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Institutional, ideological and political influences on local government contracting: evidence from England

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-13, 13:41 authored by Jose M. Alonso, Rhys Andrews, Ian HodgkinsonIan Hodgkinson
Theories of contracting out offer contrasting perspectives on the noneconomic determinants of local government contracting. Some suggest ideological motives predominate, with contracting decisions reflecting the ideology of ruling parties. Others emphasise political motives, with governments responding to local preferences. In this paper, we draw on ideas about isomorphic pressures within organizational fields to examine whether institutional influences might also affect contracting behaviour. Using a spatial auto-regressive probit model, we evaluate whether mimetic pressures as well as ideological and political motives shape the decision to contract out service provision in English local governments. In addition, we analyse whether those factors also determine whether contracting local governments decide to contract with a commercial firm or a not-for-profit provider. The statistical results suggest that the decision to contract out is spatially dependent, and hence reflective of institutional forces. By contrast, political motives and market size considerations shape with whom local governments contract.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Public Administration

Volume

94

Issue

1

Pages

244-262

Citation

ALONSO, J.M., ANDREWS, R. and HODGKINSON, I.R., 2016. Institutional, ideological and political influences on local government contracting: evidence from England. Public Administration, 94 (1), pp.244-262.

Publisher

© John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2015-07-31

Publication date

2015-10-28

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: ALONSO, J.M., ANDREWS, R. and HODGKINSON, I.R., 2016. Institutional, ideological and political influences on local government contracting: evidence from England. Public Administration, 94 (1), pp.244-262, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/padm.12216. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

ISSN

0033-3298

eISSN

1467-9299

Language

  • en