What Lays Beneath Amalgamation: A Gerrymandering Approach to the Territorial Reform.

Municipal amalgamation reforms have deserved the attention of many scholars over the last decades. As referred by Tavares (2018), the literature concerning the consequences of amalgamation can be summed up in three groups: economic efficiency and cost-saving, managerial implications, and democratic outcomes. In most of the discussion, the arguments of size always come into play: Is it better to have bigger units, seizing economies of scale to provide more and better services to citizens? Or, can territorial fragmentation lead to competition and effectiveness in service delivery and fiscal decentralization? How electors react to any increase in the size of their jurisdiction? Do they lose the incentive to cast a vote in bigger units when compared to smaller ones? (Tiebout, 1957; Boyne, 1992; Dollery & Crase, 2004; Oates, 1999, Swianiewicz, 2002; Tavares & Rodrigues, 2002; Rodrigues & Meza, 2017). Since much has been done in the aftermath of amalgamation, we wish to give the spotlight to the moment prior to the territorial reform. We focus our analysis on the political process that lead to the design of the new territorial units. Amalgamation process, by definition, presupposes the merge of two or more units. The key issue is to decide which should be merged, and with whom. The Portuguese territorial reform of 2013 was done at the sub-municipal level by the municipal officials, under national agency supervision. Our main hypothesis argues that mayors design the borders of the new SMU (sub-municipal units) in a way to gain political advantages. This is called Gerrymandering. It’s defined as a practice that entails an unfair political advantage to the agent that is manipulating the definition of the electoral district (Shotts, 2002). The goal of this paper is to analyze the amalgamation process in Portugal and determine if the local governments seize the opportunity to increase the number of SMU politically aligned. We argue that mayors, as rational political agents, will opt for the alternative that guarantees an increment of their political support. Hence, mayors that face more political competition or that perceive a threat to their reelection will endorse a strategy that pull more “soldiers to their ranks”. Preliminary results show that in 2/3 of the municipalities in Portugal, incumbents increase the potential number of SMU politically aligned. With the results of the paper, we hope to contribute to some clarification on the rationale of political decisions and explore a new dimension on the amalgamation process.