Who Supports Metropolitan Reform? Citizens

Who Supports Metropolitan Reform? Citizens’ Attitudes in Four West European Countries Michael A. Strebel* *

Department of Political Science, University of Zurich May 31, 2018

Paper prepared for presentation at the EURA Annual Conference, Tilburg, June 21-23, 2018 Abstract In this paper, I analyze public opinion on political integration reforms in metropolitan areas, i.e. citizens’ attitudes towards the unification of local jurisdictions in city-regions. I make three distinct contributions. First, for the explanation of these attitudes, I apply theories on public opinion towards political integration in the international realm to the metropolitan context. Based in these theories, I distinguish utilitarian, ideational, and cognitive motivations to support or oppose metropolitan reforms. Second, I propose a new measure for citizens’ orientations towards metropolitan reforms, consisting of attitudes towards inter-municipal taxbase sharing, consolidation, inter-municipal cooperation, and the introduction of a metropolitan government. Third, I analyze data from a unique population-based online-survey administered on 5,000 respondents from eight metropolitan areas in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom in 2015. The empirical analysis suggests that support for metropolitan integration is contingent on sociopsychological rather than utilitarian considerations. Respondents identifying predominantly with their municipality and supporters of right-wing populist parties are skeptical of metropolitan reforms. Moreover, citizens who are more exposed to metropolitan issues hold more favorable opinions towards metropolitan reforms and they extrapolate their support for metropolitan reforms from their trust in local government. By contrast, economic self-interest and pocketbook issues are not associated with metropolitan integration support. These findings indicate that attitudes towards political integration hinge on similar factors - irrespective of the territorial scale at which the integration processes take place. Keywords: Public Opinion, Metropolitan Governance, Political Integration, Survey Research

1

Introduction

How should metropolitan areas be governed? This question has bothered urbanists, public administrators and political scientists since the beginning of the 20th century. The answers given to this question can be aligned on a continuum between two extreme positions. On one end, proponents of the public choice school appreciate the existing politicoinstitutional fragmentation of (most) city-regions for its decentralized structure that in their view is best suited to respond to citizens’ needs and demands. On the other end, metropolitan reformers advocate the consolidation and political integration of local governments in metropolitan areas and argue that this allows for more efficient public service delivery and for a more equitable distribution of resources across the city-region (see Savitch and Vogel, 2009). To make a case for one or the other form of governing metropolitan areas, scholars commonly focus on the (economic) effects and outputs of different politicoadministrative settings. What is largely missing from this debate is a perspective that focuses more on the input side of the political process (Heinelt and Kübler, 2005). In particular, only few studies assess what citizens think about how metropolitan areas should be governed. The question I attempt to answer in this article is thus who supports and who opposes reforms that lead to a stronger political integration of the metropolitan area? Here I conceive of metropolitan reforms that attempt at a stronger collaboration of local jurisdictions as political integration processes, which can be broadly defined as the (further) unification of existing political entities. Taking on this political integration perspective opens the possibility to treat such metropolitan reform processes as just one particular manifestation of a broader phenomenon which also took and takes place on the national and the international level, e.g. nation-state building or European integration (Jacob and Toscano, 1964; Deutsch et al., 1968). This broad perspective is useful because it allows to integrate theories that deal with public opinion towards integration processes on other territorial scales. In particular, I take stock of research that explains attitudes towards international integration processes and towards European integration and combine them with existing studies on metropolitan reform attitudes to derive testable hypotheses. Doing so has two benefits. First, the few existing studies on metropolitan reform attitudes with their supposedly rather idiosyncratic arguments and findings can be integrated in a broader theoretical context. Second, the arguments and findings of European and international integration scholars can be evaluated in a different context which allows to test the scope conditions of their most important claims. In addition to this contribution on the explanation side of metropolitan reform attitudes, I also develop and test an encompassing measure of citizens’ ‘support for metropolitan reform’ which can be applied across different metropolitan areas. The third contribution of this study lies in the data that is analyzed. To the best of my knowledge,

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this is the first study that assesses metropolitan reform attitudes with the same measure across different countries and a diverse selection of metropolitan areas. The data comes from a unique online-survey that was conducted in fall 2015 in eight metropolitan areas from France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Two important restrictions of this study have to be mentioned at the outset. First of all, I only assess citizens’ attitudes towards metropolitan governance reforms. More general orientations, such as citizens’ identification with the metropolitan scale, that recently have been analyzed under the header of ‘metropolitan citizenship’ (Lidström and Schaap, 2018) are not part of this study. Second, I only look at metropolitan reforms which integrate political communities, i.e. which unify decision-making authority of local jurisdictions or transfer it to new government tiers. Reforms that strengthen metropolitan governance by devolving decision-making authority, for example from the national to the metropolitan tier, are not considered, since they do not fall under the definition of political integration. Rather, such reforms have a disintegrating effect on higher tier jurisdictions. In the remainder of this paper, I first derive seven hypotheses based in utilitarian, ideational, and cognitive theories which might explain citizens’ support for metropolitan reform. After the presentation of the research design I, first, show that citizens’ attitudes towards four reform proposals - inter-municipal equalization schemes, consolidation, intermunicipal cooperation and the creation or strengthening of a metropolitan government form one latent factor ‘support for metropolitan reform’ in the eight metropolitan areas. In a next step, I show that these metropolitan reform attitudes are best explained by socio-psychological factors and not by utilitarian ones, which is in line with arguments and findings on public support for European integration.

2

Explaining Support for Metropolitan Reform

Attitudes towards the political integration of existing political communities have received a significant yet somewhat uneven level of attention. The bulk of studies analyze citizens’ support for European integration. Research on attitudes in other integration contexts, such as international integration in Latin America or Africa or political integration on the subnational level, is much less developed. It is thus not surprising that the main lines of theorizing political integration support come from European integration scholars. Based on a recent review article by Hobolt and De Vries (2016), we can group existing explanations for European integration support into three different strands. Utilitarian approaches explain integration attitudes with citizens’ rational cost-benefit analysis. Identity or ideational approaches argue that integration attitudes predominantly depend on citizens’ territorial, communal and political identities. Because political integration not only creates economic winners and losers, but 3

more importantly also redistributes and re-assigns political authority, citizens that are more concerned about (national) sovereignty and feel threatened by other cultures are more skeptical of political integration. Finally, cognitive approaches start out from the observation that most citizens do not know much about European integration. Lacking knowledge on political integration can make individuals more afraid and thus more critical of the subject. Alternatively, when citizens lack information on the political integration context, they extrapolate their support for political integration from their evaluation of other political objects that are more familiar to them. In what follows, I discuss each of the three approaches in more detail and derive testable hypotheses for the metropolitan context.

2.1

Utilitarian Explanations

A first prominent utilitarian explanation for attitudes towards European integration are objective egotropic factors, such as an individual’s occupation. Depending on whether the domain an individual is working in is vulnerable to economic globalization, e.g. through off-shoring, or might actually benefit from increased integration, his attitudes are expected to be more or less favorable towards integration (Gabel and Palmer, 1995; Hooghe and Marks, 2005, 421). Vulnerability to adverse effects of political integration reforms might also play a role for metropolitan reform attitudes. Since such reforms might involve a certain risk of negatively affecting the local context one is living in, e.g. through altering local tax or service levels, people who have a lower propensity or ability to move away from their place might be more critical of metropolitan reforms. Some persons, e.g. homeowners, parents with school-aged children or people with a low income, have a lower ability to exit their jurisdiction when conditions deteriorate (Lowery, Hoogland DeHoog and Lyons, 1992). Consequently, they might be more opposed to metropolitan reforms. H1a : The higher a person’s propensity/ability to move, the higher her support for metropolitan reforms. (Vulnerability-Hypothesis) A second explanation that pertains to the utilitarian explanations for political integration support is the benchmarking mechanism. Citizens are expected to evaluate the costs and benefits of integration for the political entity they live in. For example, when they live in a European country that is rather well off compared to other European countries, they are more skeptical of European integration, because they expect lower gains from international cooperation than citizens living in less well-off countries (Sánchez-Cuenca, 2000; Hobolt, 2014). This line of argumentation is very prominent among American scholars studying citizens’ support for metropolitan reforms. Many studies find that citizens’ satisfaction with local service levels has a negative effect on their support for metropolitan integration

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proposals, because the costs likely outweigh the gains of integration the more satisfied a person is with the status quo (Hawkins, 1966; Bollens, 1990; Wassmer and Lascher, 2006). H1b : The better off a municipality is (from an individual’s perspective), the less its residents support metropolitan reforms. (Benchmarking-Hypothesis) A last explanation in the utilitarian logic, which is related to the benchmarking idea, has to do with the amount of decision-making authority a political entity loses when it engages in political integration. When a small country becomes part of an international organization, it most likely is more constrained in its future policy choices than a large country, simply because the large country will be able to exert a more substantive influence on the decisions of this international organization. At the metropolitan level, such considerations might be even more relevant to citizens, since the future impact of their municipality on political decisions in an integrated metropolitan setting are easier to determine. Accordingly, numerous scholars find, for example, that residents of more peripheral and suburban municipalities are more skeptical of metropolitan integration reforms (Bollens et al., 1961; Hawley and Zimmer, 1970; Benton, 1979; Edwards and Bohland, 1991). H1c : The more a municipality’s political autonomy might be constrained as a result of metropolitan integration, the less its residents support metropolitan reforms. (Political Influence-Hypothesis)

