Mayoral preferences for delegation in collaborative arrangements: issue salience and policy specificity

ABSTRACT

Multilevel governance offers different settings to study executive decision-making and delegation. Associations of municipalities (AoMs), which are collaborative partnerships, are understudied arrangements in the delegation literature. Using a survey experiment with 240 Colombian mayors, this research explores whether issue specificity and issue salience shift preferences for delegating funding appropriations. Mayors overall prefer not to delegate and shifts in issue salience do not affect these preferences. Yet, mayors are less likely to delegate to regional AoMs when facing a policy-specific scenario. Moreover, this effect is contingent upon municipal population due to the relevance of cognitive shortcuts in more complex scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Decision making
• local governments
• collaboration
• multilevel governance
• issue specificity

Acknowledgement

The authors express their deepest gratitude to the mayors participating in the 2019 Colombian Congress of Municipalities, as well as to the staff members of the Colombian Federation of Municipalities (FCM) and other organizers of this event. Without their cooperation, this research would not have been possible. The authors also owe special gratitude to Pedro Luis Blanco, Julieth Altamar, and Laura Marcela Villa for their valuable research assistance while conducting the survey experiment, to Jeff Vargas and Ricardo Bello Pascuas for help collecting complementary data, and to participants at the 2nd International Conference of the Experiment Lab for Public Management Research (EXPMR) in Seoul, 2020.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Studies also have explored the role of decision makers’ age, gender, education, domain expertise, personality traits, cultural background and social environment as drivers of decision shortcuts (Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman 2002; Kahneman 2011; List 2003; Sheaffer et al. 2018).

2. For a few exceptions on the exploration of these aspects in political elites, see (Avellaneda 2012, 2016; Butler and Dynes 2016; Dynes 2020).

3. A Colombian Association of Capital Cities was founded in 2015 and its members left FCM in 2018.

4. Data obtained by the authors from the FCM.

5. Other factors affecting information accessibility are frequency of information (Carlston and Smith 1996; Higgins and King 1981), familiarity of information (because of expertise or past experiences) (e.g. Ajzen 1996; Bruner 1957), and predisposition towards information or pre-existing attitudes (e.g. Festinger 1957; Heider 1944, 1958).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ricardo A. Bello-Gomez

Ricardo A. Bello-Gomez is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. He studies public management, intergovernmental relations and organization theory, with a particular interest in local government performance. His overall research agenda explores the institutional, organizational and managerial factors affecting government performance, often focusing on the provision of social services.

Claudia N. Avellaneda

Claudia N. Avellaneda is an associate professor in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. She specializes in governance and public management in developing countries, with an emphasis on local and subnational governments in Latin America. Specifically, she investigates the drivers of municipal and provincial performance by focusing on the role of mayors’ and governors’ education, experience, networking, and political support on social service delivery, public finances, tax collection, and decision-making.