What determines citizens’ attitudes to municipal mergers?

A commonplace finding in studies of local government amalgamation reforms is that the question of merging one’s own municipality with a neighboring unit often elicit stronger and more outspoken attitudes of support and opposition among voters than do many other issues that cross local council’s agendas. For local elected representatives, understanding voters’ attitudes towards merger can impact crucially on their chances of reelection. The task of predicting voters’ attitudes to merger proposals is however confounded by the fact that the consequences of a merger may be complex and multi-dimensional. While some voters may for instance appreciate the prospects of a more cost-efficcient local administration, or believe that enlargement may improve the quality of municipal services by way of increased professionalization, others may make more of the perceived risk of less effective representation or the loss of long-held local identities. Citizens’ attitudes to local government amalgamation have been analyzed mainly based on empirical evidence from surveys to random samples of citizens, or data on local referendum results. To our knowledge, however, no study so far has analyzed patterns of opposition and support for merger with reference to precise data about a real-life mergers well known to the respondents. Such analysis is interesting because it elucidates quite precisely how much weight – if any – local actors actually assign to the wide spectrum of costs and benefits associated with merger. As noted by the author of a survey-based analysis of attitudes to metropolitan mergers, “to make a statement about mass public preferences for specific reform types (…) would require surveying citizens’ preferences at a moment when different reform options are discussed” (Strebel 2021b, 20). Our study does just that, by surveying citizens of 119 Norwegian local governments in the fall of 2019, just a few months before merger of their own unit with one or more neighboring units was implemented, as the result of a national local government reform decided more than two years in advance. The considerable interim period and the high political salience of the reform means that these respondents whould be highly knowledgable about the upcoming merger, and in a good position to assess the costs and benefits associated with merging. At the same time, the known identity of each merger consortium allows the use of quantitative indiators of a wide range of outcomes for each of the merger partners, such as likely financial gains or losses or effects on political representation. The overarching research question is: To what extent can citizens’ attitudes to municipal mergers be explained by costs and benefits incurred by merging with a specific consortium of neighboring units?