For municipalities to address challenges that come alongside a population decrease, inter-municipal cooperation is seen as an effective measure but, as this thesis shows, it comes not without a cost. This essay's thesis strives to investigate in what ways inter-municipal cooperation affects democratic legitimacy. To do so, a document analysis is applied on a large number of different relevant documents such as audit reports, annual reports and board minutes. The documents are analyzed through a lens of three legitimating dimensions, input, throughput and output. The analysis results in several interesting observations. Firstly, by being part of a joint committee, the municipality receives a lower input-value. Secondly, there are tendencies that when entering inter-municipal cooperation, the operation becomes less transparent and thereby obtains a low throughput-value. Thirdly, there are weak tendencies that inter-municipal cooperation causes the operation to work somewhat more efficiently and will thereby obtain slightly higher output-value. The analysis concludes that yes, the democratic legitimacy does get affected by inter-municipal cooperation, but whether it is for the better or worse depends on the individual trade-off between the values.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hh-52579 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Lansing, Oscar, Lörstad, Linus |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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