2.2

Ideational Explanations

A first line of reasoning pertaining to the ideational explanations puts citizens’ communal identities at the center. A strand of European integration research that has become very prominent in recent years explains negative attitudes towards European integration with the extent of citizens’ national identification (Carey, 2002). Hooghe and Marks (2005) argue that citizens who exclusively identify with their nation-state perceive European integration as a threat to national sovereignty and self-determination and thus are hostile towards this process. The same mechanism might apply in the metropolitan context, with citizens strongly identifying with their local jurisdictions being more skeptical of transferring decision-making authority to the metropolitan level. The few scholars that have assessed the role of local identities for metropolitan reform attitudes find support for this idea (Fraser, 1970; Shocket and Smith, 1975). H2a : The more an individual holds an exclusive local identity, the less she supports metropolitan reforms. (Exclusive Identity-Hypothesis) A second variety of the ideational explanations emphasizes the role of citizens’ more general value orientations and beliefs for their attitudes towards political integration. Citizens 5

with a more exclusionary world view, manifested in negative sentiments towards immigrants (De Vreese and Boomgaarden, 2005), religious intolerance (Hobolt et al., 2011), or negative views on other ethnic groups in their country’s society (e.g. African-Americans or Latin Americans in the US context) (Mansfield and Mutz, 2009; Mutz and Kim, 2017) are more skeptical towards European integration and towards international trade agreements. The reason is that these people fear that political integration goes hand-in-hand with societal diversity to which they are opposed. A related reasoning can be found in early studies of metropolitan reform support. Scholars here argue that (perceived) differences in ‘life-style’ (urban versus suburban/rural) increase voters’ skepticism towards metropolitan reform proposals (Kaufman and Greer, 1960; Williams, 1967; Benton, 1979). H2b : The more exclusionary an individual’s belief system is, the less he supports metropolitan reforms. (Value Orientations-Hypothesis)

2.3

Cognitive Explanations

The last set of explanations starts out from the observation that many citizens lack information and knowledge on political integration projects. On the one hand, this can make them more skeptical of such processes, simply because they do not know enough and hence perceive these unknown processes as a threat. The more citizens are exposed to political integration processes, the less they will thus oppose it. Inglehart (1970) shows that “cognitive mobilization” - operationalized through news consumption and higher education - goes along with more favorable attitudes towards European integration. In a similar vein, Hainmueller and Hiscox (2006) show that more educated, and presumingly more knowledgeable, people hold more favorable attitudes towards internationalization and globalization. On a slightly different note, Recchi (2008, 2015) and Roeder (2011) find that persons who are more mobile within the European Union also hold more favorable attitudes towards further European integration. Their explanation is that these individuals are more exposed to the meaning of European integration through their mobility experience and thus grow more supportive of it. The few studies that assess the role of citizens knowledge for their metropolitan integration support find that the more voters know about a concrete reform proposal that is on the ballots, the more likely they are to accept it (Greer, 1963; Marando and Whitley, 1972; Benton, 1979). H3a : The more an individual is exposed to metropolitan topics and issues, the more he supports metropolitan reform. (Exposure-Hypothesis) On the other hand, a lack of knowledge and information can also mean that citizens resort to heuristics and proxies when giving their opinion about political integration in a certain context. In a seminal article, Anderson (1998) has argued that citizens, in the absence of 6

better information, use the evaluation of their national government as a proxy for their evaluation of European integration. When they feel like they can trust their national government, and their national government engages in a political integration project, their support ‘spills over’ to this integration project as well. In a later study, Harteveld, Van Der Meer and De Vries (2013) have assessed this ‘extrapolation’ mechanism in more detail and came to the same conclusion. Moreover, Schlipphak (2015) provides evidence that this extrapolation mechanism is not confined to the context of European integration but can also be found among Latin American and African respondents when evaluating Mercosur and Ecowas, respectively. To date, the relevance of this extrapolation mechanism has not been assessed for metropolitan support. Yet, residents of city-regions might also extrapolate their support for metropolitan reform based on their trust in and evaluation of local government. H3b : The more an individual believes the local political system is working well, the more she supports metropolitan reform. (Extrapolation-Hypothesis)

2.4

Alternative Explanations

Apart from these three more general approaches to explain political integration support, there are also explanations for orientations towards metropolitan areas and metropolitan governance that are more specifically tailored to the metropolitan context. In particular, scholars have emphasized the role of citizens’ “spatial practices” (Kübler, 2018) or their “city-regional integration” (Lidström, 2010, 2013, 2018). These terms refer to citizens’ interactions with the metropolitan area through their mobility behavior in the city-region or through their residential experience in a specific metropolitan area. The argument is that the more citizens interact with other municipal contexts and people from other places in their metropolitan area, the more their orientation shifts from the local to the metropolitan scale. As a result, they migh also become more supportive of reforms that aim at the political integration of city-regions (Roth and Boynton, 1969; Eklund, 2018; Owens and Sumner, 2018). In addition, socio-demographic characteristics other than income and education might matter as well. Women might be less favorable of metropolitan reforms because they are still today often more likely to be ‘stuck’ at home, particularly in a classical ‘malebreadwinner’ situation. When their husbands commute longer distances to go to work womens’ possibility to “participate in the political, social, and cultural life of the cityregion” is significantly lowered (Hudson, 2018, 94). These restricted possibilities might render women more skeptical of metropolitan reforms. An individual’s age can have an impact on metropolitan reform support as well. Bollens et al. (1961, 283) argue that middle-aged individuals are most supportive of metropoli7

tan reforms because “[t]hey are expected to experience governmental fragmentation most concretely in their daily round of activities”, most notably when they commute to work in the city-region. Younger and older persons should thus be less favorable of metropolitan reforms, because they lack this daily experience. Hawley and Zimmer (1970) indeed find certain evidence for such a ‘life-cycle’ effect. In their study, people under 30 and over 60 are more skeptical of metropolitan reforms. A final alternative explanation for individuals’ reform support is their residence municipality’s level of urbanization. Persons living in more urbanized settings can expect smaller changes resulting from metropolitan reforms than persons living in more rural settings. More integrated metropolitan governance structures can also bring changes to land-use and spatial planning, in that metropolitan authorities try to distribute population growth - but also the availability of urban amenities - more evenly across the metropolitan area, which would mean that the less urbanized areas are ‘developed’ to keep up with the more urbanized places. Individuals residing in these areas might cherish their municipality and as a result be skeptical of such changes. Accordingly, they would also reject governance reforms which might bring about such changes.

3

Research Design

3.1

Case Selection and Data

The data for this study stems from a unique online-survey administered on 5052 residents of eight metropolitan areas1 in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom (see Appendix A for details on the sampling procedure). We employed a diverse case selection strategy for selecting the countries and metropolitan areas, which is particularly suited to test the validity of hypotheses across different contexts (Gerring, 2007). The four countries are selected based on their local government tradition (see Table 1 for an overview of the cases). Switzerland and Germany belong to the North-Middle European type, where local governments have an important role both in functional terms as service providers and implementation agents and in political terms as territories in which political will is aggregated and expressed (Hesse and Sharpe, 1991). France is the ideal type of the Napoleonic group with functionally weak, but politically strong local governments. Finally, the UK pertains to the Anglo type with functionally strong but politically weak local government. Citizens’ reform attitudes might differ depending on the local government context they live in. Similarly, citizens’ attitudes might differ depending on the metropolitan setting they 1

To have a comparable definition of metropolitan areas, we relied on the “functional urban area” definition of (Eurostat, 2013). The sample is stratified to reflect the distribution of respondents between center city and surrounding areas.

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Table 1: Case Selection and Data Country Switzerland Germany

Survey Respondents Local Govern- Metropolitan Capital Metro ment System Area City Government Center Suburb N North Middle European North Middle European

France

Napoleonic

United Kingdom

Anglo-Saxon

Bern Zurich Berlin Stuttgart Paris Lyon London Birmingham

Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No

Yes No No Yes No Yes Yes No

33.6% 30.2% 75.8% 25.3% 18.6% 29.1% 33.9% 53.4%

66.4% 69.8% 24.2% 74.7% 81.4% 70.9% 66.1% 46.6%

560 606 652 606 641 667 666 654

37.7%

62.3%

5052

live in. We relied on two characteristics to select metropolitan areas in the four countries. Its role in the national political system - i.e. whether its the capital city-region or not - and whether it has existing structures that qualify, to a certain degree, as a metropolitan government (Lefèvre, 1998). Citizens in capital regions might have a different understanding of multilevel relations than those in more peripheral locations, due to the physical proximity of government administrations from various levels and citizens in areas with a metropolitan government might have different perceptions about the need for metropolitan reforms.

