Infrastructures of multilevel democracy are cumulative historical products. Their origins can date back to early state formation. Their institutional foundations were often laid before the arrival of mass democracy, national constitutional orders, state bureaucracies, or urban industrial society. Their formation and evolution has often followed distinct trajectories from national democratization, industrialization, and even the formation of national territorial states. For most of what are now developed democracies, the pivotal events took place over the long nineteenth century from the American Revolution to World War I. Over that period, throughout Europe, North America, and Japan, new national systems of local self-government and territorial administration at the scale of cities and communities established a local state. Introduced at the higher levels of states rather than localities themselves, enactments embedded into wider constitutional and administrative orders formalized a set of local institutions that had previously been informal or at best a patchwork, or had not existed before. In some instances this local state was the result of pressures from civil society. Other times it was the consequence of reform from above. Whatever its origins, this local state would shape the subsequent development of civic and political movements, and the emergence of the policy state.

In July of 1831, one year after the July Revolution established a constitutional monarchy in France, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont arrived in New York City on an official mission to investigate the US prison system. Over the next eight months their travels took them thousands of miles throughout the forty-year-old United States, from Canada to New Orleans. They spent only two weeks in the newly established national capital of Washington, DC. In the following decade, in a pivotal work that would become a touchstone of modern political science, Tocqueville expressed his admiration for a society where politics sprang from the many communities he visited rather than from the powerful hierarchies that still dominated Europe.

In the contemporary world of nation states and globalizing forces, institutions and governance arrangements at the scale of cities and communities remain a persistent fact of political life. Systems of local government addressed to this scale are a near-universal feature of contemporary democracies. In older democracies they grow out of long-established traditions, and take the form of highly institutionalized instances for decision-making, policy implementation, and political participation (Page and Goldsmith, 1987, Hesse and Sharpe, 1991, Pierre, 1999, Vetter, 2007, Lidström, 2003). The reasons governance at the local scale has persisted go well beyond the case that Tocqueville made for local institutions. Since long before he wrote, the scale of communities and cities was regarded in Western political theory as the most critical site of linkages between society and the state. Contemporary democracies, along with other states, still rely systematically on local institutions. Democracy at the local and the national scale, and the continued efforts of nation states to shape society through policy, have compounded this reliance.

The growth and consolidation of a state built around policy marked the maturation of the three distinct varieties of multilevel democracy. Over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, despite pressures toward convergence, distinctions between the three types have persisted. The multilevel lens through which we have examined these national systems of local institutions and their origins casts new light on a whole range of literatures that have compared national democratic processes and policy performance among advanced industrial democracies. Comparisons of national democratic institutions, welfare states, and varieties of capitalism point to a variety of clear correspondences between national institutions, policy performance, and the overall quality of democracy. A multilevel conception of state–society relations opens a new window onto the operational realities that determine how these relationships work. Local and multilevel institutions further illuminate familiar differences among national democratic systems, and elucidate other variations in the quality of democracy that analyses of national institutions have struggled to explain. In demonstrating that local institutions were much more than an outgrowth of the main variations in national democratic traditions, we have shown how they repeatedly shaped the construction of democratic institutions at the national scale. Their consequences remain apparent in the contemporary operational realities of democracies at the local scale, and continue to influence the quality of democratic institutions today.

We began this volume with an examination of several alternative ways that democratic nation states incorporate civil society and local institutions. Historical analysis traced the origins of contemporary differences in multilevel democracy. Comparison showed them to have affected both the performance of policy and the overall quality of democracy over the long run. Even among the relatively successful multilevel democracies examined in this study, however, the problem of enhancing and sustaining multilevel democracy poses persistent challenges. Across the developing world, even greater challenges confront efforts to construct new, more inclusive and effective institutions at the local scale. Following a brief summary of the overall argument, this chapter briefly sketches these questions for the future.

In the perspective of multilevel democratic theory, local democracy is fundamental to national democracy. In ways that previous typologies of national democratic institutions have neglected, local institutions and their linkages to governance at higher levels matter for how, as well as how well, democracy works. Alternative models of multilevel democracy depend on distinctive infrastructures of local government and administration, on particular forms of organization in civil society, and on divergent patterns of relations between the state and society at the local as well as the supralocal scale. Logics of infrastructural power, democratic accountability, and contestation foster overarching complementarities among institutions that are usually analyzed separately, from local government and national administration to political parties and organized interests. In countries with a state-dependent local government, hierarchical administration, and restricted incorporation of a local elitist model, civic participation and organization should remain limited. In countries with the independent local government and broad local societal incorporation of the civic localist model, civic organization should be broad based but have limited organizational hierarchies. Where a nationalized infrastructure assigns responsibility for national policy to institutions at the local scale, broad civic and political participation should be incorporated into hierarchical organizations at both the national and the local level.