Can: Neighbor Affair Vol. 36 free download
| Scrum narrative and psm exam guide free download | |
| How to download builds in minecraft | |
| Cant download file from qualtrics |
Municipal amalgamations and their effects: a literature review
Theoretical Background
According to the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Public Administration, amalgamation (or merger) is the process of “the fusion of one or more municipal entities into a new organization” (Belley 1). Similarly, Robert Bish () defines amalgamation as a reduction in the number of multi-purpose local government units through consolidation (Bish 14). Depending on the enabling legislation, this process can be either voluntary or mandatory, but municipal amalgamations should be distinguished from another type of consolidation: territorial annexations. In the process of annexation, one local government unit (usually of larger size and greater resources) absorbs part(s) of (an)other unit(s) (Belley ).
Both consolidation processes – amalgamation and annexation – produce larger territorial units, with potential impacts on economic efficiency, managerial effectiveness, and democratic outcomes. This survey of the literature is focused exclusively on the impacts of amalgamation reforms, since these can be more easily tracked due to the systematic nature of amalgamations, usually organized and promoted with top-down control, and covering a sizeable proportion or the totality of the local government system. This section describes the theoretical impacts of amalgamations by focusing on three types of potential consequences: economic efficiency, managerial effectiveness, and democratic outcomes.
Economic Expectations
Amalgamation reforms are often motivated by the argument that larger municipalities are able to provide local public services at lower unit costs due to economies of scale. This focus is also known as productive efficiency – that is, the optimal method to produce goods and services at the lowest possible cost. However, this argument is erroneous for at least three reasons (Boyne ; ; Dollery and Fleming ; Dollery et al. ). First, economies of scale are not uniform across the whole gamut of services provided by local governments. In capital-intensive and infrastructure services, there will be potential gains with increased population size because fixed costs can be spread across more residents, but typically, in the case of labour-intensive services, these gains are non-existent because providing more services entails hiring more employees to respond to this demand. As the mix of capitalintensive and labour-intensive services in a given municipality tilts towards the latter, scale economies are less likely to be available. Second, managerial costs tend to increase significantly after a certain population size threshold so that diseconomies of scale are likely in large municipalities. Third, population size is an imperfect measure of production costs, since these also depend on such diverse factors as the weather, topography, age of residents, local income, service quality, and seasonal variations in population (for example, tourism or migration).
Past reviews of the empirical literature seem to support these theoretical arguments. Back in , a review of the extant literature by the LUARC Commission indicated that local governments for communities between 25, and , residents are the most efficient, with diseconomies of scale occurring in jurisdictions above ,, and communities below 25, suffering from inefficiencies when providing capitalintensive and specialized services (Holzer et al. ). However, the authors of this report highlight that “over 80 percent of municipal services are of a routine and labor-intensive nature” (p.4) and therefore less likely to generate economies of scale with the added size after amalgamations. In these cases, managerial efficiency is more important than size for achieving efficiencies, because most inefficiencies in larger municipalities stem from management control and excessive administrative burden (Holzer et al. ). There is also evidence that certain services (for example, routine police patrol services) are efficiently performed in smaller communities, whereas larger municipalities are more efficient in performing special investigations (Holzer et al. ). Overall, the report concludes that the theoretical consensus regarding the economic expectations of amalgamations seems to be that the provision of specialized and capital-intensive services becomes more efficient with size increases after amalgamations (Holzer et al. ).
The supporters of intermunicipal cooperation and contracting out for municipal services highlight an additional theoretical argument against amalgamations. Local government officials concerned with reaping economies of scale can enter into more flexible arrangements, such as resource-sharing agreements with their neighbours, and/or purchase services from private providers or other local governments, thereby avoiding the use of a more radical type of territorial reform (Bish ; Dollery and Fleming ; Tavares ).
In contrast with the theoretical arguments against amalgamation reforms, other authors have argued in favour of consolidation and increased municipal size. Large-scale local governments are thought to favour local economic development, not only because of their comprehensive view of planning activities but also because they benefit from lower interest rates and represent lower risk in investments to finance expensive infrastructure (Denters et al. ). Economic efficiency (and managerial effectiveness) levels can also increase in amalgamated municipalities as a result of the higher degrees of specialization and professionalization of larger local governments (Denters et al. ). Free-riding due to interjurisdictional spillovers is also less likely to occur in more consolidated regions, because amalgamations will secure a better match between the boundaries of the jurisdiction and the catchment areas of services (Swianiewicz ).
