Swiss Municipalities Research Articles

A capacitated multi-vehicle covering tour problem on a road network and its application to waste collection

In most Swiss municipalities, a curbside system consisting of heavy trucks stopping at almost each household is used for non-recoverable waste collection. Due to the many stops of the trucks, this strategy causes high fuel consumption, emissions and noise. These effects can be alleviated by reducing the number of stops performed by the collection vehicles. One possibility consists of selecting a subset of candidate locations that are scattered throughout the municipality to place collection points which are used by residents to bring their waste. Provided that the underlying road network is available and that the collection vehicle has a known capacity, we refer to this problem as the capacitated multi-vehicle covering tour problem on a road network (Cm-CTP-R). We propose a road-network-based mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation that exploits the sparsity of the network. We compare it against the MILP formulation that results from assuming a customer-based graph, which is typically used in vehicle routing problems (VRP). To solve large instances, we develop a two-phased heuristic approach that addresses the two subproblems the Cm-CTP-R is built on: a set covering problem to select the locations and a split-delivery VRP to determine the tours. Computational experiments on instances derived from real-life data show that the road-network-based formulation is better suited. Furthermore, the proposed heuristic provides good solutions with optimality gaps below 1.7% and finds better solutions for most of the instances that the exact method is not able to solve within a given time limit.

Quantifying land-use regulation and its determinants

Abstract We analyze land-use regulation and the determinants thereof across Swiss municipalities. We construct several residential development stringency indices based on a comprehensive survey. These indices capture various aspects of local regulation and land-use coordination across jurisdictions. Combining these indices, we construct an index that provides harmonized information about what local regulation entails and the local regulatory environment across municipalities. Our analysis shows that historical building density, natural amenities, socio-demographic factors, cultural aspects and municipal competition are important determinants of local land-use regulation. However, a large share of land-use regulation variation remains unexplained. Moreover, our results indicate that more stringent land-use regulation is associated with steeper house price increases but less urban sprawl.

Collaborating and co-creating the digital transformation: Empirical evidence on the crucial role of stakeholder demand from Swiss municipalities

Digital-era governance is one of the central challenges of the twenty-first century and marks a fundamental paradigm shift in public administration. Based on the concepts of collaborative capacity and organizational maturity for co-creation, this study explores the factors that determine municipal administrations’ capacity to engage in digitalization-related collaborations. Using unique survey data from 720 Swiss municipalities, this study investigates the relevance of intra-organizational and extra-organizational factors in stimulating local governments’ likelihood of engaging in cross-sectoral and inter-organizational partnerships to implement the digital transformation. It reveals that extra-organizational impulses by digital change agents and stakeholder demand—in contrast to intra-organizational resources—are highly influential factors for municipalities to engage in digitalization-related collaborations. This study presents novel insights into the specific barriers to change and the success factors of co-creation in the process of municipalities’ digital transformation to inform theory, practice, and policy design.

The political economy of territorial integration referendums

ABSTRACT When do political communities support territorial amalgamation in referendums? Existing research has identified heterogeneity between communities as a key hurdle for integration reforms. In this paper, I demonstrate that asymmetries between communities do not necessarily impede political integration. An analysis of 1500 municipal merger referendums held in Swiss municipalities since the new millennium shows that voters’ support for integration is lower when potential merger partners are poorer or larger than their own community. However, the effects of wealth and size differences are interdependent. They reinforce each other’s effect on merger support if they point in the same direction, for example, in a relatively rich and relatively small community, but they can also cancel each other out, for example, in a relatively small, but relatively poor community. These results have important implications for understanding under which conditions integration reforms are politically feasible.

Immigrant inventors and local income taxes: Evidence from Swiss municipalities

This paper studies the relationship between local personal income tax rates and the attractiveness of municipalities as residential locations for immigrant inventors in Switzerland. Exploiting sharp differences in top income tax rates across state borders, I find an elasticity of the probability that an inventor takes residence in a border municipality with respect to the top net-of-tax rate of around 3.2. Additional evidence suggests that inventors’ residential location choices are consequential for the localization of entrepreneurial activity and local knowledge spillovers.

