Volume 15 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Though the exploration of inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) is very widespread in contemporary literature worldwide, the perception of IMC by municipal officials is rarely examined. We focused this paper on revealing the relationship between the perceptions of municipal public officials and the realized benefits of municipal cooperation. Our research combines primary data from a survey of municipalities engaged in a form of IMC and in-depth interviews of both municipal officials and managers who coordinate IMC. Our survey results show that agreement with the statement that IMC helps solve administrative capacity problems tends to vary with the size of the municipality. This study detected considerable obstacles to IMC use, with one set of respondents indicating that they had tried cooperation and found that it did not yield significant, positive financial or non-financial benefits for them. Our in-depth interviews revealed that strong political leadership and experienced managerial staff can contribute to the development of municipal cooperation. In summary, our research provides evidence supporting the notion that the perception of IMC by municipal officials could be an important precursor to actual IMC use and future development.

This article examines the influence of civil society on Ukrainian anti-corruption policy after the Maidan in 2014. Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), we hypothesise that the Maidan events led to a redistribution of formal legal authority in the anti-corruption policy subsystem, opened access to policy venues for civil society actors, and increased leverage of international organisations to push for strict reforms. We test these expectations with a systematic content analysis of primary documents and semi-structured interviews. Findings show that changes in the formal legal authority to make policy decisions led to anti-corruption policy change. The newly adopted policies were largely influenced by civil society actors who had increased venue access after the Maidan. In addition, civil society advocated for strict anti-corruption reforms through international organisation.

This paper aims to design and propose a new measurement model for social services transparency in municipalities. The model includes an empirical study of 38 municipalities in Spain. The information published on these municipalities’ websites is evaluated through experimental quantitative methods using multivariate analysis. The municipalities chosen were those with the highest population that also disclosed the largest amount of information and provided the easiest access to their websites. The paper's conceptual framework was constructed by combining the Spanish legal context with a bibliographic review based on the latest transparency models. The research proposes a new Transparency Evaluation Model for Social Services to measure transparency in municipalities using the social services information published on the websites. Factors considered include degree of ease and amount of time spent by citizens in accessing the website. Some conclusions indicate that transparency remains difficult to achieve, information is less accessible to citizens than it should be, and transparency differs among the municipalities due to the legal changes implemented in recent years, as well as to other economic and social variables.

In this study, we argue that a historical background of the region matters in tax mimicking and yardstick competition as a matter of principle. We seek to determine factors supporting the policy of the high local property tax in the Czech Republic. Based on the statistical and spatial data of 6,258 municipalities between 2009 and 2019, the results show that the municipalities burdened by large industrial facilities, as well as municipalities in the functional urban areas (FUAs), apply the policy of higher property taxation twice frequently than the rest. On the other hand, the industrial stimuli keep enfeebling after 2010, and the number of local governments preferring high property taxation is variegated across different FUAs. The causal analysis based on Granger's approach concludes an existence of cumulative effects of both industry and the FUAs, which push the municipalities with large industrial facilities located within an FUA to increase the property taxes. From the mimicking point of view, we found that mimicking policy is an important phenomenon among the municipalities of Czech Republic; however, it has different impacts on both stimuli (Industry and FUA). The analysis suggests that it rather incites the municipalities within the FUA to increase the local property taxes.

In this article, we aim to analyse the state of abandoned properties in Slovak municipalities and present possible solutions for this issue. In the theoretical part, we define abandonment and the tools for abandonment based on the current literature review. Building on this framework, the paper analyses the towns and villages of selected Slovak region, that being Banská Bystrica self-governing region. To map abandoned properties located in a selected region, as well as to identify emotional value of these building and the instruments needed for their reconstruction or removal, a questionnaire was sent to the mayors of all municipalities of over 1,000 inhabitants in the region of Banská Bystrica – a total of 115 municipalities in 2019. This concentrated research on one region enabled us to have a closer look at the status of abandoned structures in municipalities in a typical area of Central and Eastern Europe. We compare the issue of abandonment in the commuter zone (the two largest cities in the regions and their surrounding) and the hinterlands. Research has shown that the population in the hinterlands is declining more than in the commuter zone, but more abandoned buildings are located in municipalities in the commuter zone. Buildings in need of repair that are important for the inhabitants (e.g. from the point of view of history), are registered in their municipality by 93% of mayors in the commuter zone and 84% in the hinterlands. The most frequent obstacles to repairing these buildings are considered by the mayors in both zones the many number of owners who cannot agree on a plan for saving the objects. The quantitative research is completed with an illustration of an abandoned object in Banská Bystrica.