In summary, the diverse set of factors that contribute to explain varying unit costs in the provision of local services cast doubt on the degree of success of amalgamation reforms in achieving economic efficiency. However, amalgamations can generate local governments capable of addressing regional-type issues due to their large size in terms of population, geographical area, and administrative size. These conflicting theoretical expectations will be compared with the empirical results described in the fourth section of this review.
Functional and Managerial Expectations
Besides the productive efficiency concerns discussed in the previous section, the theoretical discussion focuses on the potential effects of amalgamations on allocative efficiency – that is, the optimal distribution of goods and services that takes into account the preferences of citizen-voters. According to the classic argument developed by Tiebout (), citizens ‘vote with their feet’ to choose their preferred combination of local taxes and publicly provided services. From this point of view, smaller communities are more homogeneous due to population sorting effects between communities and, as a result, local officials are better able to tailor policies that fit the preferences of a larger proportion of their residents (Oakerson ). The Decentralization Theorem proposed by Wallace Oates () argues that, in the absence of cost savings from centralization and interjurisdictional externalities, fiscal responsibilities should be decentralized. The corollary of Oates’ theorem is that “individual local governments are presumably much closer to the people […], they possess knowledge of both local preferences and cost conditions that a central agency is unlikely to have” (Oates ).
The combination of the arguments presented by Tiebout () and Oates () suggests that, in a polycentric regional context, the self-sorting of population between communities leads to significant community differentiation (Howell-Moroney ). When residents are provided with a relatively large number of choices over where to live, communities often become highly differentiated in terms of spending on public services, levels of taxation, financial resources of residents, and the racial composition of the municipality’s population (Lowery ; Ostrom, Tiebout and Warren ; Oakerson ). As a result, the regional landscape tends to display significant heterogeneity of preferences between communities and high homogeneity of preferences within communities. Due to the competition between local governments and the homogeneity of preferences within communities, managerial effectiveness and the quality of services are expected to increase in more fragmented, non-amalgamated contexts.
In a similar vein, an often-cited managerial argument suggests that consolidation of municipalities generates an increase in coordination and management costs due to more complex bureaucratic structures associated with larger local governments (Denters et al. ). The critics tend to explain the growth of bureaucratic organizations as resulting from demand pressures for public services. Amalgamations reduce competition among local governments for taxpayers voting-with-their-feet, creating a situation where uncontrollable spending goes unchecked. The Leviathan hypothesis, developed by Brennan and Buchanan (), argues that fragmentation reduces spending through more decentralised government structures which are smaller relative to the size of the local economy. Fiscal decentralisation promotes local government competition and increases the information available to residents about the price and quality of public services. In addition, “fragmentation supports experimentation and innovation” (Swianiewicz , p) and the diffusion of these practices is more likely across jurisdictions in polycentric metropolitan areas.
In contrast to the benefits for managerial efficiency and effectiveness underlined by public choice scholars, others have argued that post-amalgamation local governments are able to deliver more and better-quality services to their residents (Swianiewicz ). The argument is that the increase in size can lead to a more diverse and specialized set of services, including planning, public transportation, police, and fire services (Newton ). High levels of functional differentiation can only be accomplished in larger municipalities and this has been one of the primary motives to pursue amalgamation reforms. The belief that larger local governments are able to deploy a full-size bureaucracy, professional administrators, and effective coordination to deliver a broad set of public services explains the tendency to combine amalgamation reforms with high functional differentiation in several European countries, particularly in the North (Denters et al. ). The predictability of bureaucratic organization can help improve citizen satisfaction with service delivery, not only in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, but also in less tangible values such as equity and perceived fairness.