Participatory processes and their outcomes: comparing assembly and popular vote decisions

AbstractHow do face-to-face, assembly processes, and non-face-to-face, popular vote processes impact the decisions made by citizens? Normative discussions of the comparative merits of these two broad types of participatory decision-making processes partly rely on empirical assumptions concerning this question. In this paper, we test the central assumption that assemblies lead to decisions that are more widely supported by participants than popular votes. We do so by analyzing 1,400 decisions made through these processes on the highly salient issue of municipal mergers in Swiss municipalities since 1999. We find that assembly decisions are consistently made by larger majorities than popular vote decisions and that this relationship is significantly mediated by turnout. This suggests that higher levels of agreement in assemblies mainly result from selection biases – with fewer dissenting citizens participating in assemblies than in popular votes – rather than from internal dynamics in assemblies.

Characterising strategic collaboration of large Swiss municipalities

ABSTRACT By analysing legislative programmes of all Swiss municipalities having more than 20,000 inhabitants (in 2018) and in two different time periods (2010 and 2020), this study examines the general place of collaboration in municipal strategies, by paying attention to the various public fields and degree of complexity in terms of actor constellations. As in real life, collaboration occupies also an important part of the large Swiss municipal governments’ strategic reflections. Yet, a certain gap exists regarding the weight given to public fields. Indeed, politically selling fields seem to get more place in legislative programmes than in real life. Collaboration, such as planned in municipal strategies, involves a large diversity of actors and thereby achieves a certain complexity which clearly goes beyond the intermunicipal level. The degree of complexity does not evolve over time but inhabitants become a strategically more important collaborative actor for municipalities.

Does freedom of information contribute to more open administrations? An empirical analysis of the link between active and passive forms of transparency

ABSTRACT Government transparency has been widely commented through the adoption of freedom of information laws. Several studies have shown a positive effect of access to information on government transparency. This contribution, based on a quantitative analysis of 2,222 Swiss municipalities, adds to the literature by combining disclosure of information on municipalities’ websites and constrained release of information. The findings indicate that more proactive transparency practices are not observed in regional entities that have enacted transparency laws. Nevertheless, they also indicate that levels of proactive transparency are slightly higher in municipalities where freedom of information has been implemented for a long time.

Spatial differentials in mortality in Switzerland: How do contexts explain the differences between natives and migrants?

In Western societies, migrants are known to have lower mortality risks than native born, although they are characterised by a lower socioeconomic status. Academic research has found some explanations, but the causes of the migrant mortality paradox are still partially unknown. Individual factors are generally seen as the fundamental causes of death, but recent research has shown that social, economic and cultural environments also produce inequalities in mortality. This article aims at determining the influence of socioeconomic, cultural and geographic contexts in explaining the mortality differences between migrants and native-born Swiss. By running multilevel Bayesian models, the authors decompose spatial inequalities in mortality between migrants and natives of Switzerland within Swiss municipalities and neighbourhoods.

Does war exposure increase support for state penetration? Evidence from a natural experiment

ABSTRACT Does war exposure increase popular support for state penetration or are changes in taxation and economic intervention primarily elite-driven? Existing research rests mainly at the macro level and is therefore unable to distinguish between the two mechanisms. In this paper, we employ a natural experiment to investigate whether direct war exposure affects popular preferences for state penetration in the post-war period. We use accidental bombardments of Swiss municipalities during the Second World War as treatments to examine whether popular preferences expressed in direct democratic votes on tax policies and economic intervention in war-affected municipalities followed different trajectories in the post-war period compared to municipalities that were not the target of accidental bombardments. We show that war exposure increased popular support for state intervention into the economy, but we do not find an effect of accidental bombardments on popular support for more progressive taxes or the extension of fiscal capacity.

Swiss Municipal Data Merger Tool: Open-source Software for the Compilation of Longitudinal Municipal-level Data.

The Swiss Municipal Data Merger Tool (Swiss MDMT) offers a solution to a frequent data management problem encountered when compiling longitudinal datasets involving Swiss municipalities as the observational units. Due to municipal mergers, the number of municipalities in Switzerland declined from 3,095 in 1960 to 2,202 in 2020. As a consequence, manually securing the correct spatial reference when merging historical cross‐sectional data is tedious and time‐consuming. To facilitate this operation, the Swiss MDMT considers mutations at the municipal level and maps municipalities of a first point in time to municipalities in a second point in time based on information provided by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office's municipality inventory. The tool is distributed as an open‐source R package and is freely available on CRAN.

