Abstract.  The aim of this paper is to detect mimicking behaviour in the tax setting of local governments which share similar political ideology. We conduct an empirical investigation of municipalities' cross‐sectional data of the Marche region using spatial econometrics models. Discriminating between several sources of fiscal interaction, empirical evidence suggests that municipalities governed by the same coalition tend to implement similar tax rates according to their ideology. Resumen.  El objetivo de este artículo es detectar comportamiento de imitación en la política tributaria de gobiernos locales que comparten una ideología política similar. Realizamos una investigación empírica con datos transversales de municipios de la región de las Marcas con modelos econométricos espaciales. Realizando una discriminación entre fuentes diferentes de interacción fiscal, la evidencia empírica sugiere que los municipios gobernados por la misma coalición tienden a establecer tasas fiscales similares de acuerdo con su ideología.

This paper investigates interdependence among local councils in Italy in their public spending and distinguishes between possible sources of this interdependence. We find significant positive interaction among neighbouring local councils in regard to both spending at the level of total expenditure and spending on different sub-categories. Attempts to identify the source of this horizontal interaction seem to reject the yardstick competition hypothesis. Addressing the role that local council partnerships may play in internalising fiscal externalities, we suggest that expenditure interaction may be driven by spill-over.

We investigate the presence of political yardstick competition on current spending decisions in a sample of Italian municipalities. We find significant evidence of yardstick competition when we explicitly account for the domestic stability pact (DSP), a fiscal rule introduced to limit the budget deficit of local administrations. Firstly, we estimate a static specification of a spatial panel model, and then we check for the robustness of our results with a dynamic specification. The static analysis shows that municipalities engage in yardstick competition during pre-election years, whether their are subject to the DSP or not. The dynamic analysis shows that the yardstick hypothesis remains robust only for municipalities not constrained by the DSP.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of participating in public events, among them elections. We assess whether the voter turnout in the 2020 local government elections in Italy was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by exploiting the variation among municipalities in the intensity of the COVID-19 outbreak as measured by the mortality rate among the elderly. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the elderly mortality rate decreased the voter turnout by 0.5 percentage points, with no gender differences in the behavioural response. The effect was especially strong in densely populated municipalities. We do not detect statistically significant differences in voter turnout among different levels of autonomy from the central government.

No abstract