Will they Survive? Why City Councils Prematurely Collapse

Abstract

Despite the burgeoning literature concerning national cabinets stability, municipal governments’ early terminations have received little attention. Since recently there has been a surge of public services assigned to municipalities in countries throughout the world the question appears worthwhile. The present work aims to fill the gap with the state-level literature, researching the political and socio-economical factors that could make city councils prematurely collapses more likely. Specifically, after a brief review of the literature, I investigate towns’ cabinets tenure based on an original data set of 6235 Italian local administrations from 1999 until 2012. Being the issue at the municipal level rather uncharted, I will make use of the previous research verifying the hypotheses developed until now and proposing new possible explanatory characteristics which can contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon.

Keywords: political stability, cabinet termination, city councils.

JEL Classification: H11, H83