Just as with economic efficiency, the expected outcomes of amalgamations for managerial effectiveness seem to vary according to the theoretical background of the researchers. Public Choice scholars argue that pre-amalgamation municipalities may be more responsive due to Tiebout-type competition effects among local governments and higher preference homogeneity within communities, whereas consolidation advocates suggest that post-amalgamation municipalities can also be more responsive because of the improved coordination, capacity and professionalization of local bureaucracies.
Democratic Expectations
The urban politics literature provides two different logics for why the costs of participation are affected by the presence of multiple decision venues in regions and what this means for the quality of civic and political engagement in the community. Both logics presume that population sorting follows on from fragmentation and that the community differentiation produced by polycentricism directly affects the efficacy of engaging in political and community life.
In smaller jurisdictions, close contact between councillors and citizens is more likely and politicians are more accountable to their local constituencies. An increase in scale due to amalgamation may lead to a decline of community and social trust and, in turn, to a decline in political trust (Denters ). For Oakerson, polycentric governance structures are able to promote more consensual decision making because smaller-scale local governments are better able to effectively capture relevant ‘communities of interests’. This type of sorting helps to produce the shared values thought to encourage participation and to facilitate decision making. Works focusing on the role of social capital in political participation find that participation levels are significantly higher in demographically and economically homogeneous communities than in settings with diverse populations (Costa and Kahn ). Large-scale amalgamated governments without smaller nested governments combine highly diverse interests into a single comprehensive political jurisdiction and this situation creates conflict. Oakerson concluded that “if small municipalities are constituted so as to define relatively coherent communities of interest, with each one conducting its politics in a less adversarial style, they increase the potential for the politics of more inclusive units of governments to be conducted in a less adversarial style as well” (p). And a less adversarial style of politics makes it possible for a truly ‘civil’ society to emerge, where businesses and residents work as co-producers with municipal governments in effective urban governance, rather than “act mainly on the demand side as advocate or special pleader” (p). Thus, polycentric structures lead to larger numbers of municipal governments with relatively small populations and these smaller governments enhance political and civic participation. Consistently with this theoretical reasoning, Oliver () found that people living in smaller cities were more likely to report voting in municipal elections, participating in political meetings, and contacting city officials.
Kelleher and Lowery () argue that the absence of conflict is not necessarily an indicator of healthy governance. They suggest that consensual politics occurring in highly fragmented metropolitan areas may mean that larger problems are not confronted at all, or simply must be dealt with in other ways. They note that these problems may just be ‘off the political agenda’, because nested institutions may lead to a lack of venues for confronting larger scale problems. In these cases, Kelleher and Lowery argue, issues of inequality will not have a venue where they can be raised and addressed. This basic criticism has been advanced by several scholars (Howell-Moroney ) and its implication is that amalgamations can potentially help to address these problems by increasing political participation as a response to conflict.
According to the classical argument developed by Dahl and Tufte (), the increase in the capacity to provide more services in amalgamated municipalities can also improve the quality of local democracy. The increase in population size is likely to generate more fruitful political debates, stronger civil society, and enhanced pluralism (Swianiewicz ). If amalgamations are able to increase service delivery capacity, citizens are more likely to get involved in politics because the number of relevant political issues and service functions performed by local governments also increases. This argument assumes that pre-amalgamation municipalities are too small to harbour organized interest groups capable of making a difference through large-scale political action. In contrast, amalgamations can facilitate organized political participation as community groups, political parties and the media tend to be more present, active, and robust (Newton ). An increase in the number, density, and diversity of interest groups and civil society organizations leads to increased pluralism and political competition, and these in turn can generate higher responsiveness to policy preferences on the part of elected leaders (Denters et al. ; Verba and Nie ). Others have suggested that citizens’ perceptions of integration into a wider city-region can also be an important facilitator for consolidation reforms (Lidström ). In addition, fewer income disparities may develop in consolidated municipalities than in highly fragmented settings (Swianiewicz ). By reducing the need for income redistribution across local governments, amalgamations can potentially reduce inequalities between residents in metropolitan areas.
Smaller jurisdictions increase participation due to increased opportunities for contact with local officials as well as a higher likelihood of casting the decisive vote in local elections, whereas amalgamations can generate larger, more competitive and pluralistic local democracies, capable of increasing responsiveness (Dahl and Tufte ; Denters et al.
-
-
-