When does ideology matter? An empirical analysis of French municipalities’ make-or-buy choices

Abstract: Many empirical studies have analyzed the factors that influence local government decisions regarding the management of public services. In those studies, ideological motives are often found to be not, or at least very slightly, significant. This absence of ideological impact is often interpreted as a proof that local governments are more and more guided by pragmatic rather than ideological motivations, notably because contracting out has become less controversial.

Nevertheless, ideological factors are almost always estimated by the percentage of left-wing (or right-wing) votes in the last local election and this way to measure ideological motives ignores the fact that management of public services might be path-dependent, i.e. strongly connected to choices made by previous officials. In this paper, we show that the configuration of public services procurement at the local level can be explained by ideological motives when ideology is properly measured, i.e. over a long-term past period.