Research show that small sized municipalities, in terms of inhabitants, achieve greater benefits from shared service delivery than larger size municipalities. Even so, larger municipalities engage in a higher number of IMCs than smaller municipalities. This paper investigates what motivates large and small municipalities to engage in shared service delivery by analyzing case studies of six Norwegian metropolitan municipalities and their geographical surrounding municipalities. We use perspectives from literature on inter-organizational relations to analyze how motivations for cooperation varies between metropolitan and small-scale municipalities who share service delivery. The paper shows that while smaller size municipalities are motivated by instrumental needs for operative scale benefits such as efficiency, stability and service quality, metropolitan municipalities are motivated by both spatial needs, pressure from institutionalized environments and shared service delivery as strategic choice to gain regional influence.

After the proclamation and partial implementation of the decentralization policy in the early 2000s, Croatia is now facing a renewed wave of centralization in those policy areas that were previously decentralized. The pendulum swings the other way, and the main proclaimed reason of centralization tendencies is the need to increase the effectiveness of public policies in response to multiple crises that have occurred globally (COVID19 pandemic, climate changes, immigration, etc.), and particularly in Croatia (two devastating earthquakes, economic crises, summer fires, population outflow, etc.). These multiple societal crises (polycrises) have effects on local self-government units and particularly on their capacity to perform public tasks assigned to them and to support and enhance local and regional development. In addition to policy areas that were previously decentralized, and for which re-centralization is now being proposed or already implemented, such as healthcare, social welfare, firefighting and primary education, centralization trends are noticeable in additional policy areas as well. These are: post-earthquake reconstruction, waste management, water supply, management of theaters, etc. Centralization can be observed through the narrowing of local autonomy, both functional and organizational and through the increased and intensified oversight. In Croatian inter-governmental setting, the power is again shifting upwards, thus inverting the principle of subsidiarity, codified in the European Charter of Local Self-Government and widely embraced as a cornerstone of modern territorial governance systems. Main goal of the paper is to examine causes and goals of centralization trends in selected policy areas on local self-government units in Croatia. Are these trends and goals primarily aimed at increasing efficiency? To what extent do they take into account the impact of centralization on the democratic position of local self-government in the system of vertical division of power? In this regard, the paper analyzes the causes of centralization trends in the aforementioned policy areas, aiming to explore their influence on inter-governmental relations when it comes to increasing dependence of local self-government units on central government, analyze the response of local units to such tendencies, assess and discuss the potential effects that are expected in analyzed policy areas. Methodologically, paper relies on the analysis of formal documents (e.g. policy papers, strategies, legal regulation – laws, bylaws, etc.) as well as informal sources.

In 2020, the change in intergovernmental relations in Croatia took place. The deconcentrated model of performance of state administration tasks in territorial units was replaced with the model of administrative decentralization. The new State Administration System Act abolished the county state administration offices as first-instance state administration bodies and transferred their tasks to the delegated scope of competence of counties as second-level self-government units. Counties took over all the tasks previously exercised by the county state administration offices (internal affairs, health, culture, education, social care, war veterans rights, agriculture) except for administrative supervision and inspection affairs, together with state civil servants working in county state administration offices (app. 2 000 civil servants). This organizational change significantly increased the role of counties in Croatian territorial governance since the number of their employees almost doubled. This changes also petrified the existing territorial structure that was severely criticized by experts due to size and weak financial, institutional and personal capacities of county government.

The aim of the paper is to explore the institutional and performance effects of this organizational change that represents administrative decentralisation. Based on theoretical assumptions on decentralisation effects (Ebinger, Grohs & Reiter, 2011; Ebinger & Richter, 2016; Kuhlmann & Wollmann, 2011; Kuhlmann, 2015; Kuhlmann & Wayenberg, 2016), comparative experience with administrative decentralisation (Czech Republic and Germany, Lopižić, 2021), and empirical evidence from ex-ante and ongoing evaluation of county state administration offices abolition (Lopižić & Manojlović Toman, 2019; Lopižić & Manojlović Toman, 2021), hypotheses about the institutional and performance effects of administrative decentralisation in Croatian territorial governance setting are formulated. Empirical evidence from previous research is being supplemented by the questionnaire sent to heads of county administration offices (203 in total), county mayors and vice-mayors (51 in total) and county civil servants working on delegated state administration tasks (around 800-1000 in total) during March-May 2023 (presently ongoing), interview with the representative of the Ministry of Justice and Public Administration, and secondary data analysis.

The analysis of the data allows testing the hypothesis, formulation of conclusions about the effects of administrative decentralisation in Croatia, and contribution to administrative decentralization theory. Additionally, since this organisational change was implemented just before the COVID-19 pandemic the possible intervening effect of the COVID crisis on decentralization effects are discussed as well.

The improvements to computational power and the development of artificial intelligence technology have the potential to fundamentally change the way science is done across all fields of research. This also applies to the social sciences, where various novel techniques such as web crawling promise improvements to both data collection and data analysis processes. Nonetheless, many of these techniques have so far been greatly underutilized within the social sciences, with little to no existing literature exploring potential use cases or discussing what limited empirical evidence there is. This paper seeks to fill this gap by analyzing the opportunities and limitations of web crawling in collecting training data using the example of digital transformation in European local governments, which is examined in the framework of the Digitalisaiton at the Local Tier of Government (DIGILOG) research project. In this project, a web crawling algorithm is used to gather a large number of website URLs and e-mail addresses from the web and to analyze the contents of these websites regarding their digital maturity. This is done for all municipalities and cities of the 46 member states of the Council of Europe.

Overall, the goal of the paper is to answer the following two main research questions:

(1) How can web crawling be applied as a data collection method in the social sciences?

(2) What are the opportunities and the limitations compared to manual data collection?

The paper can thus be seen as a case study of how a web crawler can be applied in the social sciences and aims to generate knowledge that may inform future research where similar methodologies are being considered. While a web crawler has the obvious advantage that it can gather far more data compared to a manual search and does away with issues such as inter-coder reliability, this paper shows that proper implementation can be quite difficult and that it also comes with some notable limitations. These are discussed in detail, and some guidelines for the proper use cases of a web crawler as a data gathering tool are developed. The paper also makes the point that combining a web crawler with manual coding can be an efficient way to work around the problems of either technique and even to some extent correct the problem of unbalanced data. Applying this technique may thus be a way to the achieve stronger outcomes compared to conventional data collection methods.