Interlocal cooperation through service-sharing agreements has a long history, but its use has increased in popularity during the last 20 years. Th e decisions of local government units to collaborate through intergovernmental service agreements are best understood as a two-stage process. Th e fi rst stage, in which communities decide whether to consider interlocal cooperation, involves the nature of the immediate problem faced plus specifi c demands for performance and effi ciency gains that can result from service cooperation. In the second stage, communities confront a question of institutional supply, and hence must overcome inherent bargaining and collective action issues in order to forge interlocal agreements. Heckman probit estimates of such complex relationships using data drawn from a 2003 ICMA survey suggest strong support for this model. Th e authors conclude by discussing the role of network relationships among local actors for reducing transaction costs and facilitating intergovernmental collaboration.
This article investigates competing visions of how regional organizations influence cooperation among individual local governments within a metropolitan area. As network brokers among local governments, regional organizations can reduce the transaction costs of self-governing solutions to regional problems through bargaining and contracting among local units, but their centralized activities might also crowd out interlocal exchanges. Florida Regional Planning Councils are examined to test competing hypotheses based on these two visions, identifying the influence of regional organizations’ governance and activities on interlocal revenue transfers among municipal governments. Evidence that regional organizations can complement as well as substitute for interlocal cooperation is reported. In conclusion we discuss these findings in the context of vertical and horizontal federalism and theories of institutional collective action.
This study extends Peterson’s city limits perspective to counties to empirically examine how economic, political, institutional, and demographic factors influence overall county spending and spending priorities across three core policy arenas. Pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of Florida counties reveals that although population density and economic conditions influence spending, politics and institutions matter. Political ideology as indicated by presidential and gubernatorial Democratic vote share has a positive influence on all three spending categories. The findings also reveal that county adoption of a home rule charter leads to greater emphasis on developmental and redistributive rather than allocational functions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.