Leveraging insurance customer data to characterize socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities.

The availability of reliable socioeconomic data is critical for the design of urban policies and the implementation of location-based services; however, often, their temporal and geographical coverage remain scarce. We explore the potential for insurance customers data to predict socioeconomic indicators of Swiss municipalities. First, we define a features space by aggregating at city-level individual customer data along several behavioral and user profile dimensions. Second, we collect official statistics shared by the Swiss authorities on a wide spectrum of categories: Population, Transportation, Work, Space and Territory, Housing, and Economy. Third, we adopt two spatial regression models exploring both global and local geographical dependencies to investigate their predictability. Results show consistently a correlation between insurance customer characteristics and official socioeconomic indexes. Performance fluctuates depending on the category, with values of R2 > 0.6 for several target variables using a 5-fold cross validation. As a case study, we focus on predicting the percentage of the population using public transportation and we discuss the implications on a regional scope. We believe that this methodology can support official statistical offices and it could open up new opportunities for the characterization of socioeconomic traits at highly-granular spatial and temporal scales.

The geography of political ideologies in Switzerland over time

ABSTRACT Recent empirical findings highlight how economic geography is important in understanding various political outcomes. However, these results are typically based on single elections or referendums. This article overcomes the weaknesses of such data by identifying and analysing the long-term structure and evolution of fundamental political ideologies in Switzerland. The results assess the existence of significant political ideology divides among Swiss municipalities and indicate that these divides are associated with inequalities in local economic welfare, migration flows and urbanity. Overall, this article suggests that linkages between economic geography and political preferences are not restricted to specific issues or elections; rather, they also involve the more profound structure of political ideologies.

Determining the insurance value of ecosystems: A discrete choice study on natural hazard protection by forests

Forest ecosystems provide multiple services. In mountainous regions, protection against gravitational hazards is of particular importance. By preventing soil erosion and functioning as natural barriers and buffers, forests protect the population and infrastructure against avalanches and rock falls. The higher the forests' capacity to regulate and withstand external disturbances and adverse effects the higher the insurance value they provide. To operationalize the insurance value approach and to integrate it into climate change adaptation and disaster risk management, information about supply and demand of this ecosystem service is required. While assessing the capacity of forests to provide protection services has been a longstanding research focus, knowledge about the population's demand for insurance services provided by forests is still lacking. Our study analyzes the preferences of beneficiaries of such services. We conducted a choice experiment in several Swiss municipalities exposed to avalanches and rock falls, accounting for different spatial and institutional contexts. We found that households are willing to pay a significant amount for forest management that enhances forests' insurance services and reduces natural hazard risks. The results help to inform decision making in natural hazard management, and represent a further step towards operationalizing the insurance value of ecosystems.

How flood risks shape policies: flood exposure and risk perception in Swiss municipalities

Despite an increasing number of people exposed to flood risks in Europe, flood risk perception remains low and effective flood risk management policies are rarely implemented. It becomes increasingly important to understand how local governments can design effective flood risk management policies to address flood risks. In this article, we study whether high flood exposure and flood risk perception correlate with the demand for a specific design of flood risk management policies. We take the ideal case of Switzerland and analyze flood risk management portfolios in 18 flood-prone municipalities along the Aare River. We introduce a novel combination of risk analysis and public policy data: we analyze correlations between recorded flood exposure data and survey data on flood risk perception and policy preferences for selected flood risk management measures. Our results indicate that local governments with high flood risk perception tend to prefer non-structural measures, such as spatial planning and ecological river restoration, to infrastructure measures. In contrast, flood exposure is neither linked to flood risk perception nor to policy preferences. We conclude that flood risk perception is key: it can decisively affect local governments’ preferences to implement specific diversified policy portfolios including more preventive or integrated flood risk management measures. These findings imply that local governments in flood-prone areas should invest in raising their population’s awareness capacity of flood risks and keep it high during periods without flooding.