3.2

Operationalization

Support for Metropolitan Reform Most of the studies on metropolitan reform attitudes analyze American city-regions. These scholars assess citizens’ support for specific reform proposals, such as the annexation of certain suburbs or townships by a center city, or the consolidation of a city and its surrounding county into a unified city-county government. They mostly do so at a time when such proposals are on the political agenda in a certain city-region (Roth and Boynton, 1969; Fowlkes and Hutcheson, 1979; Marcal and Svorny, 2000). While this increases the chance that citizens have been confronted with debates on metropolitan governance, it has the downside that the dependent variables of these studies are very much tailored to a specific context, which inhibits generalization of the findings. For the European context, very few studies on metropolitan reform attitudes exist. In a recent special issue of the Journal of Urban Affairs (Lidström and Schaap, 2018), some studies analyze citizens’ attitudes towards metropolitan reforms. A few of them assess different metropolitan areas and thus employ less idiosyncratic measures than many of the American studies (Eklund, 2018; Kübler, 2018; Lackwoska and Mikuła, 2018; Owens 9

and Sumner, 2018). These studies provide a useful starting point for conceptualizing metropolitan reform support in a more general way. A first reform that is relevant is the equalization of economic resources across municipalities. This can be seen as an important requirement for the political integration of metropolitan areas and for the ‘equality of opportunities’ of local governments (cf. Sellers et al., 2017). Kübler (2018) and Owens and Sumner (2018) assess citizens’ attitudes towards inter-municipal resource or tax-base sharing in their studies on Swiss and Swedish metropolitan areas. The remaining items used in these studies focus on institutional reforms in a more narrow sense. The most widely proposed reform by advocates of the metropolitan reform school is consolidation of local jurisdictions (Savitch and Vogel, 2009). Attitudes towards merging municipalities to solve metropolitan governance problems are assessed in three of the studies of this special issue (Eklund, 2018; Kübler, 2018; Lackwoska and Mikuła, 2018). Advocates of the new regionalism approach to improve metropolitan governance don’t go as far as to suggest outright consolidation. They propose the use of task-specific inter-municipal cooperation schemes to enhance the political integration of metropolitan areas. Support for this reform is assessed by two of the studies in the special issue (Eklund, 2018; Kübler, 2018). Finally, a reform that has been implemented in different European metropolitan areas2 , namely the creation of a federated metropolitan governance structure where local jurisdictions pass on certain tasks to a metropolitan-wide governance institution, fares somewhere in between the solutions proposed by the metropolitan reformers and the new regionalists. Of the studies in the special issue, Kübler (2018) and Lackwoska and Mikuła (2018) report findings on citizens’ attitudes towards this reform. For this study, I use all of these reform types for the creation of one encompassing measure of metropolitan reform support. A first question in the survey asks citizens to report their approval for a. helping out municipalities in financial distress, and b. contributing personally to such a scheme. This item thus picks up the call for inter-municipal equalization schemes. A second question asks citizens to rank reform proposals that aim at solving metropolitan governance problems, namely a. merging local jurisdictions, b. task-specific inter-municipal cooperation, and c. the introduction or strengthening of a metropolitan government. The exact question wording can be found in Table B.1 in Appendix C.3 2

For example in Barcelona, Bologna, London, Lyon, Rotterdam, and Stuttgart (Lefèvre, 1998). The three items of the second question are simply linearly transformed in the analysis to have a maximum of 1 and a minimum of 0. The two items of the first question are combined into one variable. Most respondents are more positive of the general idea of helping out municipalities in fiscal distress than of personal contributions. Therefore, I ‘qualified’ the first item with the second one, so that those who indicate a general approval of such a scheme but are unwilling to contribute rank lower on this indicator (i.e. receive a ‘malus’) than those who equally support the general scheme and personal contributions. By contrast, the few who are more critical of the general scheme than of personal contributions receive an equivalent ‘bonus’ on this variable. The formula for the creation of this variable can be found in Table B.1. 3

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Utilitarian, Ideational, and Cognitive Factors In what follows, I present the operationalization of the hypotheses from section 2. The question wording for the various items can be found in Table B.2. Propensity to Move (H1a ). I consider three factors that reduce a person’s propensity or ability to move to another local jurisdiction and thus make them more vulnerable to metropolitan reforms gone wrong. Owning property in a municipality, having schoolaged children and having a low household income all reduce a person’s willingness or ability to move, because she is either financially or socially invested in the local context (homeowners, parents) or because she might lack the resources to move (low income households) (Lyons and Lowery, 1992). Accordingly, I expect these three groups to be more critical of metropolitan reforms. Benchmarking (H1b ). To operationalize a person’s local benchmark, I rely both on subjective evaluations and objective characteristics of her place of residence. The subjective measure consists of citizens’ evaluations of five local services at their place of residence. An exploratory factor analysis of these five items (see Table C.1) shows that satisfaction forms one scale (Cronbach’s α = .73). For the operationalization of the ‘objective’ benchmark characteristics I rely on two indicators of a municipality’s economic well-being, namely its local median income (=wealth) and its local unemployment rate. With H1b we would expect that dissatisfied citizens and citizens living in economically deprived municipalities are more supportive of metropolitan reforms. Political Influence (H1c ). The relative loss of decision-making competence a municipality would likely have to face when engaging in metropolitan reforms can be captured by its size and its location in the metropolitan area. Large municipalities are likely to have more leverage in joint metropolitan institutions than smaller ones, and the center cities of a metropolitan area will usually be the designated places for the seat of metropolitan decision-making institutions. Accordingly, residents of small and/or suburban municipalities are expected to be more skeptical of metropolitan reforms, since their resident municipality might lose a larger amount of political autonomy. Exclusive Identity (H2a ). To operationalize exclusive local identity, I rely on a question that asks citizens to indicate their respective level of attachment to the local and to the metropolitan level. With these two items, I construct a variable with six categories: no attachment to either the local nor the metropolitan level, exclusive attachment to the metropolitan level, more metropolitan than local attachment, equally strong attachment to the metropolitan and the local level, more local than metropolitan attachment, exclusive local attachment. The detailed procedure is described in Appendix C. Those with stronger local than metropolitan attachment are expected to be more skeptical of metropolitan reform. Value Orientations (H2b ). The second hypothesis of the ideational explanation states 11

that individuals with exclusionary value orientations are more opposed to metropolitan reforms. A first value orientation I consider is citizens’ identification with traditionalist/authoritarian/nationalist (TAN) parties (Hooghe, Marks and Wilson, 2002). These parties, often referred to as right-wing populist parties, strongly oppose international integration processes and perceive themselves as the fervent defenders of their country’s sovereignty and self-determination in their own view. However, these parties might not only be opposed to a centralization of decision-making authority from the national to the international level, but also to centralization from the regional to the national, or from the local to the regional level (Mazzoleni, 2005). Citizens who feel close to such a party are thus expected to be more opposed to metropolitan reforms.4 I use respondents’ attitudes towards immigration as an additional measure for an exclusionary belief system (De Vreese and Boomgaarden, 2005). Citizens who are more critical towards immigrants are also expected to be more critical towards metropolitan reform. Exposure (H3a ). For citizens’ exposure to metropolitan topics and issues, we can unfortunately not fall back on a direct knowledge measure, since such measures were not incorporated in the survey questionnaire. We thus have to rely on more indirect measures of exposure. A first one is whether a person reads local newspapers or not. Respondents were asked if they read newspapers to inform themselves about political issues and which was their main source of information out of a list provided specifically for each metropolitan area. Newspapers that report only on local topics or that have an important local section are considered local news media.5 A second, more subjective, indicator for exposure to metropolitan topics is a person’s interest in the politics of other municipalities in the same area. Center city residents were asked about their interest in the politics of the surrounding municipalities and vice versa. Finally, and yet more indirectly, a person’s educational attainment is used as an indicator of exposure to metropolitan topics. More educated persons are generally more well-informed about political matters. This is probably also the case for metropolitan topics. We thus expect that local media consumers, those interested in metropolitan politics, as well as more educated persons are more supportive of metropolitan reform. Extrapolation (H3b ). To capture citizens’ beliefs about the functioning of the local 4

The following parties are coded as TAN parties in the four countries (based on the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (Polk et al., 2017)). Switzerland: Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), Lega dei Ticinesi, Eidgenössiche Demokratische Union (EDU), Schweizer Demokraten (SD): Germany: Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), Republikaner, Deutsche Volksunion (DVU); France: Front National (FN), Mouvement pour la France (MPF): UK: United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), British National Party (BNP). 5 Bern=Berner Zeitung, Bund; Zurich=Tages-Anzeiger, Zürcher Oberländer, Zürcher Unterländer, Zürichsee Zeitung; Berlin=Berliner Zeitung, Berliner Morgenpost, Berliner Kurier, Tagesspiegel; Stuttgart=Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Stuttgarter Zeitung; Paris=Le Parisien; Lyon=Le Progrès, Le Dauphiné Libéré; London=London Evening Standard, City A.M.; Birmingham=Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post.

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Figure 1: Overview of Hypotheses and Indicators

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political system, I use two indicators. The first indicator is their trust in local government. A second indicator is their feeling of local external political efficacy, i.e. the belief that local politicians are responsive to the needs of the citizens in their jurisdiction. The expectation is that higher trust and higher feelings of external political efficacy go hand in hand with stronger support for metropolitan reform. Spatial Practices. A first indicator for respondents’ spatial practices in the metropolitan area is their commuting behavior. The survey includes two questions that allow to measure this. Respondents are asked how often they pursue five different activities6 in i.) the center city of the metropolitan area, and ii.) in other municipalities of the metropolitan area (other than their own). For each of these five activities, I coded how often a respondent commutes from a suburban municipality to the center, from the center to a suburban municipality or from a suburban municipality to another suburban municipality. This yields five indicators for the five activities, each with four levels of commuting intensity: no commuting (=less than once a week), once a week, several days per week and daily. With these five indicators as a starting point, I conduct a polychoric exploratory factor analysis (see Table C.2). The five individual indicators all load on one factor and form one scale (Cronbach’s α = .76). Respondents can thus be rather clearly divided into commuters and non-commuters. A second indicator for a respondent’s city-regional integration is the number of years she already lives at her current place of residence. Finally, respondents are asked to indicate whether they have already lived in another municipality of the same metropolitan area or not, to capture their city-regional residential mobility. Socio-Demographics and Urbanization. In addition to the three indicators for spatial practices, gender, age and local urbanization level are examined as alternative explanations of metropolitan reform support. The measurement of gender and age is straightforward. As a proxy for a municipality’s urbanization level, I rely on the local population density. As a rule, more densely populated places also have a more urban character. Figure 1 depicts the seven hypotheses, the indicators used for their operationalization, and the expected effect these indicators have on ‘support for metropolitan reform’. Table C.3 gives an overview of the descriptive statistics of all the indicators used in the analysis.

