Assessing the intensity of cooperation: a study of joint delegation of municipal functions to inter-municipal associations

ABSTRACT

Talking is cheap, at least in the short term; elected officials may profess their preferences for IMC and yet deny IMA organisations the necessary resources to fulfil their missions. Driven by a focus on revealed preferences for inter-municipal cooperation, the article aims to answer two questions: Why do some IMA exhibit a high level of commitment on the part of their local government members whereas others remain underutilised, reflecting a choice by local governments to retain these responsibilities themselves? How does this commitment to IMAs vary over time? We use data from 25 IMAs over a 10-year period (2008–2018) in Portugal to assess the intensity of cooperation among Portuguese local governments through stand-alone organisations. The panel analysis regression supports the hypotheses that a larger number of local governments involved in IMAs and higher levels of heterogeneity among them make cooperation more difficult. In contrast, longer interaction in IMAs reinforces the intensity of cooperation.

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-municipal cooperation
• commitment
• service delivery
• delegation of authority
• information asymmetry

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2018 European Consortium of Political Research meeting in Hamburg, Germany. The authors would like to thank their colleagues there for providing useful comments on this earlier version.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The article uses the acronym IMA to describe all stand-alone organisations formally set up by a group of municipalities. IMAs are known by different names around the world: comunidades inter-municipais in Portugal, municipal unions in Italy, intercommunalités in France, and mancomunidades in Spain, Bolivia, Equador, and Chile.

2. The Herfindahl index is primarily used as a measure of the size of firms in relation to the industry. In our case, the population Herfindahl index measures the size of the population of the municipalities in relation to the total population of the IMA. A low value (near 0) indicates that all municipalities have about the same population size (physical homophily). A negative coefficient is expected. The economic Herfindahl index measures the proportion of fiscal revenues of the municipalities in relation to the total amount of fiscal revenues of IMA. A low value (near 0) indicates that all municipalities raise about the same amount of fiscal revenues (economic homophily). A negative coefficient is also expected. The political Herfindahl index measures the proportion of municipalities of the IMA that are governed by the same political party. A high value (near 1) indicates that one or few political parties govern in a large number of municipalities (homophily). A positive coefficient is expected. Note that due to the different nature of the variables, the Herfindahl Index of political homophily has the exact opposite interpretation of the population and economic indexes.

3. In order to be cautious about the results reported here, we also estimated ordinary least squares and instrumental variable regressions, using several variables as instruments, but the results remained substantively the same. See the Technical Appendix for a detailed description of all the results included in this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Centre for Political Science (UIDB/CPO/00758/2020), University of Minho/University of Évora, supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the FCT; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia;

Notes on contributors

Pedro J. Camões

Pedro Camões is an assistant professor in the School of Economics and Management and a member of the Research Centre for Political Science at the School of Economics and Management at the University of Minho, Portugal. He has recently published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Management Review, Ecological Economics, Land Use Policy, and Local Government Studies.

António Tavares

António F. Tavares is an associate professor of political science and a member of the Research Centre for Political Science at the School of Economics and Management at the University of Minho, Portugal. His research interests include local public service delivery, land use management, and civic engagement and political participation. He has recently published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Cities, Water Resources and Management and Local Government Studies.

Filipe Teles

Filipe Teles is an assistant professor at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. He is a member of the University’s Research Unit on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policy, where he has worked on governance and local administration, territorial reform, political leadership, and innovation. He has recently co-edited, with A. Gendzwill, C. Stanus and H. Heinelt, Close Ties in European Local Governance - Linking Local State and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and has published articles in journals including Science of the Total Environment, Resources, European Planning Studies and the Journal of Cleaner Production.