Coercive Municipal Amalgamation Today – With Illustrations from Estonia

by

“This essay presents coercive municipal amalgamation as one of the most serious threats to local government today. But this is without rational base, as all recent empirical investigations deny a connection between size and efficiency in such cases; theory, likewise, speaks against automatic efficiency gains, as efficiency is task-dependent and thus a function of appropriateness.

Then the Estonian case is reviewed, finding that the current, traditional attempts at coercive amalgamation are a typical example of non-rational public-sector reform. Finally, the essay makes the point that matters so fundamental for democracy as municipal autonomy are beyond expert opinion anyway, which necessarily has the habit of changing, but they need to be decided by the citizens involved themselves.”

W. Drechsler | May 5 2013 | Political Science, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Coercive-Municipal-Amalgamation-Today-%E2%80%93-With-from-%E2%80%93-Drechsler/656d32b4cd833ff08b1197d0563dae34b688ca6c

Related posts:

  1. Municipal Amalgamation in Japan: Who Is Happy? “In order to improve efficiency in local government public services, Japan’s central government has implemented a strategy of amalgamation of municipalities and created larger local government units. Since the Meiji Restoration (1868) there have been three big waves of amalgamations...
  2. Municipal amalgamations and their effects: a literature review “Despite the significant variation across countries and reforms, some regularities emerge: cost savings being primarily limited to general administration expenditures (wages, office supplies, and so on), few changes in the quality of local services, and the diminished quality of local...
  3. Structural Reform: Municipal Mergers “Structural reorganization using municipal mergers is a common form of local government reform. This chapter examines both the theoretical literature and associated empirical work on council consolidation. After briefly discussing the magnitude of amalgamation across the world, this chapter considers...
  4. Municipal Merger and Local Democracy: An Assessment of the Merger of Japanese Municipalities “After controlling for potential confounding factors, the analysis shows that municipal merger is negatively correlated to legislative performance.” Municipal mergers have been widely used as a tool for administrative reform. The goal of most municipal mergers is to increase the...
  5. The Australian Experience of Municipal Amalgamation: Asking the Citizenry and Exploring the Implications “Debate over municipal amalgamations in Australian continues to dominate local government reform agendas, with the putative need to achieve economies of scale and scope consistently set against anti-amalgamation arguments designed to preserve extant communities. Following from an examination of recent...
  6. How Coerced Municipal Amalgamations Thwart the Values of Local Self-Government “Arguments invoking increased functional efficiency have had a profound impact on local government reforms in advanced democracies during the past 60 years. Consequently, most mature democracies have implemented municipal amalgamation reforms, often through top-down coercion. In this article, we demonstrate...
  7. Improving Efficiency in Australian Local Government: Structural Reform as a Catalyst for Effective Reform “It is argued that ‘top-down’ state government structural reform policy initiatives carrying the threat of amalgamation constitute an efficient mechanism for evoking optimal ‘bottom-up’ structural change models.” Municipal amalgamation has been the main policy instrument of local government structural reform...
  8. Impact of municipal amalgamation on stakeholder collaboration: the case of Auckland, New Zealand “Local councils governing Auckland, New Zealand, underwent restructuring in 2010, amalgamating eight local authorities and establishing the Auckland Council as a unitary authority. Key objectives for Auckland’s amalgamation included achieving reform and a single direction in governance, facilitating democratic representation...
  9. Fiscal Effects of Municipal Amalgamation “By examining the Fiscal Effects of the large scale municipal amalgamations in the German State of Baden-Wurttemberg from 1967-1975 this paper contributes to the economic literature on municipal public debt by focusing on the often neglected aspect of the appropriate...
  10. Citizens’ Attitudes toward Municipal Amalgamation in Three Ontario Municipalities “One of the most contentious policies introduced by the Harris Conservative government as part of its Common Sense Revolution was municipal amalgamation. The purpose of the amalgamations was to improve efficiency and reduce municipal spending and to decrease the number...