3.3

Estimation

To construct the dependent variable ‘support for metropolitan reform’ I rely on confirmatory factor analysis (Davidov et al., 2014). The goal here is to assess whether the four items inter-municipal tax-base sharing, consolidation, inter-municipal cooperation and metropolitan government form one latent factor both in the overall sample and in all 6

Working, shopping, sports and leisure, associational activities and visiting friends and family.

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the eight metropolitan areas individually. Davidov et al. (2014, 63) distinguish different levels of measurement equivalence that can be established with confirmatory factor analysis. Here, the aim is to establish the least demanding form of measurement equivalence, namely “configural equivalence.” Configural equivalence requires that the observed items load on the same latent factors in all cases, and it “means that the latent concepts can be meaningfully discussed in all countries” or metropolitan areas for that matter. To test for configural equivalence, I use the -sem- command in Stata with multiple imputation of missing values (option method(mlmv)). I assess whether the four items form one scale in the overall sample and in the eight metropolitan subsamples. For the test of the seven hypotheses I rely on multilevel modeling due to the hierarchical data structure (Hox, 2010). Respondents are nested in municipalities (level-2), which are themselves nested in metropolitan areas (level-3) and countries (level-4). It is plausible that respondents living in the same municipality/metropolitan area/country are more similar in their attitudes towards metropolitan reforms than respondents living in different contexts. Standard OLS regression models do not take this nestedness into account, which means that they would misrepresent the error structure of the data. One problem of the present analysis is that we only have eight metropolitan areas on level-3 and four countries on level-4. This small number of cases does not allow to incorporate these two levels in the multilevel regression models. However, this problem is mitigated by the fact that the variance of the dependent variable on these two levels is very small, which means that respondents living in the same metropolitan area or the same country are not more similar in their attitudes towards metropolitan reforms than respondents from different metropolitan areas or countries. The results of random effects ANOVAs with the variable ‘support for metropolitan reform’ (subsection 4.1) as dependent variable and the three different levels as level-2 suggest that citizens only vary significantly in their attitudes towards metropolitan reform support across municipalities, but not across metropolitan areas or countries (see Table C.4). The associated intra-class correlation amounts to 12% in the random effects ANOVA for the municipalities but is virtually zero for the two higher levels. We can therefore rely on multilevel modeling with respondents as level-1 and municipalities as level-2. To nevertheless capture eventual cross-metropolitan variance, I include metropolitan area-fixed effects parameters in the model.

4

Results

In this section I first present the results of the confirmatory factor analysis and show that the four items used to measure ‘support for metropolitan reform’ indeed form one scale in the overall sample and in the eight metropolitan areas. In a second step I test the seven hypotheses from section 2 and show that utilitarian explanations are largely irrel15

evant for the explanation of who supports metropolitan reform. By contrast, ideational and cognitive explanations both enhance our understanding of ‘support for metropolitan reform’.

4.1

Measuring Support for Metropolitan Reform

Table 2 displays the results of a confirmatory factor analysis with the four items for both the overall sample and the eight metropolitan areas separately.7 Looking at the factor Table 2: Confirmatory Factor Analysis: Support for Metropolitan Reform Variable

Full

Inter-municipal Tax-Base Sharing Consolidation

Metropolitan Areas BE

ZH

BL

ST

PA

LY

LO

BI

Inter-municipal Cooperation Metropolitan Government

.44 (.02) .69 (.01) .64 (.01) .60 (.01)

.40 (.05) .62 (.04) .76 (.05) .41 (.05)

.40 (.06) .57 (.05) .57 (.05) .42 (.06)

.34 (.05) .74 (.04) .56 (.04) .58 (.04)

.25 (.05) .59 (.05) .61 (.04) .64 (.05)

.51 (.04) .74 (.03) .74 (.03) .72 (.03)

.45 (.04) .67 (.03) .84 (.02) .72 (.03)

.48 .59 (.04) (.03) .70 .76 (.03) (.03) .70 .59 (.03) (.03) .75 .79 (.03) (.03)

N RMSEAa CFIb TLIc LR χ2 p > χ2

4822 .06 .99 .96 38.83 .000

539 .00 1.00 1.00 1.24 .536

569 .10 .94 .81 12.34 .002

635 .10 .96 .88 14.21 .001

594 .15 .89 .68 29.75 .000

612 .11 .98 .93 15.43 .000

637 .08 .99 .96 10.27 .005

630 .07 .99 .97 7.25 .027

606 .00 1.00 1.00 1.39 .497

Note. Entries are factor loadings obtained through confirmatory factor analysis with multiple imputation of missing values in Stata (-sem, method(mlmv)-); Standard errors in a parentheses; RMSEA=Root Mean Square Error of Approximation; b CFI=Comparative Fit Index; c TLI=Tucker-Lewis Index. loadings of the four items, we can see that inter-municipal tax-base sharing has the lowest loading on the latent factor ‘support for metropolitan reform’ in the full sample and in all eight metropolitan areas. It’s loading is particularly low in the Stuttgart sample, and highest for the Paris and Birmingham one. In part, this low loading might be explained by the fact that inter-municipal tax-base sharing, unlike the other three items, does not capture an institutional reform in a narrow sense. Rather, it is directed towards the more fundamental question of resource redistribution across local jurisdictions in the area. The consolidation item has the highest loading on the latent factor in the full sample, which suggests that this item represents the most direct manifestation of the latent vari7

157 respondents were excluded from the sample due to satisficing behavior, i.e. always ticking the same categories independently of the question, a common problem of online surveys.

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able metropolitan reform support. In the eight metropolitan subsamples, consolidation loads highest only in Zurich, Berlin, and Paris, but it ranks second in the Bern, London, and Birmingham metropolitan areas. Inter-municipal cooperation has the second strongest loading in the analysis of the full sample, and it is the most important expression of metropolitan reform support in the Bern and Lyon metropolitan areas. Moreover, it is second most important in the Zurich, Stuttgart, Paris, and London metropolitan areas. The metropolitan government item has a somewhat lower loading than the other two institutional reform items. This can be explained by the two Swiss samples, where this item’s loading is as low as the one for inter-municipal tax-base sharing. The reason for this might be that, despite the fact that the metropolitan area of Bern has a, very weak, type of metropolitan government, such reforms have so far not been a topic of public debates on reforms to local governance structures in Switzerland, unlike consolidation and inter-municipal cooperation. To assess the quality of the confirmatory factor analysis in the full sample and in the eight subsamples, we can turn to the bottom half of Table 2. Here, three measures are displayed that are commonly used to assess the goodness-of-fit of confirmatory factors analyses, the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), the comparative fit index (CFI), and the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI). Schreiber et al. (2006) define thresholds for each of these measures below or above which they indicate good model fit. The RMSEA should be .95 to indicate good model fit. For the full model, these three conditions are all fulfilled and thus indicate a good model fit. All three measures are also meet the required thresholds in the Bern, Lyon, London, and Birmingham subsamples. In the Berlin and the Paris metropolitan areas, the model fits somewhat less well, the RMSEA is clearly above the threshold in both areas, and the TLI is clearly too low for the Berlin sample as well. Finally, in the Zurich and especially the Stuttgart subsamples, the required thresholds are all missed, even if only closely for the CFI in the Zurich metropolitan area. The bad model fit for Stuttgart can be explained by the low loading of the variable inter-municipal tax-base sharing which is a rather poor manifestation of the latent metropolitan reform support variable in this metropolitan area. Overall, we can nevertheless conclude that the four items constitute a robust latent factor in the overall sample and in a majority of the metropolitan subsamples. While we find that the different items best representing the latent construct ‘support for metropolitan reform’ differ across metropolitan areas, we cannot attribute this variation meaningfully to existing differences in metropolitan governance, such as the existence of a metropolitan government or the role inter-municipal cooperation schemes play in the respective country (see Hulst and Van Montfort, 2007). The exception to this is the low loading of the metropolitan government item on the latent factor metropolitan reform support in both

17

Swiss metropolitan areas. As suggested above, this might be explained by the wallflower existence this reform type led so far in public debates on metropolitan governance in Switzerland. In the next subsection, I analyze the determinants of the latent variable ‘support for metropolitan reform’ and test the seven hypotheses developed in section 2.

4.2

Who Supports Metropolitan Reform?

