Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T15:52:50.487Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Political representation and effects of municipal mergers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2019

Oskari Harjunen ,
Tuukka Saarimaa  and
Janne Tukiainen
Oskari Harjunen
Affiliation:
Aalto University School of Business and City of Helsinki—Urban Research and Statistics, P.O. Box 5500, 00099City of Helsinki, Finland
Tuukka Saarimaa
Affiliation:
Aalto University School of Business and School of Engineering, Helsinki Graduate School of Economics and VATT Institute for Economic Research, P.O. Box 21210, FI-02150Espoo, Finland
Janne Tukiainen*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, and VATT Institute for Economic Research. P.O. Box 1279 (Arkadiankatu 7), FI-00101Helsinki, Finland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: janne.tukiainen@vatt.fi
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We study the effects of municipal mergers using novel geocoded data on local public sector jobs and local politicians' place of residence. We find that the mergers had no effects on municipal expenditures overall after eight years. However, the mergers led to highly unequal geographic political representation in the post-merger councils among the merged municipalities. Small and politically marginalized municipalities experienced a substantial reduction in local public jobs in administration and health and social care services relative to the municipalities with stronger representation. Development of house prices suggests that the quality of the service-tax bundle deteriorated in these politically marginalized municipalities.

Keywords

Difference-in-differencesmunicipal mergerspolitical representationregional inequality
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 72 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank Manuel Bagues, Essi Eerola, Dominik Hangartner, Marko Köthenbürger, Mika Kortelainen, Simon Lapointe, Rune Sørensen, Natalia Zinovyeva and seminar participants at BI Oslo, VATT Helsinki, FEA 2017 meeting in Jyväskylä, UEA 2017 meeting in Copenhagen, IIPF 2017 meeting in Tokyo, LSE and HECER for helpful comments. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the editor, Rocío Titiunik, for their thoughtful comments on the manuscript. Financial support from the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (Finland) is gratefully acknowledged.

