Book Reviews
361
Was etwas fehlt, ist eine genauere Betrachtung der Limitationen der RCS-Methode.
Erstens sind RCS-Umfragen kompliziert umzusetzen und relativ teuer. Nicht jedes Institut
besitzt die Kapazit€
aten oder das Knowhow, solche Umfragedesigns zu implementieren.
Zweitens ben€
otigt man f€
ur eine erfolgreiche RCS-Umfrage hohe Fallzahlen. F€
ur Selects
€ber 4000 Personen befragt. Gleichzeitig ist die Fallzahl pro
2011 wurden zum Beispiel u
Tag oder pro Partei dann immer noch recht gering. Manche von den Hypothesen in De
Rocchis Buch finden keine empirische Unterst€
utzung. Das heisst jedoch nicht unbedingt,
dass diese Hypothesen nicht stimmen k€
onnen: “The absence of evidence ist not the
evidence of absence.” Mit anderen Worten: Selbst mit einer €ausserst detaillierten RCSStudie sind die kleinen Ver€
anderungen in einem Wahlkampf nur schwer zu beobachten.
Eine weitere Limitation der Studie bezieht sich auf die Verkn€
upfung der RCS-Daten mit
dem medialen Kontext. Die Messung von Mediennutzung ist sehr schwierig (Prior 2009).
In den Daten von Selects 2011 wurde aber nur eher grob abgefragt, welche Medien
konsumiert werden. F€
ur die Verkn€
upfung von Befragten mit dem Medienkontext muss De
Rocchi daher recht grosse methodische Annahmen machen, die jedoch alle sinnvoll und
durchdacht sind. Dennoch zeigt sich auch hier, wie herausfordernd die Evaluierung
kurzfristiger Einfl€
usse auf die Wahlentscheidung ist. De Rocchis Buch leistet hier einen
wichtigen und innovativen Beitrag, gleichzeitig zeigt es auch auf, welche Wege die
zuk€
unftige Forschung einschlagen sollte.
Markus Wagner
Universit€at Wien
Literatur
Berelson, B.R., P.F. Lazarsfeld and W.N. McPhee (1954). Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a
Presidential Campaign. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Prior, M. (2009). Improving Media Effects Research through Better Measurement of News
Exposure. The Journal of Politics 71(3): 893–908.
Sen, M. and O. Wasow (2016). Race as a Bundle of Sticks: Designs that Estimate Effects of
Seemingly Immutable Characteristics. Annual Review of Political Science 19: 499–522.
The Political Economy of Capital Cities.
Mayer Heike, Sager, Fritz, Kaufmann, David and Martin Warland
Abingdon, Routledge (2018), 181 p., ISBN 978-1-138-68143-9
The Political Economy of Capital Cities is a short and well-written book on the subject of
Secondary Capital Cities (SCCs), i.e. cities that are the capital of a country, but that are
less important to the country economically than at least one other city of the country (p.
3). Therefore, though not clearly indicated in the title, this book purposefully moves away
from the study of global capital cities like Tokyo or London (e.g. Sassen 1991), to
investigate how public-private interactions in four less economically important capital
cities (Bern, Ottawa, The Hague and Washington D.C.) determine the positioning of these
cities on the national and international stages.
The book’s focus on SCCs makes for an interesting read. Besides being overlooked in
the literature, SCCs have special characteristics affecting cooperation between public and
© 2018 Swiss Political Science Association
Swiss Political Science Review (2018) Vol. 24(3): 359–369
362
Book Reviews
private actors. In a SCC, public bodies represent a larger share of the city economy and
have more possibilities to constrain their private partners, especially through public
procurement procedures. However, since state actors are exempted from taxation, this
important public presence also considerably restrains the fiscal base at the local level. As a
result, local authorities of SCCs do not have the means to maintain their capital city
status alone. They have to look for alliances and partnerships with private actors,
especially given the declining role of the nation state in the current globalizing context.
Theoretically speaking, the interdisciplinary perspective of the book will be of interest to
a large audience ranging from geographers to economists and political scientists. The
authors study the internal mechanisms of public-private relationships borrowing the
concept of Regional Innovation Systems (RIS) coming from economic geography. A RIS
relates to “a set of interacting private and public interests, formal institutions, and other
organizations that function according to organizational and institutional arrangements and
relationships conducive to the generation, use, and dissemination of knowledge” (p. 14).
