politics and administration and in the local political economy follow logics associated with the three patterns. Participatory politics, including protest as well as more conventional forms of nonelectoral politics, has emerged in each setting alongside managerial practices. This participation also differs in ways traceable to influences from the patterns. I then analyze the grounding of each pattern in general means of public authority. Organizational hierarchies, legal rules and practices of civic inclusion operate throughout state-society relations as resources, constraints and constitutive influences. These means shape the contrasting character of institutions and the divergent bases of institutional legitimation and delegitimation evident in the patterns. Finally, correlational and regression analysis of housing and permit statistics in the three metropolitan areas demonstrates that differences between the patterns have affected the overall course of development.