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.

Citizen participation and empowerment are high on the political agenda of Western European welfare states. They are often pursued through processes of decentralisation with an appeal to ‘place-based’ working. Existing research focuses on citizen experiences or policymaker motivations, neglecting the perspectives of (municipal) public servants as mediators. Using an ethics of care framework, we examine the concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ within the context of local decision-making processes to help us understand how public servants negotiate local initiative within the spaces of local decision-making. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty-three municipal public servants and managers, we show that they frequently experience an absence of care and eschew joint responsibility for concerns voiced by citizens. We show how ‘privileged irresponsibility’ depends on invisibility and normativity and is the outcome of local political relations and institutional pressures. ‘Tokenist’ forms of participation make it difficult for municipal public servants to take up ‘caring’ responsibilities towards citizens, with effects on their job satisfaction.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on populist radical-right parties in power and illiberalism, focusing on the Italian League and its welfare chauvinist agenda. It consists of ethnographic research conducted in a medium-sized city located in one of the party’s electoral strongholds. During its term in municipal office, the party changed the regulation on school services (buses and canteens), requiring non-EU families to present additional documentation in order to access reduced charges. The ‘canteens affair’ provoked the exclusion of immigrant children from the services, a strong mobilization of local civil society, an echo in the international media and a legal dispute between a civic committee and the League’s administration. Starting from this specific case, the article sheds new empirical light on the illiberal turn of Western democratic systems, understood as the progressive erosion of liberal-democratic principles of universalism and equality.

While existing research on policy diffusion has provided substantial evidence regarding the drivers of policy adoption across jurisdictions, limited attention has been given to the dynamics of policy textual learning across different levels of government. We fill this gap by using regression analysis to examine the patterns of policy textual learning evident in the clause similarity of seven environmental statutory policies in China. Within China’s decentralized and multilevel environmental governance, our findings reveal that horizontal policy textual learning is more prominent than vertical learning. Temporal distance negatively impacts policy textual learning, whereas spatial distance, contrary to traditional policy diffusion perspectives, does not universally explain multilevel policy textual learning. Additionally, subsequent versions of policy texts are not necessarily similar to earlier ones, challenging conventional assumptions about the adoption and adaptation of policies over time.

This article examines the problems associated with the fact that Japanese nuclear power plants have multiple reactors within one plant and are concentrated in specific regions. It analyzes the situation from international, domestic, and local perspectives, revealing features of Japanese state-local relations.

How should a democratic assembly be designed to attract large and diverse groups of citizens? We addressed this question by conducting a population survey in three communities with institutionalized participatory deliberative democracy in Switzerland. To examine participatory disposition in light of both individual characteristics and design features of the assembly that citizens contemplate joining, the survey comprised a conjoint experiment in which each respondent was asked to indicate his or her likelihood of participating in democratic assemblies with varying design features. The main result is that design features emphasizing the communitarian character of the assembly increase citizens’ willingness to participate, especially among disengaged citizens. Moreover, citizens were found to be less attracted by both very consensual and very adversarial meeting styles. Rather, we found meeting styles combining both controversy and consensus to be most favorable to assembly turnout. The implication is that practitioners of participatory or deliberative democracy must engage in community-building to foster turnout and inclusiveness in democratic assemblies.

Following the growing interest in using behavioral theory and choice architecture in the public sector, several new studies have looked at how changes in the choice architecture of budget simulations influence the participants’ budgetary decisions. These studies have also introduced the possible problem that participants may make inappropriate choices in the budget simulation, like creating a budget with unacceptably high budget surpluses. Building on Thaler and Sunstein’s NUDGES framework, we seek to answer the question, ‘How can budgetary choice architects correct for errors such as large ending surpluses at the end of the budget simulation?’ We replicate earlier results on budget starting conditions. Additionally, we test a budget treatment that encourages participants to reduce ending budget surpluses. The budget treatment works as intended and suggests that the large ending budget surpluses stem from errors made by participants in the simulation rather than loss aversion. The need to both nudge and budge participants is important for practicing choice architects, like public budgeters who have to design and implement tools that inform citizens and reveal accurate preferences that conform with legal requirements.

Policy with concentrated costs often faces intense localized opposition. Both private and governmental actors frequently use financial compensation to attempt to overcome this opposition. We measure how effective such compensation is for winning policy support in the arena of housing development. We build a novel survey platform that shows respondents images of their self-reported neighborhood with hypothetical renderings of new housing superimposed on existing structures. Using a sample of nearly 600 Bostonians, we find that compensating residents increases their support for nearby market-rate housing construction. However, compensation does not influence support for affordable housing. We theorize that the inclusion of affordable housing activates symbolic attitudes, decreasing the importance of financial self-interest and thus the effectiveness of compensation. Our findings suggest greater interaction between self-interest and symbolic politics within policy design than previously asserted. Together, this research signals opportunities for coalition building by policy entrepreneurs when facing opposition due to concentrated costs.

South African municipalities are entrusted to perform various functions, including providing basic services to communities. Recently, the auditor-general has raised concern about municipalities’ overall functionality and ability to fulfil their obligations. Municipalities’ service delivery failures have led to disputes between them and their communities. Moreover, South African courts have drawn attention to the impact of service delivery failures and described their catastrophic and devastating effects on communities and their local economies. In addition, it is said that the consequences of these municipal failures are more severe for the communities than any other stakeholder. For this reason, communities require legal options to resolve such disputes. This article puts forward two legal options (and potentially a third) to which communities can turn. The article examines mediation and structural interdicts and argues why these options are suitable methods for resolving disputes between a community and its municipality.