Urban Regime Theory

Urban regime theory has been the leading concept within urban politics for analyzing coalition‐based politics in large US cities. Urban regimes have been studied in numerous settings in the USA and beyond, with a specific focus on the informal relationships between public and private actors that allow city governments to develop and act on a policy agenda. In the early 2010s, the regime approach remained a central feature of the urban politics literature; however, many debates were underway on how to move beyond urban regime theory. These discussions about “next steps” in theory‐building have focused on the ways in which the validity of regime theory has been affected by changes in the global economy, transitions in intergovernmental relations, and scholarly critiques of the theory.