Health promotion in Swiss municipalities: towards proportionate universalism

Abstract Background Health promotion goes beyond the health sector. Municipalities, the local public authorities in Switzerland, have a crucial role to promote population health in all their decisions. Initially developed by Promotion Santé Valais, the label “Healthy municipality” exists in the canton of Vaud since 2015. The label takes stock of existing measures in health promotion and prevention in all sectors and incentivise new interventions. The labelling process respects different criteria and is validated by an external committee. It is voluntarist, free of charge for the municipality but requires time and intersectoral communication. This abstract explores equity in the uptake of the label. Results In Vaud, 17 municipalities have been labelled “healthy”. Two external evaluations by Swiss universities highlighted that small villages are less involved in the label than urban areas. To achieve health equity, we need to identify and approach municipalities with limited human and financial resources, that might be less active in health promotion and/or whose population is socioeconomically disadvantaged. Preliminary results indicate that municipalities below 1000 inhabitants, in rural areas, should be targeted first. We are currently investigating the barriers and facilitators for them to enrol in the label. Lessons As labels rewarding healthy cities are expanding worldwide, it is important to document and reflect on who benefits from them, and who does not. Our practice is now focusing more on villages in rural areas, with less resources than urban settings. We investigate their needs regarding the type of support that we, public health professionals, can provide. Proportionate universalism principles should also apply to advocacy for health promotion, at the municipality level. Key messages To achieve health in all policies, the role of municipalities is essential. More efforts in health promotion should target specifically small and rural municipalities, with limited resources.

Direct democracy, partial decentralization and voter information: evidence from Swiss municipalities

In this paper, I investigate whether changes in the availability of direct democratic institutions in local jurisdictions affect the decentralization of expenditures. Using a difference-in-differences estimation on a panel of 406 Swiss municipalities, I find a statistically significant reduction in decentralization when local jurisdictions introduce mandatory fiscal referenda. To rationalize this result, I propose a model of partial decentralization in which policies are mainly influenced by politicians’ electoral incentives. As direct democracy has positive effects on citizens’ awareness of governments’ behavior, in equilibrium, expenditures will be higher at the level of government at which citizens have the least control over government actions.

Immigrant Inventors and Local Income Taxes: Evidence from Swiss Municipalities

This paper studies the relationship between local personal income tax rates and the attractiveness of municipalities as residential locations for immigrant inventors in Switzerland. Exploiting sharp differences in top income tax rates across state borders, I find an elasticity of the probability that an inventor takes residence in a municipality with respect to the top net-of-tax rate of around 4. Additional evidence suggests that inventors’ residential location choices are consequential for the localization of entrepreneurial activity and local knowledge spillovers.

The effect of citizenship on the long-term earnings of marginalized immigrants: Quasi-experimental evidence from Switzerland.

We provide evidence that citizenship catalyzes the long-term economic integration of immigrants. Despite the relevance of citizenship policy to immigrant integration, we lack a reliable understanding of the economic consequences of acquiring citizenship. To overcome nonrandom selection into naturalization, we exploit the quasi-random assignment of citizenship in Swiss municipalities that held referendums to decide the outcome of individual naturalization applications. Our data combine individual-level referendum results with detailed social security records from the Swiss authorities. This approach allows us to compare the long-term earnings of otherwise similar immigrants who barely won or lost their referendum. We find that winning Swiss citizenship in the referendum increased annual earnings by an average of approximately 5000 U.S. dollars over the subsequent 15 years. This effect is concentrated among more marginalized immigrants.

Predicting outdoor recreation demand on a national scale – The case of Switzerland

Residents of industrialized countries place increasingly more value on outdoor recreation. For many alpine and remote municipalities, revenues from tourism and recreation belong to the most important sources of income. At the same time, these activities generate large carbon footprints through traffic. In order to understand what drives the demand for outdoor recreation, we used a set of Generalized Linear Models to explain how landscape properties and accessibility are related to revealed outdoor recreation demand (i.e. number of day trips received by Swiss municipalities), and which variables are most important to predict demand for outdoor recreation day trips on a national scale. While many authors have demonstrated that accessibility is a crucial variable to explain demand for outdoor recreation, our results show that population density and the number of land-use/-cover classes per municipality are among the main drivers of demand for outdoor recreation. This calls for a careful spatial planning, including the consideration of the increased demand for recreation generated by resident population growth. Furthermore, securing an attractive landscape requires policies supporting diverse land management practices. Ultimately, our results can help planners in their decision-making, including those to support a more sustainable mobility in the future.