Intermunicipal cooperation is often seen as a mean to reap both quality and economic benefits of scale. Prior research, however, show that the effects of shared service delivery diverge, leaving scholars and practitioners to question whether, under what conditions and at what expense effects of cooperation manifest. Using a panel dataset on child protection services, we analyze how cooperation affects the cost-quality relation. The results show that cooperation initially increases cost. This increase is only partly explained investments in service quality, indicating that there are significant transaction costs linked to cooperation as a mode of production.

A growing number of FOI laws have been passed around the world, but their full enactment remains a challenge. Most of the research on determinants of active transparency focuses on sociodemographic, financial, elected officials, and the mayor’s characteristics as proxies to explain divergences in active transparency publication between municipalities. The results, however, are mostly non-conclusive and do not consider organizational factors. In this article, we propose delving into organizational factors as explanans of active transparency compliance. While usually overlooked in active transparency research, we contend that organizational factors may help gain a further understanding of active transparency compliance patterns. Drawing on institutionalist literature, we believe that organizational structures create feedbacks that affect active transparency law compliance. To show our point, our fieldwork involved the monitoring and extraction of Spanish local councils’ active transparency compliance patterns and the delivery of a questionnaire to the transparency officers of the same local councils. We have used the data obtained to elaborate a catalogue of organizational factors and to gauge empirically which organizational factors affect active transparency compliance the most. Our contributions are twofold: first, we show that organizational factors influence positively by themselves active transparency compliance, though this relationship appears mainly in municipalities bigger than 10.000 inhabitants. The bigger the local council, the more institutionalized STL is. Second, results show that the organizational factors that increase Spanish local councils’ transparency law compliance are different depending on their size.

This study, which is currently in progress, looks into citizens' assessment of local democracy in their communities through the prism of an ongoing consolidation reform in Armenia. Our aim is to understand the extent to which the consolidation and decentralization reform strategy put forward by the government to improve the performance of local decision-making units has contributed to changes with regard to local democracy and improved performance of local authorities. This, in particular, is interesting in terms of the so-called 'Dahl-and-Tufte dilemma' which posits that larger units are more effective but less democratic. The analysis of local democracy is based on data from 2015 and 2019 nationwide representative surveys, conducted within CRRC – Armenia “Civic Engagement in Local Governance” (CELoG) Program. This statistical data is compared against first-hand qualitative data collected through interviews with decision makers at local, regional and central government levels and local government union leaders as well as focus group sessions with local opinion leaders within 14 local communities of Armenia. Given that the focus groups, which are currently in progress, are expected to be completed by this April, the main findings and conclusions will become available by late Spring.

The process of digitization in government often goes in two directions: back in time, to make archived information available in digital form, and forward in time, by determining what kind of data needs to be collected in the future so that governments can both continue to meet their mandates and do so in more efficient and effective ways. As such, the process offers an opportunity to pause and consider (if done right) what might change in the future in light of where the past has been. But at the local level of government, such reflection is often more performative than real, especially if local governments have been constrained by higher-level governments in the past, and expect such conditions to continue in the future. This tends to be the case in highly centralized countries with unitary systems of government, as is the case in South Korea.

The Covid19 pandemic, however, was an external shock to the system, and highlighted ways in which local governments could use their own information resources and networks to create data that would be transformed into information that would save lives (Kasdan and Campbell 2020). But the organization of data (what to collect, what to share, what to ignore) was often culturally determined, and then reprocessed again through cultural filters to create information that could be used in the most effective way possible. Much of the Covid19 response in South Korea was relegated to local governments, including data collection and analysis. This resulted in different approaches, often determined by local cultural preferences that differed across regions of the country. Contrary to what has been argued with respect to collectivist approaches to mass compliance, I argue that South Korea’s local cultures affect how local governments use the data they collect in surprisingly different ways to achieve common goals, leading to a collectivist pluralism that can produce results that seem uniform on the surface, but hide a complex diversity underneath. I examine this phenomenon through the execution of local climate change mitigation plans, which require the collection of data determined at the local level, but shared to build a larger picture of readiness (or the lack thereof) at the national level. I find that while there is much performative collection of data, there are remarkably varied and distinct ways in which different localities are addressing a future threat. These differences demonstrate the importance of cultural variables in shaping how data is collected and then interpreted as local governments look to the future.

Reference:

David Oliver Kasdan & Jesse W. Campbell (2020) Dataveillant Collectivism and the Coronavirus in Korea: Values, Biases, and Socio-Cultural Foundations of Containment Efforts, Administrative Theory & Praxis, 42:4, 604-613, DOI: 10.1080/10841806.2020.1805272