Local government outside local boundaries

Ceuninck, Koenraad De; Valcke, Tony; Verhelst, Tom

doi:10.4324/9781315306278-25

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Politicians must interpret their mandate from the electorate (McGarvey and Stewart 2018), and situations inevitably occur where the mandate is internally inconsistent, resulting in decision dilemmas. In the context of local government, the mandate is sometimes formalized in law, such as in Norway's Local Government Act (§ 1), which states that councilors are responsible for both the current and future state of the municipality's affairs.…”

Section: Social Norms and Pre-merger Hoardingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Merging local governments is a dramatic yet relatively common type of public sector reform that is often motivated by the desire for economic gain (Blom-Hansen et al 2016; Ceuninck, Valcke and Verhelst 2018). Merging local governments leads to what Ostrom (1990) called a common-pool resource problem by creating “a future common pool which the amalgamating entities can try to exploit prior to amalgamation” (Hansen 2019, 678).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Moderating Effects of Social Norms on Pre-merger Overspending: Results from a Survey Experiment

Houlberg

Askim

2022

Urban Affairs Review

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The proposition that amalgamation reforms lead to a common-pool problem is strongly supported; governments are incentivized to overspend before the merger is implemented. However, existing literature helps little in understanding why some governments do not overspend in the pre-merger period, and why hoarders do not overspend more than they do. One explanation hitherto overlooked is the moderating effect of social norms. Two hypotheses regarding the importance of social norms are tested with data from a survey experiment conducted on over 3000 Norwegian local elected officials. The analysis supports both: Support for hoarding is lower when hoarding is debt-financed than when financed by savings. Support for hoarding is also lower when others in the amalgamation are anticipated not to hoard than when they are. That pre-merger hoarding varies with different levels of social obligations vis-à-vis the amalgamation has implications for common-pool theory and for reformers of the structure of government.

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Section: Social Norms and Pre-merger Hoardingmentioning

confidence: 99%