Inter-municipal cooperation in administrative tasks – the role of population dynamics and elections

ABSTRACT

We use a hazard model to identify the factors that drive the emergence of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) in tasks of internal administration in West-Germany between 2003 and 2014. Our first focus rests on the role of population decline. The results show that municipalities situated in clusters of shrinking municipalities are more likely to start IMC. Second, we test for the role of political cycles in the timing of IMC-arrangements. There is no direct effect of the proximity to elections yet IMC in election years is more (less) likely among municipalities characterised by high (low) fiscal capacity and administrative expenditures. In addition, state subsidies for IMC are found to have a strong positive impact on the emergence of IMC.

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-municipal cooperation
• population decline
• political cycles
• hazard model
• Germany
• survey

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the editors and reviewers for their constructive suggestions and comments. They would also like to thank Guido Bünstorf, Germa Bel, Raymund Gradus, Monika Banaszewska, Simon Melch, Rasmus Bode, Martin W. Rosenfeld as well as the participants in the session on decentralization at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society in Budapest for their valuable input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Metropolitan areas are defined as cities with more than 250,000 inhabitants and surrounding municipalities with strong commuter flows towards the cities (cf. Rosenfeld et al. 2016).

2. In many cases, the mayor answered the survey personally. The results reported below are robust if we include dummies marking different types of people handling the survey.

3. See supplementary Appendix B.

4. Fiscal variables in prices of 2015.

5. See supplementary Appendix C.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hans Böckler Foundation; Hans Böckler Stiftung [2014-713-4].

Notes on contributors

Ivo Bischoff

Ivo Bischoff is Professor of Economics at the University of Kassel, Germany. His research – mostly empirical – focusses on the area of public finance and public choice at the local level.

Eva Wolfschütz

Eva Wolfschütz is a research assistant in the Public Economics Unit at the University of Kassel. Her research interests include public finance, political economy, and inter-municipal cooperation.