The Effect of Municipal Cooperation and Municipal Amalgamations on Voter Turnout

Municipalities face increasing pressure to provide public services more efficiently. Increasing the scale of public service provision is often suggested as a method to improve efficiency, although empirical evidence does not seem to support this. However, scale increases may have negative effects on the local democratic process. This paper investigates this issue by analyzing voter turnout in Dutch municipal elections. We distinguish between two important ways through which municipalities can realize scale increases. The first approach is close and intensive cooperation with other municipalities, also called inter-municipal cooperation (IMC). This often introduces an extra organization, of which the leadership is unelected. This reduces the ability of democratically elected council members to monitor the executive and to influence policy. The second approach to increase scale is municipal amalgamation. This increases the number of eligible voters in municipal elections and weakens the historical and cultural ties between a municipality and its constituency. Because both IMC and municipal mergers decrease the potential impact of casting a vote in municipal elections, we expect that both result in a lower voter turnout, although the size of the impact may differ. This expectation is empirically tested using a dataset which includes voter turnout statistics for four municipal elections (2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018), and data on IMC and municipal mergers in the years preceding each election.