Municipalities’ Choices of Service Delivery Modes: The Influence of Service,Political, Governance,and Financial Characteristics

This study investigates the influence of service, political, governance, and financial characteristics on municipalities’ choices of four service delivery modes (in-house, inter-municipal cooperation, municipality-owned firm, and private firm) in the Dutch local government setting. The results show that as a service involves more asset specificity and more measurement difficulty, the likelihood that municipalities contract this service out is lower. Also, although some differences in preferences are found between boards of aldermen and municipal councils, for both political bodies a more right-wing political orientation is shown to be positively related to privatization of services. Furthermore, contracting out is also shown to be related to the governance model of municipalities, as services of municipalities that (in general) put relatively less emphasis on input, process, and output performance indicators, and more on outcome performance indicators, are more likely to be privatized. Finally, the results also show that services of municipalities that have a better financial position are less likely to be contracted out to a private firm.     

Assessing electronic service delivery in municipalities: determinants and financial consequences of e-government implementation

In the Netherlands, electronic service delivery has become an important issue in many municipalities. Using the Internet for service delivery is seen as an important element of e-government. Based on 2014–2016 panel data for all Dutch municipalities, we show that there is a large variety among the municipalities in the extent to which they offer their service delivery digitally. By exploring the factors that may explain the differences among the municipalities, some trends can be discerned. Most notably is the strong relationship of e-government adoption with demographic characteristics, such as population, population density and both older age and younger age groups. Remarkably, we did not find an influence of education and income. Finally, we did not observe a relation between municipal allocated costs and level of e-maturity, hereby leaving the question open if and how e-government can lead to cost reductions.