New forms of local governance : a theoretical and empirical analysis of municipal corporations in Portugal

摘要

What factors influence local governments to rely on municipal corporations toprovide public services? This article seeks to identify which factors lead localgovernments to use local corporate public sector organizations, particularly municipalcorporations, for service delivery. Based on the ideas of the neo-institutionalismapproach to public administration developed by Murray Horn (1995), we argue thatlocal officials trade-off bureaucratic costs of in-house production with agency costs ofexternal delegation to municipal corporations when deciding how to deliver local publicservices. Econometric models are employed to test this explanation for the adoption ofmunicipal corporations by the 278 Portuguese local governments. The results indicatethat organizational size, financial independency, and fiscal surplus, as well asideological concerns and the activity of local interest groups, drive choices of localgovernance structures.