Local government rescaling[1][2], the process of reconfiguring municipal boundaries in order to exercise decisional and policy control, has received considerable scholarly attention over the past decades. Despite years of empirical and theoretical research, our understanding of municipal officials’ decision logic regarding rescaling, remains fairly rudimentary. When is it opportune to consolidate local governments and when is it opportune to sub-divide existing local governments? These questions have been mostly left unanswered in both the empirical and theoretical literature. This paper attempts to fill this gap through the development of a decision logic framework. The framework is premised on the argument that local governments are like shoppers who scout around for different modes of service delivery to satisfy the needs of their residents. All things considered, local governments will select the mode of service delivery that is desirable (e.g. in terms of economies of scale and public value) and feasible (e.g. can be supported by local management capacity and has low transaction costs). The paper draws on construal level theory in social psychology[3] and more recent empirical findings to develop this framework. Propositions are provided to further guide future empirical testing.
[1] I use the term interchangeably with Vogel and Savitch’s (2004) ‘territorial rescaling’ defined originally as “the remaking or the reconfiguration of land in order to exercise decisional and policy control.” (Savitch, in Savitch and Vogel, p. 12). In ghana this is called district creation.
[2] Jeroen J. L. Candel (2019): The expediency of policy integration, Policy Studies,
[3] Construal level theory is a theory in social psychology that describes the relation between psychological distance and the extent to which people's thinking is abstract or concrete
Mots clés :
A102974CK