Local sovereignty norms weaken local opposition to foreign bases regardless of public sentiment.

Evidence

Traditional political science would typically agree with this assessment. Many political scientists would say that local protest should generally be irrelevant in such a situation. Even if a majority of Vicenza residents opposed the base, even if a newly elected mayor and city council rejected the plan (as they did in late 2008), decisions about military matters and other issues of foreign policy should be made not by local authorities but by nationally elected politicians. And in this case, the Italian government approved the base. Many would suggest that this was democracy at work. Some might point to the U.S. base in Manta, Ecuador, as a telling comparison: in that case, the majority of locals supported the base, but the national government opposed it, and the base was eventually removed. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 937

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the usual democracy narrative: a national government can override local majority support (Manta) just as it can impose against local majority opposition (Vicenza) — the tension with legitimate democratic legitimacy is central.
• DEEPTHINKING: Frames the deeper question of which polity (local vs. national) legitimately ‘owns’ decisions about foreign bases on its own soil — a genuinely thorny normative issue that resists summary.