Territorial Inequalities in Multilevel Systems

Inequality is a challenge for societies around the globe. In addition to its socio-economic and political dimensions, inequality also has a territorial dimension. Like interpersonal inequality, inequality among the different parts of a country can have disruptive effects on democratic societies, fueling regional grievances and undermining territorial cohesion. Citizens generally dislike territorial differences in living conditions and the access to public services, or ‘postcode lotteries’ (Henderson, Jeffery and Wincott, 2014). There are grounds to expect that decentralization increases territorial inequality, meaning that territorial disparities in the access to public services, living conditions, and state capacities may be particularly high in federal, regionalized, and dezentralized countries; though this has never been systematically examined. Against this backdrop, the panel invites empirical and theoretical contributions on spatial inequalities, policy diversity, and regional imbalances in multilevel systems to shed light on a major democratic challenge of the 21st Century and the implications of decentralization and federalism.