Mr Guglielmo Cori (p), Dr Marco Di Cataldo, Prof Stefano Magrini

The paper examines how political competition, shaped by electoral rules, affects municipal spending, and whether responses differ between re-running incumbents and one-term-only mayors. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment in Italy: the sharp 15'000-inhabitant threshold at which municipalities switch from single-ballot elections to a run-off system. Using a sharp regression discontinuity design, we estimate the causal effect of this institutional change on municipal expenditure commitments (Italian "impegni di spesa") over the term of office and stratify the analysis by mayors’ re-election incentives. The results reveal opposite responses concentrated near elections: incumbents seeking re-election increase spending in the final years of the term, whereas one-term-only mayors display null or negative effects, with a decline in current expenditure. These patterns are driven primarily by current education spending, which rises for re-running incumbents and falls for one-term-only mayors. The evidence is consistent with an electoral-competition mechanism in which, as elections approach, incumbents reallocate resources toward visible and quickly adjustable services that can signal responsiveness, while outgoing mayors—facing weaker accountability—do not sustain (and may even retrench) such spending. Overall, the findings identify political competition as a key local driver of political budget cycles and highlight the importance of carefully accounting for heterogeneity in candidates’ incentives.

Prof. Tomasz Kamiński (p), Ms Natalia Matiaszczyk (p)

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has profoundly reshaped patterns of governance across Europe, revealing cities as frontline international actors in responding to war-related crises. While scholarship on paradiplomacy and city diplomacy has documented the growing international engagement of local governments, less attention has been paid to how urban authorities operate under conditions of armed conflict and geopolitical disruption. This paper addresses this gap by examining how Polish metropolitan cities responded to the war in Ukraine and how their actions challenge existing analytical frameworks of decentralised development cooperation and humanitarian governance.
The paper develops a three-role analytical framework conceptualising cities as donors, hubs, and brokers within multilevel systems of wartime assistance. This framework captures the functional diversity and simultaneity of urban international engagement in crisis contexts. As donors, cities provided direct material, financial, and technical support to local governments in need. As hubs, they aggregated, coordinated, and redistributed assistance from domestic and international partners, functioning as key logistical and organisational and territorial nodes in transnational aid chains. As brokers, cities connected actors across governance levels and sectors, facilitating new partnerships, cooperation networks, and institutional pathways of support.
Empirically, the analysis draws on original survey data from eleven Polish metropolitan cities and eleven semi-structured interviews with municipal officials conducted between January and March 2025. The mixed qualitative approach enables a fine-grained reconstruction of practices, coordination mechanisms, and temporal dynamics of assistance, while capturing variation across cities. The findings demonstrate that war catalyses a crisis-driven mode of city diplomacy characterised by urgency, institutional innovation, and governance ambiguity, in which cities often act ahead of or alongside national authorities.
By situating wartime urban engagement within the interdisciplinary debates on local resilience and multilevel governance, the paper argues that cities should be understood not merely as sites affected by conflict, but as strategic actors shaping the governance of solidarity, spatial coordination, and responsibility in times of geopolitical rupture.

Dr. Réka Horeczki (p), Ms Petra Kinga Kézai, Ms Nóra Baranyai