Who supports metropolitan reform? Above I have argued that we can think of utilitarian, ideational, and cognitive explanations for why someone supports or opposes metropolitan reforms. In what follows, I present the results of the multilevel regression analysis. For the sake of clarity, I rely on coefficient plots in the presentation of the results. The corresponding regression models including the goodness-of-fit statistics can be found in Table D.1.8 Figure 2 shows the results for the three hypotheses associated with the utilitarian approach. We find only little evidence for H1a , that individuals with a lower propenFigure 2: Utilitarian Explanation

Note. Own figure. Data Source: Strebel, Kübler and Marcinkowski (2016). Dots represent point estimates. Lines represent 95% confidence intervals. Total range of Support for Metropolitan Reform=.66. sity or ability to move - and accordingly a higher vulnerability to metropolitan reforms gone wrong - are more critical of metropolitan reform. The only finding that points in 8

The results shown here display the coefficients from the full model. In addition to the full model, Table D.1 includes separate models for each of the three approaches as well as a baseline model incorporating the alternative explanations only. The analyses presented here are performed on a listwise deleted sample, i.e. respondents with missing values on one of the variables were excluded from the sample. Table D.2 shows multilevel regressions performed on a multiply imputed sample. The substantive results do not differ from the listwise deleted sample.

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this direction is that people from low income households are somewhat more critical of metropolitan reforms than respondents from a medium income household. Homeowners do not differ from tenants in their metropolitan reform support, and parents with schoolaged children even tend to be more supportive of metropolitan reforms than persons without children. Based on these findings, we can thus reject hypothesis H1a . The same is true for hypothesis H1b which states that citizens use their local environment as a benchmark to evaluate reforms to local governance. This only seems to be the case for living in a poorer or richer municipality. Citizens living in more wealthy municipalities are more critical of metropolitan reforms, possibly because they fear that a stronger integration with other municipalities in their metropolitan area might be costly for them.9 Furthermore, persons living in local jurisdictions with a higher unemployment rate are not more favorable towards metropolitan reforms. The most surprising finding is, however, that those who are more satisfied with the quality of services at their place of residence are also more open to the idea of metropolitan reforms aiming at the political integration of the metropolitan area. The difference between the most and the least satisfied person on the metropolitan reform support scale amounts to .05 points. Considering that the dependent variable has a maximum range of .66, this is a rather substantive effect: If we treat the total range of the metropolitan reform support variable as 100 percent, then the change from the least to the most satisfied person amounts to 7.8 percentage points on that transformed scale. Due to the findings for local unemployment rate and satisfaction, hypothesis H1b can be rejected as well. Finally, there’s also only very limited evidence for the political influence hypothesis (H1c ). Respondents living in larger municipalities are not more open to metropolitan reforms than those living in smaller municipalities. There is a tendency for persons in the center city to have more favorable views on metropolitan reforms. However, this effect is not significantly different from zero with 95% confidence. Therefore, H1c has to rejected as well. So far, we have not found evidence in favor of the hypotheses formulated here. Apparently, citizens do not base their attitudes towards metropolitan reforms in utilitarian or ‘rational’ considerations. Do we find different results when looking at the ideational explanations? Figure 3 displays the results for hypotheses H2a and H2b . Here, the results are more in line with the two hypotheses. First, we find that citizens who feel more attached to the local than to the metropolitan level are more critical of metropolitan reform than those who are equally attached to the local and to the metropolitan level. If we treat the total range of the dependent variable as representing 100 percent like above, being more locally oriented goes along with a mere 1.97 percentage point decrease in 9 However, this effect is not significant when we look at the model that incorporates the utilitarian indicators only.

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Figure 3: Ideational Explanation

Note. Own figure. Data Source: Strebel, Kübler and Marcinkowski (2016). Dots represent point estimates. Lines represent 95% confidence intervals. Total range of Support for Metropolitan Reform=.66. metropolitan reform support. In addition, those who are neither attached to the local nor the metropolitan level are also less favorable of metropolitan reform than those who are attached to both the local and the metropolitan level. Amounting to a 3 percentage point decrease in metropolitan reform support, this effect is even stronger than the one for being more locally oriented. Interestingly, those who are more oriented to the metropolitan than to the local level are not more favorable towards metropolitan reform. Finally, the effect of being exclusively attached to the local level is positive, which goes against the expectation formulated in H2a . Yet, it is important to note that only 21 out of 3450 respondents in the listwise deleted sample belong to this category, which means that the results for this category have to be taken with great caution. This is also indicated by the large confidence interval for the coefficient of this category. In sum, we find some support for the hypothesis, that those with a stronger local than metropolitan orientation are more critical of metropolitan reform. When it comes to the exclusionary value orientations, the results for at least one indicator are also clearly in line with H2b . Those who identify with a TAN party are more skeptical of metropolitan reform. Also this effect is rather moderate and the difference in metropolitan reform support between TAN partisans and non-TAN partisans amounts to 2.4 percentage points on the transformed scale of the dependent variable only. Finally, the effect of holding more positive attitudes towards immigrants is very small and not statistically significant. Again, this yields some support for hypothesis H2b . The results for the last two hypotheses associated with the cognitive approach are displayed in Figure 4. The expectation is that those more exposed to or aware of metropolitan

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Figure 4: Cognitive Explanation

Note. Own figure. Data Source: Strebel, Kübler and Marcinkowski (2016). Dots represent point estimates. Lines represent 95% confidence intervals. Total range of Support for Metropolitan Reform=.66. topics are more favorably oriented to metropolitan reform (H3a ) and that citizens extrapolate their support for metropolitan reform from their evaluation of local government (H3b ). We find rather strong support for both hypotheses. Readers of local newspapers are more supportive of metropolitan reform, they rank 1.69 percentage points higher than those who do not read local newspapers, and citizens more interested in metropolitan politics are also more favorably oriented towards metropolitan reform. The difference on the metropolitan reform support scale between those least and those most interested in metropolitan politics amounts to 6.22 percentage points. In addition, more educated individuals are significantly more supportive than medium and less educated ones. The difference between highly and medium educated citizens amounts to 1.7 percentage points. In combination, this is strong support for the exposure hypothesis H3a . The results for the extrapolation mechanism are also very clear. Those who are the most convinced that their voice is heard by local officials rank 7.85 percentage higher on the metropolitan reform scale than those who feel that their voice is not heard. Moreover, citizens who trust their local government the most rank 10.46 percentage points higher on the dependent variable than those who trust their local government the least. These are rather substantive effects and yield strong support for H3b . In addition to the results for the three main explanatory approaches, we have to assess the results for the alternative explanations. Figure 5 shows the results for the three ‘spatial practices’ indicators. Interestingly, those who commute more frequently tend to be slightly less supportive of metropolitan reform and those who have previously resided in another municipality of the metropolitan area also tend to be more critical

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Figure 5: Spatial Practices

Note. Own figure. Data Source: Strebel, Kübler and Marcinkowski (2016). Dots represent point estimates. Lines represent 95% confidence intervals. Total range of Support for Metropolitan Reform=.66. of metropolitan reform. To a certain extent, this goes against the idea that a stronger ‘city-regional integration’ goes along with a stronger orientation towards the metropolitan area. However, neither of these two effects is statistically significant. Those who reside at their current place of residence since a longer time seem to be somewhat more critical of metropolitan reform. Citizens who only live at their place of residence since one to three years are significantly less skeptical of metropolitan reform than those who reside in their current municipality since more than 20 years. In general there seems to be a certain tendency for longer term residents to be more skeptical of metropolitan reform, but the remaining coefficients are not statistically different from zero. Finally, we do not find significant differences in metropolitan reform support between men and women or between individuals from different age groups (see Figure 6). Moreover, the urbanization level of an individual’s place of residence also does not seem to have an impact on her orientations towards metropolitan reform. Overall, the results from this analysis suggest that utilitarian considerations only matter to a very limited extent, if at all, for citizens’ metropolitan reform support. This goes against the findings of much of the earlier research on metropolitan reform support in American metropolitan areas (Hawkins, 1966; Lyons and Engstrom, 1973; Benton, 1979). By contrast, we find support for the more ‘socio-psychological’ explanations of metropolitan reform support, which are derived from theories on support for European integration. Citizens with a predominantly local territorial identity (H2a ), those with more exclusionary value orientations (H2b ), citizens less exposed to metropolitan issues (H3a ) and those who evaluate their local government less positively (H3b ) are all less supportive of

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Figure 6: Socio-Demographics and Urbanization

Note. Own figure. Data Source: Strebel, Kübler and Marcinkowski (2016). Dots represent point estimates. Lines represent 95% confidence intervals. Total range of Support for Metropolitan Reform=.66. metropolitan reform. When it comes to the variance in the dependent variable that is explained by the three different models, the cognitive model (H3a and H3b ) is clearly the most promising. Its indicators account for 23% of the total variance in the variable metropolitan reform support (see R2 measures in Table D.1). In comparison, the utilitarian (13%) and the ideational (11%) fare much less well. Moreover, the overall model including all indicators only accounts for 2% more of the variance in the dependent variable than the cognitive model alone. This further corroborates the finding that the cognitive explanation is best suited to further our understanding of metropolitan reform support in the case at hand. One issue requires further discussion, namely the findings for school-aged children and for service satisfaction, which go diametrically against the expectations formulated in H1a and H1b . A possible explanation for both of these findings is that the indicators might not measure exactly what they are intended to measure. Both of them might actually pick up socio-psychological orientations. First, while parents with school-aged children might have a lower propensity to change their place of residence due to their kids, they are probably also exposed to a lot more people from different backgrounds than persons who do not have kids. Parents come into contact with persons from different social backgrounds and world views through their kids - be it because they pick their kids up at school or because they interact with the parents of their kids’ friends. This in turn might render them more open to new and potentially unknown things. This general openness might also go along with lower skepticism towards metropolitan reform. In a similar vein, satisfaction with local service quality might actually serve as a heuristic - much like trust in local

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government and feeling of external political efficacy - for the assessment of metropolitan reform. When things are going well at their place of residence, people might be more willing to take the ‘risk’ of metropolitan reform because they have no prior reason to believe that things turn out bad and vice versa. An indication that this might be the case is first, that service satisfaction is strongly correlated with trust in local government (Pearson’s r=.41) and feeling of external political efficacy (Pearson’s r=.30). Second, the size of the coefficient of the service satisfaction variable drops significantly from the model with only utilitarian indicators to the full model. This suggests that part of the service satisfaction effect is picked up by the two extrapolation variables (see Table D.1). It is important to note, however, that this explanation is very preliminary and not at all conclusive. Further research is needed to assess intricate links between these two variables and metropolitan reform support.

