Local Politicians and the Implementation of Local Government Reforms

Abstract

Local government plays a crucial role when it comes to reforms because it must usually approve such projects or is at least responsible for their implementation. It is interesting to discover more about the role of local executive politicians in the modernization process of local governments. While there is much literature on local government reforms and on the role of the local executive authority in general, studies which investigate the connection between the two are scarce. This study investigates whether the reform agenda of a municipality is rather influenced by the institutional setting or the personal attributes of local politicians. This hypothesis-based paper assumes that institutional settings as well as specific personal attributes of the local politicians influence the local reform agenda. For the empirical analysis, the case of Switzerland was chosen, where local politics is mainly made by the local politicians and reforms are mostly implemented on a voluntary basis. Two surveys form the dat...