Abstract
Local autonomy is a core issue in democracies, and there have been multiple attempts to measure it. Most of these efforts provide cross-country comparable data based on country-level scores, thus neglecting in-country territorial differences. This study stresses the multidimensionality of local autonomy, its context-driven variability, and the importance of acknowledging and assessing territorial differentiation in order to provide more accurate measurements of municipal local autonomy. It thus explores the variations in the degree of local autonomy at the municipal level in Italy by region and not only at the country level. Italy is a particularly interesting case due to its quasi-federal asymmetry, while the federal systems of Austria and Switzerland provide further evidence of these variations. Our findings—gathered in two original datasets—show that discrepancies in local autonomy across regions are remarkably present, particularly when regional autonomy is high, that they emerge regardless of the formal competences allocated by the legal framework, that they dissimilarly vary across the dimensions of autonomy, and that they can be traced back to the impact of austerity measures, the reforms indirectly but substantially impacting local government, and the context-driven perceptions of the meaning of autonomy. These results may be relevant to analyses of asymmetric realities in multilevel democracies in Europe and beyond.