5

Conclusion

This study had three main goals. On a theoretical level, the aim was to build a bridge between approaches that explain citizens’ attitudes towards international integration and studies that assess citizens’ attitudes towards metropolitan reform. For public opinion scholars assessing attitudes towards international integration, this matters because their established theories are tested in a different setting and for scholars assessing metropolitan governance attitudes, this study matters because it connects and extends existing debates to a more general framework. On a conceptual level, the aim was to propose and test a new measure of support for metropolitan reform that travels across different metropolitan and national contexts. And finally, on an empirical level, the aim was to move beyond the single-region or single-country focus of previous studies and to incorporate a diverse set of countries and metropolitan areas in the analysis. For the measurement of the dependent variable, a confirmatory factor analysis suggests that the four items inter-municipal tax-base sharing, consolidation, inter-municipal cooperation, and metropolitan government indeed constitute one latent factor ‘support for metropolitan reform’ which can be reproduced to a satisfactory degree in most of the eight metropolitan areas. While there is variance in terms of the four items’ relevance across metropolitan areas, they still all contribute to the overall measure of metropolitan reform attitudes. The assessment of the three different theoretical strands to explain support for metropolitan reform shows that utilitarian or rational choice considerations only matter to a very limited extent. The socio-psychological explanations of the ideational and the cognitive approach seem to be much better suited to explain citizens’ support for metropolitan reform. However, to conclude that utilitarian or rational factors do not matter at all for citi24

zens’ metropolitan reform attitudes might be premature. An important limitation of this study is that it relies on rather general measures of both metropolitan reform support and utilitarian considerations - due to its cross-national setup which prohibits more specific measures for reasons of comparability. If citizens had been asked about a specific reform proposal discussed in their metropolitan area and about what they expect to come from this for themselves, as it is done in many of the American studies, we might have found utilitarian considerations to be more relevant. A second important caveat is that we can only make a limited statement about causality. While we can theoretically and plausibly argue why X should affect Y and not the other way around and why the relationship between X and Y is not driven by a third factor Z, we cannot show this empirically. Future studies should thus try to bridge the gap between very case-centered analysis and rather general analysis like this one, by assessing both citizens’ support for specific metropolitan reform proposals currently discussed in their area and more general reform orientations. In addition, a more experimental survey setup would allow to test whether the relationships found in this study are indeed causal. Despite these limitations, this study furthers our understanding of support for metropolitan reform and of support for political integration more generally. The most important finding of this study is that the socio-psychological theories developed to explain public support for European and international integration also work in the metropolitan or subnational context. Exclusive identities and exclusionary beliefs tend to go along with lower metropolitan reform support, while exposure and awareness to metropolitan topics goes hand in hand with higher support for metropolitan reform. The most striking finding, however, is that the extrapolation heuristic - citizens’ use of their trust in national institutions as a cue for their attitudes towards international integration processes - is also highly relevant in the metropolitan context. We might thus be dealing with a more fundamental phenomenon: Attitudes towards the integration of existing political units seem to hinge on similar psychological mechanisms - be it in the international or in the subnational realm. In more substantive terms, these findings also have implications for political actors advocating metropolitan integration. Emphasizing merely the economic benefits of metropolitan integration reforms, as it is still often the case with the dominant narrative on scale economies, is not enough to convince citizens of such reforms. Equally, officials have to address citizens’ concerns of political self-determination and their potential fears of losing important local symbols and traditions in the course of an integration process. The more critical challenge, however, is to inform citizens about, and raise awareness and interest among mass publics on metropolitan governance problems and their possible solutions. This in itself already seems to be vital for the success of metropolitan reform projects.

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Appendix A

Survey and Sampling Procedure

The aim of the survey was to interview a sample of roughly 600 respondents that are representative of the general population in each of the eight metropolitan areas. Due to administrative circumstances, we had to rely on two different recruitment strategies in the four countries. In Switzerland, a random sample of 2257 valid individual addresses of the resident population (aged 18 to 75) in the Bern and Zurich metropolitan areas could be drawn by the Swiss Statistical Office. For the field phase we relied on the Swiss Survey Institute MIS Trend. Invitation letters to fill in an online questionnaire were sent to all these individuals, together with an unconditional incentive of 10 Swiss Francs (≈10.12 US$). A first reminder was sent two weeks after the initial letter, a second reminder was sent after one month to those individuals who had not replied by then. The second reminder included a paper version of the questionnaire and a prepaid return envelope. Individual identifiers were used for each potential respondent in order to exclude multiple responses to the survey. All in all, 1162 respondents filled in the questionnaire, either online (n=936) or on paper (n=226). The response rate (calculated on the valid addresses) is 52 percent. The field phase of the survey in Switzerland lasted from mid-September 2015 to early January 2016. In the remaining three countries, respondents were recruited from online-access panels and a quota-sampling strategy was applied to mirror the distribution of core features of the basic population (i.e. residence in the center city or the surrounding area, gender, age, employment status and education level). In these three countries, the survey was fielded by the international survey institute TNS Infratest. The field phase lasted from beginning of October to end of November. In this period between 606 and 667 complete interviews were conducted in each metropolitan area. Respondents were incentivized through coupons by the panel providers. Due to the quota sampling procedure used in Germany, France and the UK, response rates for these countries are not available, as the sample composition (i.e. the contacted people) changes in the course of the field phase to meet the quotas. Table A.1 presents an overview of the composition of the eight metropolitan samples and their representativeness of the respective metropolitan population before and after weighting based on the aforementioned indicators. The biggest differences between the samples and the target populations are present for education level. Highly educated individuals are over- and less educated individuals under-represented in all eight metropolitan samples. While this non-response pattern constitutes a problem, it is a common issue in 30

population-based surveys that can be countered to a certain extent with the assignment of weights. The weights are calculated based on the indicators shown in Table A.1 with the -ipfweight- package in Stata. The largest weights are constrained to not exceed 5 and the lowest weights are constrained to be greater or equal to 0.2.

