Explaining Mayoral Delegation in Associative Arrangements: Issue Specificity and Institutional Context

Abstract

Among local governments’ collaborative arrangements, associations of municipalities are understudied in the literature of delegation and executive decision making. We explore the role of issue specificity and institutional context in mayors’ decisions to engage in collaboration with an association of municipalities by reviewing three survey experiments with Latin American mayors in Honduras, Guatemala and Colombia. Mayors received a scenario in which they decide whether to delegate extra funding for service provision to an association of municipalities (AoM). The experiments manipulate the decision scenario to modify issue specificity. We expect mayors would be less likely to prefer delegating through collaborating with an AoM in more specific issues. Findings suggest that the effect of issue specificity, and overall preferences for delegation, are contingent on national context. We propose that institutional differences in those countries’ local governance landscape drive these divergent findings.