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Cities worldwide operate on the frontlines to support forced migrants. Some of these cities even overstep their formal prerogatives by refusing to comply with, and at times overtly subverting, the prescriptions of national authorities. This article builds a conceptual framework to understand such forms of insurgent urban asylum policy-making. We argue that insurgency depends on how city governments mediate the constraints and opportunities that emanate from the horizontal and vertical dimensions of multi-level governance, which capture city-level political dynamics as well as intergovernmental interactions. To illustrate our framework, we compare asylum policy-making in Barcelona, Milan, and Munich during the 2010s “refugee crisis.” While Munich invested in rather uncontroversial integration programs, Milan and Barcelona overstepped their jurisdictional boundaries and supported migrants considered “illegal” by national governments. These insurgent responses were enacted as a “remedy from below,” stemming from a sense of urgency that was not as pressing for Munich’s policy-makers because of the greater capacity of Germany’s asylum system.

Anti-corruption claims have been at the core of many mass mobilizations worldwide. However, the nexus between corruption and collective action is often overlooked. Bridging social movement and corruption studies, this article contends that believing in extensive corruption has a positive impact on non-electoral forms of participation. But this effect is uneven across the population and contingent upon the individual’s political interest and education. Using survey data from 34 countries, the analysis confirms that people prefer non-electoral mobilization when institutions are seemingly captured by vested interests. Moreover, perceiving endemic corruption is likely to breed indignation among lesser-educated and less politically interested citizens, who are keener to embrace anti-elitist arguments and ultimately engage in extra-institutional behaviour. These findings help refine theories of societal accountability, which generally assume that politically sophisticated citizens are the driving force in the fight against corruption.

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