31

32

13.3 47.0 39.7 72.6 35.4

7.4 46.5 45.9 74.2 34.1

51.8

13.4 21.0 20.7 18.8 15.6 10.5

19.4 38.1 42.4 65.3 20.1

46.5

7.1 20.7 21.6 20.8 16.9 12.8

9.0 33.1 57.9 69.3 18.8

W

10.1 19.0 19.3 20.2 17.0 14.4

7.9 16.1 21.8 19.4 19.4 15.1

U

51.0

47.5

W

19.3 38.3 42.4 65.0 20.0

13.2 21.2 20.8 18.9 15.9 10.0

51.5

P

Paris

13.5 47.1 39.5 72.6 35.9

10.1 19.0 19.3 20.2 17.0 14.4

51.0

P

Bern

10.3 5.2 -15.5 −4.8 1.2

6.1 0.5 −0.8 −1.9 −1.0 −2.8

5.0

∆1

6.1 0.6 -6.4 −1.6 1.8

2.2 2.9 −2.5 0.8 −2.4 −0.7

3.5

∆1

−0.1 0.2 0.0 −0.3 −0.1

−0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.3 −0.5

−0.3

∆2

0.2 0.1 −0.2 0.0 0.5

0.0 0.0 0.0 −0.1 0.0 0.0

0.1

∆2

4.2 37.3 58.5 68.6 28.8

10.9 22.0 23.2 20.8 11.7 11.2

52.6

U

7.3 48.4 44.2 79.6 29.2

7.5 16.2 19.5 26.0 15.5 15.0

43.9

U

17.5 42.9 39.5 63.8 28.0

15.7 19.6 19.6 18.0 15.6 11.4

51.5

W

15.1 44.6 40.3 73.1 30.3

10.0 20.2 21.2 19.6 14.8 14.2

49.8

W

17.5 42.9 39.5 63.8 29.0

15.1 19.8 19.8 18.2 15.7 11.4

51.4

P

Lyon

15.0 44.1 40.9 72.7 31.8

9.7 20.6 21.6 20.2 15.1 12.8

49.8

P

Zurich

13.3 5.6 -19.0 −4.8 0.2

4.2 −2.2 −3.4 −2.6 4.0 0.2

−1.2

∆1

7.7 −4.3 −3.3 -6.9 2.6

2.2 4.4 2.1 -5.9 −0.4 −2.2

5.9

∆1

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0

−0.6 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.0

−0.1

∆2

−0.1 −0.5 0.6 −0.4 1.5

−0.3 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.3 −1.4

0.0

∆2

23.2 17.7 58.9 66.7 33.7

4.9 20.4 21.9 20.0 19.4 13.2

53.9

U

10.5 55.7 33.6 68.9 76.0

7.6 23.2 20.7 19.3 19.7 9.4

48.9

U

28.0 26.3 45.7 67.3 24.2

12.7 24.3 21.0 18.4 13.3 10.4

50.6

W

12.8 52.2 35.0 56.0 68.4

9.8 18.6 17.9 21.7 16.1 15.9

49.9

W

28.0 26.3 45.7 68.0 24.2

12.6 24.2 21.1 18.3 13.3 10.4

50.6

P

London

12.8 52.2 35.0 56.0 69.0

9.8 18.7 17.9 21.7 16.1 15.9

49.9

P

Berlin

4.8 8.6 -13.2 1.3 -9.5

7.7 3.8 −0.8 −1.7 -6.1 −2.8

−3.3

∆1

2.3 −3.5 1.4 -12.9 -7.0

2.2 −4.5 −2.8 2.4 −3.6 6.5

1.0

∆1

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

−0.1 −0.1 0.1 −0.1 0.0 0.0

0.0

∆2

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.6

0.0 0.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

0.0

∆2

33.0 23.8 43.1 63.5 52.2

5.5 18.7 23.1 20.8 20.3 11.4

52.6

U

14.4 50.1 35.4 70.0 25.1

9.8 19.8 21.4 20.2 18.6 10.0

48.3

U

40.5 31.1 28.3 57.7 41.6

12.8 18.9 19.2 18.9 15.4 15.0

51.6

W

15.8 51.7 32.5 68.0 23.0

10.6 17.0 19.5 21.5 15.7 15.6

49.9

P

40.5 31.2 28.3 57.0 42.0

13.6 18.9 19.3 19.0 15.5 13.6

50.7

P

1.6

∆1

1.4 1.6 −2.9 −2.0 −2.1

0.8 −2.8 −1.9 1.3 −2.9 5.6

Stuttgart

7.5 7.4 -14.8 -6.5 -10.2

8.1 0.2 −3.8 −1.8 −4.8 2.2

−1.9

∆1

Birmingham

15.8 51.7 32.5 68.0 23.4

10.6 17.0 19.5 21.6 15.7 15.6

49.9

W

0.0 0.1 0.0 −0.7 −0.6

0.8 0.0 0.1 0.1 0.1 −1.4

−0.9

∆2

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 −0.4

0.0 0.0 0.0 −0.1 0.0 0.0

0.0

∆2

Note. Cell entries are percentages. U=Sample unweighted, W=Sampled weighted, P=Population, ∆1 =Difference population-sample unweighted, ∆2 =Difference population-sample weighted. Italics=Population-sample difference > 5 %-points.

Female Age Cohorts 65 Education Low Medium High Employed Center

Female Age Cohorts 65 Education Low Medium High Employed Center

U

Table A.1: DemGovCit-Survey: Unweighted and Weighted Sample Versus Population

B

Question Wording

Table B.1: Operationalization: Support for Metropolitan Reform Variable

Question Wording

Inter-municipal Tax-Base Sharing

“Please indicate to what extent you agree or disagree with the following statements A. When a locality in the [X] region is facing financial difficulties, it should be supported by the other localities via equalization payments. B. I would personally be ready to pay higher taxes, to help other localities via equalization payments.” [0=strongly disagree - 10=strongly agree]

Institutional Re- “In the [X] region, there are problems in certain realms that go beyond form the boundaries of a single local authority. There are several options to deal with these problems. Please indicate to what extent you would support the following possible solutions. A. the merger of several local authorities into larger local authority areas. B. the cooperation of several local authorities in the corresponding problem areas. C. handing over the corresponding tasks to a new political authority to develop uniform solutions for the whole [X] region.” [0=strongly disagree - 10=strongly agree] Note. X=Name of the respondent’s city-region. Creation of combined variable inter) | A > B; municipal tax-base sharing is done in the following way: 1. A × (1 − ( |A−B| 10 |A−B| 2. A × (1 + ( 10 ) | A < B. Table B.2: Operationalization: Independent Variables from Questionnaire Variable

Question Wording

UTILITARIAN APPROACH Homeownership Are you a tenant or are you the owner of your apartment/house? 1 Tenant 2 Owner 3 Other 88 DK Kids of Thinking now of everyone living in your household, including children: Schoolage including yourself, how many people live here regularly as members of your household? a. Number of adults and adolescents aged 14 years and over: [free text] b. Number of Children aged under 14 years: [free text] Continued on next page

33

Table B.2 – Continued Variable

Question Wording

Income Level

Please utilize the list below. Which category applies for the total net income of your house-hold per week/month/ year? If you do not know the exact amount, please estimate. [1=lowest income bracket, 10=highest income bracket] Satisfaction with And now a question concerning life at your current place of residence. Public Services How do you assess the following aspects of your daily life? Please indicate to what extent you agree or disagree with the following statements. a. Public transportation (Buses, Tube, Railway) is well-developed. b. There are enough jobs. c. There are enough public parks and squares to relax or meet. d. There are enough public schools near by. e. You can move freely without concern for your personal safety. [1=strongly disagree - 5=strongly agree; 88=DK] IDEATIONAL APPROACH Exclusive Local How attached do you feel to... Attachment a. the local authority area in which you live? b. the [CITYNAME] region? [0=no attachment at all - 10=very strong attachment; 88=DK] TAN Party Iden- Do you generally think of yourself as a supporter of a political party or tification is there some party that you feel closer to than the others? a. Yes b. No If a.: Which party is that? [TAN party=1, other/no party=0] Pro-Immigration To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following Attitudes statements? d. Too many immigrants just don’t want to fit into [COUNTRY]’s society. [0=strongly agree - 10=strongly disagree; 88=DK] Left-Right Self- In politics people sometimes speak of “left” and “right”. Where would Placement you place yourself on a left-right scale? [0=left, 10=right, 88=DK] Continued on next page

34

Table B.2 – Continued Variable

Question Wording

Localism

And now think about the way politics is practiced in [COUNTRY]: Some say that things would work better, if more domestic political decisions would be taken at the local level, whereas others say that it would be better, if more domestic political decisions would be taken at the national level. What is your stance on this? Please situate yourself with respect to the following statements on the scale below. a. Things would work better, if more decisions would be taken by local politicians (0) VS Things would work better, if more decisions would be taken by politicians on the national level (10) b. Local politicians know better what I expect from politics (0) VS Politicians on the national level know better what I expect from politics (10) c. Local authorities should be able to determine their level of taxation (0) VS Taxes should be the same in the whole country and be determined by the national government (10)

COGNITIVE APPROACH News Media Use You have indicated that you use (print / online) newspapers and / or magazines to obtain information about political events. Which of the following newspapers/magazines do you read at least once a week? [Local/Regional Newspaper(s) of metropolitan area] Inter-municipal How interested are you in the politics of... Political Interest [FILTER1: Only people in the suburbs] [FILTER2: Only people in the centre city] a. [FILTER1:] the city of [CITYNAME] b. [FILTER1:] other local authorities in the [CITYNAME] region c. [FILTER2:] the local authorities in the [CITYNAME] region [1=not at all interested - 4=very interested; 88=DK] Education What is the highest level of education you have successfully completed? [ISCED-97 Codes (0=pre-primary education - 6=second stage of tertiary education)] Continued on next page

35

Table B.2 – Continued Variable

Question Wording

Local External Political Efficacy

Please indicate, to what extent you agree or disagree with the following statements. c. [Local] Politicians strive to keep in close touch with the people. d. [Local] Politicians care about what ordinary people think. [0=strongly disagree - 10=strongly agree; 88=DK] How much do you personally trust.. g. local government? [0=no trust at all - 10=complete trust; 88=DK]

Trust in Local Government

ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS Commuting I Please indicate how often you engage in the following activities in the city of [CITYNAME]... a. Shopping b. Leisure activities (sports, cinema, theater, restaurants, etc.) c. Club/Associational activities (social or political engagement, etc.) b. Visiting friends and family e. Working [1=daily, 2=several times a week, 3=once a week, 4=once a month, 5=less than once a month, 6=never; 88=DK] Commuting II Please indicate how often you engage in the same activities outside the city of [CITYNAME], meaning in other localities in the [CITYNAME] region [FILTER: (apart from your own locality)]... [FILTER: Only people in the surrounding area] a. Shopping b. Leisure activities (sports, cinema, theater, restaurants, etc.) c. Club/Associational activities (social or political engagement, etc.) b. Visiting friends and family e. Working [1=daily, 2=several times a week, 3=once a week, 4=once a month, 5=less than once a month, 6=never; 88=DK] Continued on next page

36

Table B.2 – Continued Variable

Question Wording

Duration of Residence

Residential bility

Gender

Age

How long have you been living in your locality? 1. Recently moved, less than 1 year 2. 1-3 years 3. 4-10 years 4. 11-20 years 5. More than 20 years 6. Have always lived here, apart from short stays (less than 1 year) elsewhere Mo- In the past ten years, have you lived somewhere other than your current place of residence? (i.e., somewhere for at least one year or longer, not on holiday.) 1. No, I have always lived where I live now 2. Yes, in another locality in the region where I now live 3. Yes, in a different region in the UK 4. Yes, in another European country 5. Yes, in a country outside Europe 88 DK Are you... a. Female b. Male c. Other In what year where you born?