This concept has been developed to identify specific clusters in the local economy (e.g.
automobile, high-tech, watchmaking) but has not been applied to highly-regulated sectors
in which public bodies play a much more important role. A well-developed RIS implies
that both public and private sectors are important for the city’s economy and that they
regularly interact. In contrast, a weak RIS will be characterized in a capital city by a
strong dependence on the public sector and by weak public- private cooperation.
Then the stage of development of a city’s RIS determines the types of locational policies
that local and regional policymakers are able to put in place “to enhance the
competitiveness of [the] region” (p. 24). This concept of locational policies considering the
attractiveness of the region as a whole was developed at the end of the 1980s within urban
studies, in order to propose an alternative to the neoliberal paradigm that merely aimed to
improve the competitiveness of the city-center at the expense of its periphery. The authors
define four types of locational policies. The less ambitious and most common one consists
of asking for public funds and compensation payments from the national government
arguing for the specific needs and features of the capital city status. The second one is to
coordinate key competitive edges such as transportation, taxation, image-building and
economic promotion at the metropolitan level. The third one consists in attracting private
firms arguing on the spatial proximity with national governmental agencies and national
sectoral organizations. Finally, innovation policies are the last type of locational policy.
They strengthen interactions within the “triple helix” – i.e. between firms, knowledge
institutions and governmental officials – and encourage the emergence of start-ups.
Attracting firms and pushing innovation are the most ambitious locational policies and
require a more developed RIS. Both strategies especially target knowledge-intensive
business services (KIBS) active in highly-regulated sectors (e.g. medical technology,
cybersecurity, education, energy) that strongly depend on public procurement contracts.
Empirically speaking, the book is rich and comprehensive. The authors conducted solid
case study research based on an impressive number of 179 face-to-face interviews
complemented with immersion stays at the universities of each city under study. Thus,
despite the fact that the four authors are based in Bern, the empirical analysis of the three
other SCCs (Ottawa, The Hague and Washington D.C.) is conducted with the same level
of in-depth knowledge and importance.
Several results confirm the link between the RIS of a city and the locational policies it
chooses, but the interaction goes both ways. For instance, the goals of innovation policies
definitely depend from the RIS development stage, but SCCs also develop innovation
© 2018 Swiss Political Science Association
Swiss Political Science Review (2018) Vol. 24(3): 359–369
Book Reviews
363
policies to specifically address RIS failures. Ottawa and The Hague recently created new
cluster organizations fostering exchanges within their triple helix. It reinforced their RIS,
especially in economic sectors in which they already had a competitive advantage (hightech for Ottawa, security for The Hague). As coordination within its RIS functions
already (too) well, Washington D.C. rather pushes for the creation of start-ups in order to
add new actors in the RIS and to prevent lock-in, i.e. a situation in which public
procurement procedures become corporatist and where innovation decreases because it
lacks new actors bringing new ideas. Finally, the least developed RIS of Bern explains why
the city’s strategy still largely focuses on attracting public funds and does not promote
itself as an attractive business hub.
Another main result of the book that is worth mentioning concerns the advantage of
spatial proximity to governmental agencies. We could think that in today’s highly
technological world, spatial proximity is not a significant factor in securing public
procurement contracts. However, the in-depth analysis of the authors reveals exactly the
opposite, because the decisive steps occur largely before the official launch of the public
procurement procedure. In all four cities, interviewees stress the importance of maintaining
regular informal contacts with governmental agencies in order to evaluate the needs of the
administration, to influence the content of future procurement contracts and to anticipate
their launch. In Ottawa and Washington D.C. governmental agencies even organize preprocurement press conferences where competing companies come and can initiate
cooperation to respond to governmental needs. Thus, winning a public procurement
contract requires much more back and forth with governmental agencies than what the
official procedure suggests. These initial stages cannot feasibly be completed by firms
located outside of the capital city. Therefore, despite globalization and digitalization, SCCs
can still rely on proximity to political power to achieve prosperity. The authors conclude
their book in this vein, offering ten recommendations towards a more prosperous SCC to
firms and policymakers at city and national levels.
Let us conclude this review by raising some criticisms about the book. First, there is a
contradiction related to the RIS as a whole and the risk of lock-in, one of the three RIS
features. When the authors theoretically present the concept of RIS, the risk of lock-in is
said to be constant, whatever the level of the two other RIS features, namely
organizational thinness and fragmentation. However, when it comes to the empirical
comparison of the four SCCs, it becomes clear that the risk of lock-in is much higher in
cities with ambitious innovation policies and well-organized interactions within the triple
helix (Ottawa, Washington D.C.), than in cities with a thin and fragmented RIS (Bern).
