Measuring Territorial Political Capacity in European Regions

The final paper discusses the need to go beyond debates about convergence and divergence and discusses the need for the creation and operationalisation of a new framework for studying the ‘territorial political capacity’ of regional governments and authorities in Europe. The paper builds upon a recent tradition of measurement of sub-state territorial power in political science and economics. Of most relevance,  Hooghe, Marks and Schackel (2010) recently developed an influential and much cited new indicator of decentralisation: the Regional Authority Index (henceforth RAI), which is widely considered as the new benchmark and which features prominently in our own approach. The paper proposes a new analytical framework that integrates ‘soft’ evidence into the analysis of territorial models of governance. The framework combines hard and soft variables:  potential indicators of regional capacity sometimes require quantitative data, sometimes mobilise qualitative evidence and sometimes require both.  We select seven indicators of territorial political capacity which can each have a material, as well as a constructed dimension. Mainly material indicators include:  institutions and institutional resources; economic profiles and material capacity. Mixed material and constructed indicators include styles of inter-governmental relations and political leadership.  Mainly constructed indicators include the operation of territorial regimes (is there a consensus between political, economic, associative actors)?  territorial identity (is the regional space underpinned by a [regional] territorial identity or not?); and territorial narratives (is there a coherent shared view on the nature of the challenges facing the region, or a shared repertoire of responses?