Bel, Germà;
Pano, Esther;
Sebő, Marianna;
(2025)
Joining forces or going solo? The political and economic dynamics of intermunicipal cooperation.
Journal of Public Policy
10.1017/S0143814X25100718.
(In press).
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Abstract
The suboptimal size of municipalities is often a challenge for service delivery due to scale limitations. Intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) has expanded as an alternative to top-down amalgamations, offering a more flexible and typically voluntary approach. Many studies have been devoted to understanding the driving factors of IMC, providing static empirical evidence on the characteristics of cooperating municipalities. This article contributes to the literature with a dynamic analysis of the drivers of cooperation, using a Cox proportional hazards model over a long period and a very large sample of municipalities in Catalonia. This dynamic analysis unravels the direction of the causal relationship in complex relationships such as fiscal restrictions or political legitimation with cooperation. Furthermore, as we have data from eight relevant local services, we improve both the theoretical and empirical analysis of cooperation dynamics based on the characteristics of the services.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Joining forces or going solo? The political and economic dynamics of intermunicipal cooperation |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1017/S0143814X25100718 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X25100718 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s), 2025. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Intermunicipal cooperation, local government, policy diffusion, public services |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Political Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217661 |
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