Local Politics between Resurgent Authoritarianism and Resilient Democratisation

Autocratisation threatens democratic achievements of the past decades, but the relevant trends seem to be mainly observed at the national level. Dynamics at the local level often develop in the shadows of scholarly attention. In particular, the daily practices of local governments and local politics are hardly discussed in relation to the global rise of authoritarianism despite the ambition of most political decentralisation processes to bring government closer to ‘the people’ and therefore to democratise from below. Doubts about the democratic effectiveness of decentralisation accompanied the respective reform processes, in the Global South as well as in post-socialist countries. Yet, decentralisation, and particularly devolution, created new actors and redistributed resources, thus affecting the daily practices of local politics. The panel invites empirical insights into the everyday consequences of decentralisation for local political actors, local self-organisation, and populations in times of global autocratisation trends. How do local actors react to the increasing use of local governments as safe havens by authoritarian regimes? How do renewed authoritarianisms affect the everyday practices of local politicians? How do the global trends affect citizen participation in local politics where decentralisation took place under the continuing legacies of autocratic regimes?