The Politics of Inter-local Cooperation: Is Collaboration Efficiency-Enhancing or Stratification-Preserving?

In this paper, I focus on key factors that contribute to interlocal collaboration. The argument contrasts two different logics for the emergence of interlocal agreements: (1) that such cooperation results from efficiency-enhancing efforts of local officials seeking economies of scale in the production of capital- intensive goods; and (2) that interlocal cooperation might result from stratification-preserving efforts of local officials seeking to prevent the dilution of the voter groups on whom they rely for electoral support. These two logics derive respectively, though not exclusively, from the Tiebout tradition of focusing on the competition among local governmental jurisdictions for citizen-consumers as an efficiency-enhancing market- like mechanism; and from critiques of the Tiebout tradition in which fragmentation of local jurisdictions within metropolitan areas is typically viewed as a mechanism for preserving social stratification and inequality. I then describe a database that is in the process of being constructed for testing the two arguments. These data are drawn from the 2002 Census of Governments and the 2000 Census of Population. Tests of the two logics indicate substantial evidence for the efficiency-enhancing argument but not the stratification-preserving argument