“…Researchers have empirically examined the impact of amalgamation (Blom-Hansen et al, 2014), privatization (or outsourcing) (Bel and Miralles, 2003), and inter-government cooperation (Bel and Warner, 2015;Blaka, 2017;Dijkgraaf and Gradus, 2013) on government cost-efficiency. Researchers have also examined the impact of many political factors, which include political ideology, political competition, political participation (Buch-Gomez and Cabaleiro-Casal, 2020;Narbon-Perpina et al, 2020), political accountability (Bruns and Himmler, 2011), political transparency (Guillamón and Cuadrado-Ballesteros, 2021), the form of municipal government (the mayor-council form, the mayor-manager form, and whether the mayor is elected) (Grossman et al, 1999), and the electoral system (Baraldi, 2008;Santolini, 2017). 4 Among the limited number of studies examining county government expenditures, Morgan and Kickham (1999) find that the change of government forms has no effect on the fiscal behavior of the US county governments, which contradicts the strong association documented by Benton (2003) and McDonald (2015).…”