Municipal Amalgamation Reforms

This introductory chapter provides the foundation and justification for the book. I present and discuss briefly the mainstream explanation—reform theory—for the enactment of local government amalgamations. The anomalies identified in this conventional explanation are manifest in the theory, methods and evaluation focus of amalgamation studies. The chapter provides an overview of all types of territorial reforms (annexations, incorporations and city-county consolidations) and situates amalgamations as a special case of local boundary change. Several definitions of municipal amalgamations and their key features are advanced. Taking these definitions as the starting point, the chapter provides a background on amalgamation reforms, highlighting the need to consider time, space and human agency in the analysis of territorial reforms in general and municipal amalgamations in particular. The chapter also addresses the complex relationship between size, amalgamations and local government efficiency. I make a preliminary attempt to untangle these effects, before delving into these arguments in more detail in later chapters.

This chapter conducts a review of the empirical results reported in the municipal amalgamations literature according to economic, managerial and political criteria. This undertaking shows that the evaluations present in the literature have focused primarily on the impacts in one category of effects and in single country cases. A close inspection shows several gaps and omissions in prior empirical studies, which I discuss in detail in the final section of the chapter.

The chapter presents the existing theories on the causes of amalgamation reforms (reform theory, public choice theory and new regionalism) and introduces two additional contributions – historical institutionalism and diffusion theory – with the potential to expand our knowledge about why amalgamations reforms occur in some places and times but not others.

This chapter of the book is dedicated to the methodological choices made in the study of municipal amalgamations. Supporting the idea that there are different styles of research, but one single logic of inference (King et al., 1994), I approach the chapter avoiding the classic dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative analysis. Instead, the first section of the chapter describes four types of research designs: case studies, cross-sectional comparative analyses, developmental trends and developmental comparisons. The first section presents the state of the field, describing research designs, data and methods typically employed in empirical studies of amalgamation reforms. By failing to take advantage of developmental comparative designs to account for both time and space elements, scholars have missed the opportunity to develop more robust theoretical explanations for the causes of amalgamation reforms. The second section of the chapter discusses how comparative historical analysis (CHA) can improve research on the topic, allowing scholars to overcome the current challenges to descriptive and causal inferences. The section distinguishes between broad exploratory strategies and causal inference strategies as two different approaches to develop and test explanations for the presence or absence of amalgamation reforms, respectively.

This chapters employs the analytical tools of Historical Comparative Analysis to explore how the history of local government systems has conditioned the choice of amalgamation reforms across European countries and over time. In the first section, the date of birth of each local government system is identified in its chronological time and the time sequence of adoption in each country is then compared to the geographical location of each system to detect possible clusters across space and over time. In the second section, each local government system is divided into periods bookended by critical junctures. These periodizations will help in the detection of common patterns of consolidation and/or fragmentation across local government systems as well as highlight possible longue durée structures, particularly secular, cyclical or convergence trends. The chapter closes with the deployment of two tools of physical time—duration and tempo—to uncover regularities in amalgamation reforms across space and time.

This chapter uses the case of the first amalgamation reform in Sweden (1943-1952) to illustrate how a group of macrolevel variables derived from reform theory – urbanization, economic growth, and the expansion of the Welfare State – relate to the evolution of the local government system in Sweden in general and to the amalgamation reforms of its local governments in particular. Sweden is particularly useful as a case because it constitutes the archetype of a reform based on a rational design rhetoric. The teachings from this case are used to develop a set of general propositions to be tested in the last empirical chapter of this book using a larger set of countries.

The final empirical chapter of this book presents a comparative study of European countries to assess the general propositions discussed in Chap. 6. The number of countries included in the analyses varies depending on data availability on both municipal amalgamation reforms and the relevant explanatory factors. The first section of the chapter compares and contrasts the evolution in the number of local governments in selected European countries and the developments of the Welfare State, urbanization and economic growth in the past century and a half. The second section emphasizes the developmental comparison design of this study by focusing on data comparing all European countries over time to assess patterns of convergence, divergence and diffusion of amalgamation reforms across local government systems. 

This last chapter provides a synthesis of the book, highlights its major contributions and projects future research on the causes and consequences of municipal amalgamations. The chapter begins with a summary of the main findings and a discussion of how they fit the overall landscape of research on the topic. The first section underscores how the combination of time and space elements in the analysis contributes to advance our knowledge of the critical junctures present at the birth of local government systems in European countries, how they help to explain the evolution of these systems and, ultimately, why some systems were more subjected to amalgamation reforms than others. The last section of this conclusion reflects on how future research on the topic might be able to move time and space to the forefront of the study of territorial reforms. First, it reflects on the implications of this study for reform theory as a causal explanation of amalgamation reforms and, more generally, how this book might stimulate the development of alternative and/or complementary accounts of these reforms. Next, it suggests that the combination of time and space is also important for the study of the effects of amalgamation reforms and it provides additional hints on how future studies might take advantage of these themes.