Eva Belvončíková (p), Valéria Némethová

Rune Dahl Fitjar

As literature suggests the decision-making process about public affairs should consider certain key aspects. Policies generally consist of programs and projects designed to bring about the change needed to address the issues and problems identified. Case study presents detail knowledge on a selected decision-making process of a specific self-government in Slovakia. The selected public area is education, specifically the construction of primary schools due to insufficient capacity of existing premises. The aim of this case study is to analyse in depth the whole process of solving the problem of insufficient capacities in education that is to re-evaluate the primary school construction project, to describe how the process itself takes place and compare the reality in Slovakia with the ideal process presented in the evaluation manual. To achieve the goal, a qualitative research method in the form of semi-structured interviews with representatives of the selected local government was used. The information obtained was used to describe and analyse the implementation of the process and then compared with the recommended situation. The general conclusion of the analysis of individual steps in the decision-making process could be the need to assign competencies. Those steps in which municipality does not have sufficient knowledge of the specific task could be improved. The presented recommendations aim to help local governments and other political representatives to improve the quality of decision-making processes and thus indirectly increase the efficiency of the use of public resources and increase the efficiency of implemented measures in public administration. Redistributed competencies, expertise and available information - all these components are key to the ideal implementation of steps in the decision-making processes of public administration in the 21st century.

Edoardo di Porto, Angela Parenti (p), Sonia Paty

Eva Belvončíková

This article is intended to  fill a gap in the emerging literature on the political consequences of decentralization by investigating the determinants of voter turnout at the municipal level. While the literature
has mostly focused on the determinants of voter turnout at the aggregate level, less attention has been
paid to sub-national elections (Blais et al., 2011). Most theories of voter behavior predict that electoral participation will be higher in elections where more is at stake such as in national ones (Anderson et al., 2014). However, one cannot simply assume a strict equivalence of turnout determinants irrespective of the type of election (Cancela and Geys, 2016).
Many countries in Europe have tried to
solve the excessive number of subnational jurisdictions and the resulting inefficiency by implementing
institutional agreements for the joint delivery of local public services (Lago-Penas and Martinez-Vazquez, 2013). This variety of institutional arrangements ranges from complete mergers or amalgamations to "functional" cooperative agreements between independent municipalities, such as inter-municipal cooperation (DiPorto et Paty, 2020; DiPorto et al., 2018).
Where functional cooperation between municipalities is implemented voluntary or not, municipalities
may end up in two possible situations: i) a highly integrated case where municipalities lose most of their
competencies and the associated  scal revenues, or ii) an isolated or a low integrated situation where
most competences and taxation revenues remain in the hand of the mayors. Since less remains at stake
at the municipal level to the bene t of the inter-municipal jurisdiction in the  rst case, one could expect
that municipal voter turnout is lower than where low or no integration is chosen.
We therefore address a new institutional determinant of electoral participation - i.e. jurisdictional fragmentation - using French experience over the last decades. First, we address a new institutional
determinant of electoral participation; second, we study the e ect of the combination between the ins-
titutional context and the electoral system on local voter turnout using an exogenous variation in the
French case. Whereas inter-municipal councillors were elected by an indirect su rage before 2014 in
France, citizens got the opportunity to vote directly for them at the same time as municipal elections.
We  nd that this direct su rage had a positive e ect on turnout only in municipalities that have
transferred their competencies to the inter-municipal level while the e ect would be not signi cant on
those, which are less integrated.

Chen Sharony (p), Shlomo Mizrahi, Prof. Miki Malul

Angela Parenti

In recent decades, more and more first-world democracies are facing challenges of representation, as growing segments of their population express dissatisfaction with the attention and resources allocated to them by welfare policymakers. The current research attempts to shed light on the issue of representation by focusing on one of its manifestations - the extent to which national election vote distribution reflects public preferences for income redistribution. This was achieved by conducting a comparative study that examined the gap between public preferences for income redistribution and national election votes in 24 OECD countries, between 1998 and 2013.
In the first stage of the study, panel data was used for evaluating the connection between public income-redistribution preferences and election results. Public preferences were evaluated through value survey scores (ESS, ISSP). Election results were analyzed by documenting the votes won by each political party, along with a score that reflected each party’s approach towards the trade-off between low taxation and high public spending. In the second stage of the research, panel-regression analysis was employed in-order-to check whether social capital, ethnic heterogeneity, government effectiveness and corruption impact the above-mentioned gap.
The results of the first stage revealed that among the OECD countries investigated, no match was found in any of the years, between public redistribution preferences and voting trends. With regard to the size of the gap between preferences and votes, the smallest gaps were discovered in the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway) and in New Zealand. The largest gaps, on the other hand, were found in Greece, Ireland, France, Portugal, and Japan, countries that, for the most part, belong to the Mediterranean welfare model. This model is characterized by the over-use of welfare systems and by Clientelism – politicians’ exploitation of welfare systems for political gains. The possible connection between the large gaps found in some of the investigated countries, and the Mediterranean welfare model practiced in those countries, is supported by the results of stage 2 of our research that revealed that only government effectiveness and corruption (but not social capital, ethnic heterogeneity) impacted the size of the gap. Hence, a possible explanation for the gap found in these countries is that public perception of the national welfare system as corrupt, or as a system that serves only certain (political) groups, may cause individuals to become indifferent and consequently less inclined to vote in line with their redistribution preferences.

Jonathan Muringani, Rune Dahl Fitjar (p), Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

Chen Sharony

Economic development theory increasingly recognises that soft institutional factors, such as trust and, in particular, political trust, influence economic outcomes. Political trust is a function of the general level of social trust in society, but also of the quality of political institutions. In this paper, we examine the complex relationship between social trust, quality of government, political trust, and economic development, using a structural equation model (SEM) on pooled data from 208 regions in the European Union (EU). We find that political trust is a fundamental driver of economic growth in EU regions. Political trust is in turn shaped by both social trust and government quality, which are therefore both directly and indirectly associated with economic growth. These findings highlight the importance of political trust as a mechanism through which both formal and informal institutions influence regional development.