Who Sets the Template? Institutional Design Replication in Interlocal Agreements

Research on interlocal collaboration has largely explained why local governments choose to collaborate but has paid little attention to how collaboration is designed. This dissertation examines whether the institutional designs embedded in interlocal agreements emerge independently or recur across jurisdictions, using Iowa's archive of Section 28E agreements (1993–2020) and a combination of computational text analysis, spatial econometrics, and relational event modeling. The first essay measures institutional design replication using cosine similarity of agreement text and finds it to be widespread. Governments frequently extend designs from their own prior agreements and sometimes adopt designs from agreements in which they did not participate. Replication is strongest in service domains with well-defined routines, such as public safety, and lowest in domains characterized by greater contextual specificity, such as planning and development. The second essay shows that design replication clusters geographically. Nearby jurisdictions tend to reuse similar governance structures, and the strength and role of spatial and fiscal proximity vary across service areas. The third essay examines network mechanisms of institutional design replication in public safety agreements using a relational event modeling framework. Institutional designs travel through different types of relational knowledge: in police protection, replication is associated with existing partnerships and accumulated implementation experience across partners. In emergency management, indirect exposure alone is associated with reuse. The findings suggest that the relational paths through which designs spread vary across service areas. Together, the three essays show that interlocal collaboration diffuses through the circulation of institutional designs, not only through participation decisions. Governments rarely design agreements from scratch; they rely instead on credible arrangements encountered through spatial and relational experience. These findings shift attention from whether governments collaborate to how collaboration is structured and highlight the role of accessible institutional examples in facilitating interlocal collaboration.

Author dc:creator

• Raul Gutierrez Meave (24399662)

• Public Administration
• Public Policy

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.32994098.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32994098