Bringing up the past: Political experience and the distribution of urban populations
Abstract This article reexamines the effects of political determinants on urban population distributions by developing a series of longitudinal measures that proxy for a nation’s political experiences. The cross-national analyses are derived from a new database that includes population figures for the five largest cities of 123 nations from 1960 to 2005. This coverage allows for the development of the 1–4 urban primacy ratio which is used to assess past findings and test four hypotheses related to the length of capital status as well as colonial, democratic, and communist experiences. The main findings suggest that the length of a nation’s largest city’s capital status is positively associated with urban primacy. Conversely, nations with longer democratic or communist experiences have lower levels of urban primacy. Finally, the results on colonial experience are curvilinear and lend strong support to modernization and central place theory.
Introductory Remarks 2 Part I. National and Regional Context of Policy-Making 2 Section 1. National context of policy-making 2 Section 2. Regional context 6 Section 3. SNA implementation 9 Part II. Europeanization Processes 11 Section 1. Adaptational pressures 11 Section 2. Resistance to change 13 Section 3. Evolution of central state policy-making structures 16 Section 4. Non-state actors 16 Section 5. Civic culture 18 Part III. Assessment of Learning Capacity 18 Section 1. Outcome 18 Section 2. Patterns of learning and adaptation 19 Section 3. Policy recommendations 21 References 22 Appendix 1: Interviewed actors / stakeholders and quantitative SNA results 25 Policy Area: Regional Policy. Case Study Region: Southern Transdanubia 25 Policy Area: Environmental Policy / Waste Management. Case Study Region: Central Hungary 29 Appendix 2: Map of Hungary with the two case study regions 24