The project aims to empirically investigate and analyze social cohesion as an expression of local power relations. Our starting hypothesis is that local cohesion is to a large extent the product of the enforcement of interests, the availability of resources, and networks capable of exercising power. Cohesion cannot be conceptualized without reference to power or conflict.
More specifically, the project is guided by the complex concept of power developed by Hans Paul Bahrdt, which builds on Plessner, Popitz, and Weber. In this understanding, power is a social relationship, an economic relation, and an institutional order. Central to our analysis—drawing on Pierre Bourdieu—are (capital) resources with which actors are endowed and through which personal, positional, and symbolic power are expressed.
The project seeks to generate findings on the extent to which municipal power constellations in the design and use of infrastructures and public goods constitute specific conditions for, or potential threats to, social cohesion in democracy. As issues of resources and distribution, infrastructures and public goods are particularly well suited to the analysis of power, as they are permeated by differing interests and their negotiation.
The project aims to address the following questions:
- To what extent and in what ways are infrastructures and public goods perceived as binding or divisive through questions of power?
- How do power relations and discourses about power influence local cohesion?
- What role do power, micropolitics, and social places play in infrastructural change and social cohesion?
- How do actors with differing degrees of power shape infrastructures and public goods through their relationships?
To answer these questions, the project combines qualitative methods (local case studies, participant observation, expert interviews, group discussions, and informal roundtable conversations) with quantitative approaches (analysis of regional statistical and microdata, budget documents, and data from council information systems).