Thus, the risk of lock-in seems to run counter to the two other RIS features. Since it
clearly impacts the type of locational policies that cities will develop, this trade-off
between the risk of lock-in and the overall stage of development of the RIS could have
been better stressed and discussed by the authors.
Second, it is regrettable that the authors do not consider the urban regime framework as
a bridge between economic geography and political science to make, as suggested by the
book’s title, an even more comprehensive analysis of the political economy of SCCs. The
definition of the RIS, the importance of informality in procurement procedures or the
cluster strategies established by cities to position themselves in highly regulated markets,
all these elements fit within the regime framework. Given these similarities and the
empirical richness of the book, the alleged infeasibility of applying the regime framework
advanced by the authors (pp. 146-47) is a rather unconvincing argument. Moreover,
reference to regimes that do not necessarily prioritize growth (Stone 1993) would have
© 2018 Swiss Political Science Association
Swiss Political Science Review (2018) Vol. 24(3): 359–369
364
Book Reviews
been helpful in explaining how cities solve RIS trade-offs and why, in some cities like
Bern, local actors do not necessarily aim to get a highly- developed RIS.
Finally, whereas the ten recommendations concluding the book will surely interest
practitioners, academics will no doubt be disappointed by the limited reflections the
authors make regarding the implications of their work for existing literature. Given the
fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue and the convincing arguments that spatial proximity to
government still matters, the reader would expect a little more than one-and-a-half pages
(pp. 155-156) to reflect on the book’s main results and to sketch research challenges for
further work. However, despite this limitation, the book convincingly sheds light on the
overlooked political economy of SCCs with four detailed case studies, thereby being a
worthwhile reading for every urban scholar, regardless of his or her disciplinary
background.
S
ebastien Lambelet
University of Geneva
References
Sassen, S. (1991). The Global city : New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stone, C. (1993). Urban Regimes and the Capacity to Govern: A Political Economy Approach.
Journal of Urban Affairs 15(1): 1–28.
Les ressources d’action publique. Vers une nouvelle lecture du pouvoir
Knoepfel, Peter
Z€
urich und Genf, Seismo (2017), 324 S., ISBN 978-2-88351-080-7
Das neuste Werk von Peter Knoepfel handelt von einem der wohl zentralsten und
€ffentlichen
wichtigsten Konzepte in der Politikwissenschaft und der Analyse von o
Politiken: der Macht von politischen Akteuren. Der Autor verspricht «Une nouvelle
lecture de pouvoir» (Titel des Buches), und der Leser wird von diesem Titel nicht
entt€auscht. Das Buch skizziert nicht nur einen spannenden, aus einem anderen
€bertragenen Ansatz, um u
€ber Ressourcen und damit verbundene Macht
Literaturstrang u
€ber eine
politischer Akteure nachzudenken, sondern liefert auch eine vertiefte Diskussion u
breite Palette von verschiedenen Ressourcen. Die Argumente im Buch bauen direkt auf
€ber nat€
fr€
uheren Arbeiten des Autors u
urliche Ressourcen auf und wenden diese Sicht auf
nat€
urliche und weitere Ressourcen auf die Studie von Macht und Einfluss von Akteuren
an. Dadurch ist das Buch f€
ur ein diverses Publikum von Interesse: Erstens ist es eine gute
€ffentlicher Politiken,
Lekt€
ure f€
ur Studierende der Politikwissenschaft und der Analyse o
und somit n€
utzlich f€
ur den Unterricht (der Autor erw€ahnt dies explizit, «destine aux
€
€ber verschiedene
enseignements academiques» (S.13)). Es liefert eine breite Ubersicht
u
Arten von Ressourcen von politischen Akteuren, beleuchtet systematisch verschiedene
Aspekte des Umgangs mit diesen Ressourcen, und stellt eine Auswahl von wichtigen
€ber Macht und Ressourcen in der existierenden Literatur vor. Zweitens
Artikeln u
beinhaltet das Buch auch f€
ur Forschende, welche sich mit der Macht und Ressourcen von
Akteuren und dessen Einfluss auf kollektive Entscheidungsprozesse auseinandersetzen,
inspirierende Argumente. F€
ur diese Leserschaft ist die systematische Abhandlung
© 2018 Swiss Political Science Association
Swiss Political Science Review (2018) Vol. 24(3): 359–369