Context-driven Local Autonomy. The importance of differentiated assessments in asymmetric countries

Local autonomy is a highly debated concept, whose definition is still controversial both from a legal and a political perspective (Panasyuk, 2018) 1. Measuring its level is challenging as well. Nonetheless, given the empowerment of regional and local levels of government in recent decades (Sharpe, 1993; Keating, 1997; 1998; Kersting & Vetter, 2003), several studies have engaged in this effort and provided the first reliable large-scale comparative set of data, both cross-country and over time, on local autonomy at the regional (Hooghe et al., 2016) as well as municipal (Ladner et al., 2019) subnational level. Those indexes are usually provided at the country (national) level, and only irregularly at the subnational level. While undoubtedly valuable in terms of comparability and conciseness, they are nonetheless of limited use for in-depth and locally-based analyses. This article thus aims to provide a more differentiated evaluation of local autonomy by assessing the degree of municipal autonomy at the subnational level rather than aggregated at the national level.