37

C

Operationalization, Descriptive Statistics and Estimation

Table C.1: EFA: Service Evaluation Service Evaluation: Public Transport 0.63 Service Evaluation: Jobs 0.71 Service Evaluation: Public Space 0.72 Service Evaluation: Public Schools 0.74 Service Evaluation: Safety 0.69 Eigenvalue 2.44 Variance (%) 48.8 Cronbach’s α 0.73 N 4148

Exclusive Local Identity The standard indicator to measure the exclusivity of an individual’s attachment to one level compared to another is the so-called ‘Moreno’-question (Moreno, Arriba and Serrano, 1998). The question was developed to assess the degree to which people in different Spanish regions hold dual identities (i.e. feeling both attached to the state and to their region) or exclusive ones (i.e. feeling attached to the state or the region only) (Marks, 1999, 77-79).10 The data used here does not contain the Morenoquestion. However, it contains items for local and metropolitan attachment, which forms part of an item battery. Respondents had to indicate - on a scale from 0 to 10 - how attached they feel to their municipality and to the city-region they live in (but also to their neighborhood, their country, Europe and humanity as a whole). Dupoirier (2007) suggests a way for constructing a Moreno-type indicator from such an item battery, by combining the answers to the items on the level of interest.11 The indicator obtained in this way is of course only an approximation of the Moreno-question. Yet it represents a 10

The question (here for the Basque country and Spain) reads like this: “In general, would you say you feel more Basque than Spanish, as Basque as Spanish, or more Spanish than Basque? 1. Only Basque, 2. More Basque than Spanish, 3. As Basque as Spanish, 4. More Spanish than Basque, 5. Only Spanish” (Marks, 1999, 78). 11 The precise coding is done as follows: Exclusive metropolitan attachment: >6 on city-region attachment, 8 on city-region attachment, >1 and 6 and 1 and 3 and 6 on municipality attachment; finally, respondents who scored below 4 on both indicators or answered “don’t know” are considered to have no particular attachment to any of the two levels.

38

Figure C.1: Dependent Variable Items: Distribution Across Metropolitan Areas (b) Tax-Base Sharing (Personal) (a) Tax-Base Sharing (General)

(c) Consolidation

(d) Inter-Municipal Cooperation

(e) Metropolitan Government

Note. Own figure. Data Source: Strebel, Kübler and Marcinkowski (2016).

39

feasible indirect way to juxtapose two levels of territorial attachment in the absence of the original Moreno-indicator. Table C.2: EFA: Commuting Commute: Working 0.58 Commute: Shopping 0.79 Commute: Leisure 0.83 Commute: Club/Association 0.73 Commute: Visiting Friends/Family 0.79 Eigenvalue 2.83 Variance (%) 56.4 Cronbach’s α 0.76 N 4895 Note. This exploratory factor analysis is based on a polychoric correlation matrix which accounts for the fact that the distribution of the five variables is right-skewed and that the variables’ scale level is ordinal. Table C.3: Descriptive Statistics Variable Support for Metropolitan Reform Gender (Female=1) Age: < 25 Age: 25-34 Age: 35-44 Age: 45-54 Age: 55-64 Age: > 65 Commuting Frequency Residence: < 1 year Residence: 1-3 years Residence: 4-10 years Residence: 11-20 years Residence: > 20 years Residence: Whole life City-Region Residence (=1) Income: Low

N

Mean

SD

4895

0

0.09

−0.39

4888 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895 4895

0.49 0.08 0.2 0.22 0.21 0.18 0.12 0.13 0.04 0.15 0.23 0.2 0.27 0.12 0.18

0.5 0.27 0.4 0.41 0.41 0.38 0.33 0.4 0.2 0.35 0.42 0.4 0.44 0.32 0.38

4873

0.28

0.45

Continued on next page 40

Min

Max

P25

P50

P75

0.28

−0.04

0

0.05

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3.15 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0

0

1

0

0

1

Table C.3 – Continued Variable

N

Income: Medium Income: High Homeowner (=1) School-Age Children (=1) Std. Service Evaluation Identity: None Identity: Exclusive Metro Identity: Metro>Local Identity: Equal Identity: Local>Metro Identity: Exclusive Local Party ID: TAN (=1) Pro-Immigration Local Media Use (=1) Metropolitan Pol. Interest Education: Low Education: Medium Education: High Local EPE Trust Local Government LOCAL CONTEXT WEALTH UNEMPLOYMENT RATE log(POPULATION) CENTER (=1) log(POP. DENSITY) Note.

a

Mean

SD

Min

Max

P25

P50

P75

1 1 1 1

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

1 1 1 1

−0.65 0 0

−0.02 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 1 0 0

4873 4873 4853 4895

0.42 0.31 0.47 0.27

0.49 0.46 0.5 0.45

0 0 0 0

4057 4895 4895

0 0.07 0.02

1 0.26 0.13

−3.47 0 0

4895 4895 4895 4895

0.21 0.6 0.1 0.01

0.4 0.49 0.31 0.08

0 0 0 0

4895 4677 4895 4831

0.09 0 0.4 0.02

0.29 1 0.49 0.99

0 −1.17 0 −1.89

1 2.06 1 1.7

0 −0.85 0 −0.69

0 −0.2 0 0.5

0 0.77 1 0.5

4769 4769 4769 4722 4668

0.14 0.39 0.47 0 0

0.35 0.49 0.5 0.99 0.99

0 0 0 −1.32 −2.22

1 1 1 2.72 1.81

0 0 0 −0.92 −0.61

0 0 0 −0.11 0.2

0 1 1 0.7 0.6

4683 4895

0.01 −0.01

1 0.99

−1.31 −2.64

1.7 4.33

−0.97 −0.79

−0.3 −0.06

0.7 0.66

4884 4895 4895

0 0.38 0

1 0.48 1

−3.33 0 −4.91

1.55 1 2.1

−0.79 0 −0.6

0.13 0 0.19

0.72 1 0.7

Standardized indicators.

41

1.71 1 1 1 1 1 1

0.7 0 0 0 1 0 0

Table C.4: Support for Metropolitan Reform: Random Effects ANOVA Level-2 Municipality Metropolitan Area Country Constant (γ00 ) -.0024 (.0017) .0001 (.0013) .0001 (.0013) 2 Level-1 variance (σ ) .0077 (.0002) .0086 (.0002) .0086 (.0002) Level-2 variance (τ00 ) .0011 (.0002) .0000 (.0000) 0.000 (0.000) Total Variance (σ 2 + τ00 ) .0088 .0088 .0088 N (level-1) 5044 5044 5044 N (level-2) 1347 8 4 a Intra-Class Correlation .1203 (.0180) .0000 (.0000) .0000 (.0000) LR test (χ2 ) 76.21 0.00 0.00 2 p>χ 0.000 1.000 1.000 τ00 a Note. ICC= σ2 +τ00 ; Standard errors in parentheses.

D

Regression Tables

Table D.1: Support for Metropolitan Reform: Listwise Deleted Data Baseline

Utilitarian

Ideational

Cognitive

Full

-0.0041 (0.3012)

-0.0032 (0.3940)

-0.0049 (0.1990)

-0.0018 (0.6073)

-0.0023 (0.5059)

0.0092 (0.3061) 35-44 -0.0091 (0.2063) 45-54 -0.0046 (0.5296) 55-64 -0.0065 (0.3550) >=65 -0.0067 (0.4237) Commuting Frequency 0.0007 (0.9405) Residence Duration (B= > 20 years) < 1 Year -0.0032 (0.7669) 1-3 years 0.0190∗∗ (0.0080)

0.0111 (0.1897) -0.0118 (0.0846) -0.0014 (0.8310) -0.0027 (0.6727) -0.0049 (0.5464) 0.0004 (0.9626)

0.0111 (0.2131) -0.0087 (0.1965) -0.0035 (0.6227) -0.0043 (0.5316) -0.0088 (0.2928) 0.0011 (0.8891)

0.0072 (0.3705) -0.0082 (0.1673) -0.0052 (0.4173) -0.0069 (0.2622) -0.0128 (0.0967) -0.0051 (0.4953)

0.0096 (0.2294) -0.0091 (0.1152) -0.0023 (0.7060) -0.0033 (0.5750) -0.0102 (0.1815) -0.0055 (0.4200)

-0.0043 (0.6660) 0.0161∗ (0.0179)

0.0041 (0.7002) 0.0253∗∗∗ (0.0005)

0.0065 (0.5116) 0.0138∗ (0.0320)

0.0060 (0.5269) 0.0148∗ (0.0224)

Gender (Female=1) Age Cohorts (B=25-34) χ2 R2 AIC BIC

3414 1104 3425.14 105.95 0.000 0.0659 -6794.28 -6622.49

3414 1104 3530.15 206.55 0.000 0.1318 -6990.29 -6775.54

3414 1104 3500.40 226.19 0.000 0.1098 -6930.79 -6716.04

3414 1104 3716.01 389.06 0.000 0.2307 -7368.02 -7171.68

3414 1104 3763.63 523.42 0.000 0.2527 -7435.25 -7153.01

Birmingham Constant Level-1 variance (σ 2 ) Level-2 variance (τ00 )

Note. Own calculations. Data Source: Strebel, Kübler and Marcinkowski (2016). *p