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In this article we compare Cardiff and San Sebastián‐Donostia (Donostia) qualitatively, arguing that local governments’ capacity to co‐opt non‐state actors provides a relevant approach to understanding changes in citizen participation under fiscal austerity. Our argument is based on the close interrelationships of co‐optation, legitimacy and procedural regulation. These concepts help us understand how citizen participation is maintained in periods of instability, as experienced by city governments during and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Local governments’ legitimacy is maintained in so far as it shows capacity to co‐opt through negotiation, capture, ‘technicalization’ of processes and minimization of conflict. These elements work in tandem with factors of urban austerity embedded into a longer‐term neoliberalizing discourse. Our findings show that both city governments maintained their legitimacy but that, in the process, Cardiff Council's co‐optive capacity weakened, in contrast to Donostia's.

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From 1987 to 1998, the Basque government was made up of a coalition between Basque nationalists and unionists. However, there are doubts about whether this experience has a consociational character. In order to clarify this, the article analyses the four characteristics of Lijphart's scheme, focussing on the degree of power‐sharing of the Basque governments using the qualitative distinction of McGarry and O'Leary and the centripetal approach, creating the power‐sharing in government index and studying the degree of ideological proximity of the parties making up the coalition. The conclusions are that in the Basque case, there were no complete or concurrent consociational governments, but instead, there were centripetal coalitions. Furthermore, it makes clear that an electoral system with high proportionality is an obstacle when it comes to maintaining cross‐segment governments in societies that lack stability in the correlation of forces among segments and use centripetal power‐sharing coalitions or weak or concurrent consotiational coalitions. The most realistic choice in order to preserve the power‐sharing government would be adopting a proportional sequential coalition and a proportional electoral system with significative electoral threshold to avoid the emergence of anti‐consociational parties.