References

Albouy, D (2013) Partisan representation in congress and the geographic distribution of federal funds. Review of Economics and Statistics 95, 127–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alesina, A and Spolaore, E (1997) On the number and size of nations. Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, 1027–1056.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allers, MA and Geertsema, JB (2016) The effects of local government amalgamation on public spending, taxation, and service levels: evidence from 15 years of municipal consolidation. Journal of Regional Science 56, 659–682.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ansolabehere, S, Gerber, A and Snyder, J (2002) Equal votes, equal money: court-ordered redistricting and public expenditures in the American States. American Political Science Review 96, 767–777.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berry, CR, Burden, BC and Howell, WG (2010) The president and the distribution of federal spending. American Political Science Review 104, 783–799.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertrand, M, Duflo, E and Mullainathan, S (2004) How much should we trust differences-in-differences estimates? Quarterly Journal of Economics 119, 249–275.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Besley, T and Case, A (1995) Incumbent behavior: vote seeking, tax setting and yardstick competition. American Economic Review 85, 25–45.Google Scholar
Besley, T and Coate, S (1997) An economic model of representative democracy. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, 85–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blesse, S and Baskaran, T (2016) Do municipal mergers reduce costs? Evidence from a German Federal State. Regional Science and Urban Economics 59, 54–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom-Hansen, J, Houlberg, K and Serritzlew, S (2014) Size, democracy, and the economic costs of running the political system. American Journal of Political Science 58, 790–803.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blom-Hansen, J, Houlberg, K, Serritzlew, S and Treisman, D (2016) Jurisdiction size and local government policy expenditure: assessing the effect of municipal amalgamation. American Political Science Review 110, 812–831.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, A, Gelbach, J and Miller, D (2011) Robust inference with multiway clustering. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 29, 238–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahl, RA and Tufte, ER (1973) Size and Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Duverger, M (1954) Political Parties. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Egger, PH, Köthenbüger, M and Loumeau, G (2017) Local Border Reforms and Economic Activity. CESifo Working Papers No. 6738.Google Scholar
Ellingsen, T (1998) Externalities vs internalities: a model of political integration. Journal of Public Economics 68, 251–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiva, JH and Halse, AH (2016). Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems. Journal of Public Economics 143, 15–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiva, JH, Halse, AH and Smith, DM (2018) Local Candidates and Distributive Politics under Closed-List Proportional Representation. CESifo Working Papers 7039.Google Scholar
Gorecki, MA and Marsh, M (2014) A decline of ‘friends and neighbours voting’ in Ireland? Local candidate effects in the 2011 Irish ‘Earthquake Election’. Political Geography 41, 11–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grossman, G, Pierskalla, JH and Dean, ED (2017) Government fragmentation and public goods provision. Journal of Politics 79, 823–840.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinnerich, BT (2009) Do merging local governments free ride on their counterparts when facing boundary reform? Journal of Public Economics 93, 721–728.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodler, R and Raschky, PA (2014) Regional favoritism. Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, 995–1033.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houbraken, M, Demeyer, S, Michoel, T, Audenaert, P, Colle, D and Pickavet, M (2014) The index-based subgraph matching algorithm with general symmetries (ISMAGS): exploiting symmetry for faster subgraph enumeration. PLoS ONE 9, e97896.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hyytinen, A, Saarimaa, T and Tukiainen, J (2014) Electoral vulnerability and size of local governments: evidence from voting on municipal mergers. Journal of Public Economics 120, 193–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyytinen, A, Meriläinen, J, Saarimaa, T, Toivanen, O and Tukiainen, J (2018) Public employees as politicians: evidence from close elections. American Political Science Review 112, 68–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jankowski, M (2016) Voting for locals: voters' information processing strategies in open-list PR systems. Electoral Studies 43, 72–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, B (2008) Legislative representation, bargaining power and the distribution of federal funds: evidence from the US congress. Economic Journal 118, 1785–1803.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koch, P and Rochat, PE (2017) The effects of local government consolidation on turnout: evidence from a quasi-experiment in Switzerland. Swiss Political Science Review 23, 215–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lassen, DD and Serritzlew, S (2011) Jurisdiction size and local democracy: evidence on internal efficacy from large-scale municipal reform. American Political Science Review 105, 238–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laver, M and Shepsle, KA (1990) Government coalitions and intraparty politics. British Journal of Political Science 20, 489–507.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miceli, TJ (1993) The decision to regionalize in the provision of education: an application of the Tiebout Model. Journal of Urban Economics 33, 344–360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moisio, A and Uusitalo, R (2013) The impact of municipal mergers on local public expenditures in Finland. Public Finance and Management 13, 148–166.Google Scholar
Oliver, JE (2000) City size and civic involvement in Metropolitan America. American Political Science Review 94, 361–373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osborne, MJ and Slivinski, A (1996) A model of political competition with citizen-candidates. Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, 65–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reingewertz, Y (2012) Do municipal amalgamations work? Evidence from municipalities in Israel. Journal of Urban Economics 72, 240–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saarimaa, T and Tukiainen, J (2014) I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member: empirical analysis of municipal mergers. Political Science Research and Methods 2, 97–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saarimaa, T and Tukiainen, J (2015) Common pool problems in voluntary municipal mergers. European Journal of Political Economy 38, 140–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saarimaa, T and Tukiainen, J (2016) Local representation and strategic voting: evidence from electoral boundary reforms. European Journal of Political Economy 41, 31–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taagepera, R and Shugart, MS (1989) Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Tavits, M (2010) Effect of local ties on electoral success and parliamentary behaviour. The case of Estonia. Party Politics 16, 215–235.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tiebout, CM (1956) A pure theory of local expenditures. Journal of Political Economy 64, 416–424.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treisman, D (2007) The Architecture of Government. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verba, S and Nie, NH (1972) Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality. Chicago: The Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Harjunen et al. supplementary material

Harjunen et al. supplementary material 1

Download Harjunen et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 113.8 KB