Miles’ law in Finnish municipalities: where decision-makers stand depends on where they sit

ABSTRACT

Miles’ Law, i.e., the notion that institutional position affects attitudes, is considered a truism, but not much attention has been given to properly test or develop it. Here, we argue that Miles’ Law is effective not only for civil servants but among municipal decision-makers in different positions. We examine how well institutional position can explain differences in attitudes to welfare service provision among decision-makers on different levels. Differences in opinion depending on institutional position are usually overlooked when attitudes on welfare are explained. Using survey data (N = 1,578) from 42 municipalities in Finland, our analyses show that institutional position does affect attitudes to service provision. However, the differences are contingent on the mode of service provision under consideration and are moderated by the size of the municipality and the economic status. This shows that it is important to consider the position of local government decision-makers to understand their attitudes.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitudes
• Miles’ law
• Finland
• municipalities
• service provision
• decision-makers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Chen (2012, 242) includes a parenthesis in a footnote saying: ‘Allison credits Paul Hammond, but Miles claims original authorship’. This is incorrect, because the footnote referring to Paul Hammond is nr 83. In footnote nr 82, however, Allison (1969, 711) wrote: ‘This aphorism was stated first, I think, by Don K. Price’, commenting the phrase in question. Further, the text by Machol (1978, 86) was apparently published before Miles’ own article, as Machol begins ‘According to the Wall Street Journal (Feb.22, Dahl and Tufte 1973), Miles’ Law was ‘promulgated some years back by Rufus Miles […]’’. Miles (1978, 399), again, mentions two persons in the story behind the phrase (occurring ‘in late 1948 and early 1949’), besides himself. One of them is the examiner who changed his position, the other is an associate to whom Miles predicted the change in the examiner’s attitude. When Miles, at the point where this change had occurred, said to his associate ‘You see, it depends on where you sit, how you stand’, the associate (‘wide-eyed’) said “That deserve to be given the status of a law. You should call it ‘Miles’ Law’”.

2. A reform of the Finnish welfare system has transferred the responsibility for organising health and social services to a new, regional level from 2023.

3. In 2015 (when the material was collected) there were 301 municipalities in mainland Finland, with on average 17,500 inhabitants. The median size was 6,000 and only nine cities had more than 100.000 inhabitants.

4. The intra-class correlations for the three null models are 0.008 for Individualization, 0.005 for Centralization and 0.014 for Localization. These low levels of intra-municipal correlations indicate that it is unlikely that the situation of the municipality plays a major role.

5. There is some overlapping between categories since most board members are also members of the council (n = 329 out of 355) and many councillors are members of committees (n = 428). Since we assume that experiences from the most influential position is what affects their attitudes, they are coded accordingly.