Why do ideologically distant political adversaries sometimes choose to govern together? This article advances research on coalition formation in parliamentary democracies by introducing a diffusion-of-innovation perspective. We argue that cooperation between political archenemies can spread spatially as parties learn from nearby cases. When sister parties in adjacent jurisdictions successfully form such coalitions without electoral punishment or sanction from national leaderships, the normative barriers to similar cooperation are weakened. In this way, unorthodox coalitions become politically imaginable and strategically viable through processes of observation, emulation, and learning. We test this argument in the context of Swedish local government, where an extraordinary transformation has occurred over the past few decades. Historically, cooperation between the Social Democrats and the Moderates – the two dominant rivals for national power – has been virtually unthinkable. Today, however, these former adversaries co-govern in nearly one-fifth of Sweden’s 290 municipalities. This shift in coalition behaviour challenges core expectations in coalition theory, which predict alliances between ideologically proximate parties. Drawing on a unique panel dataset covering eight local election cycles (1994–2022), we employ complementary log-log regression models to test whether exposure to unorthodox coalitions in the surrounding regional environment increases the likelihood of similar coalition formation. The analysis reveals clear evidence of hierarchical regional contagion: Social Democrat–Moderate coalitions are significantly more likely to emerge in administrative regions where similar arrangements existed in the previous term. These findings suggest that coalition formation is a socially embedded process of spatial learning, offering a new account of how political cooperation evolves across space.

Academics and practitioners recognize the importance of data to achieve critical public value outcomes: more effective services, more efficient use of resources, more equitably distributed benefits, and increased transparency and accountability of government action. Scholars are increasingly trying to understand the conditions that influence public organizations’ ability to use data to meet these goals, but existing research largely follows two separate approaches to studying this phenomenon. Some researchers take organizations as their main unit of analysis to understand how organizational configurations and resource endowments explain differences across governments. Other scholars study how individuals’ competencies and behaviors affect effective interpretation of data and its use to make decisions. Between these two poles lies a missing link: the collective and coordinated capabilities of groups of individuals responsible for collecting, processing, sharing, and using data in the service of tackling public problems. Using a comparative case-study design, we study teams leveraging data to tackle property distress and abandonment in three US cities. This exploratory empirical research allows us to derive insights into the main constitutive components of data-related capabilities, their enabling factors, and their effects. This understanding can advance future scholarship by providing researchers with a more operationalizable construct to study data capabilities, bridging an important gap between the main existing approaches to studying data-informed governance.

In response to New South Wales’ target of eliminating Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) waste to landfill by 2,050, this study investigates how environmental education shapes residents’ awareness and waste-sorting behaviours in multi-unit dwellings (MUDs) across Greater Western Sydney. Adopting an exploratory mixed-methods approach – integrating surveys, bin audits, interviews, and infrastructure assessments – the research reveals persistent knowledge gaps and structural constraints, particularly among culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) households. Guided by the Action Competence Framework (ACF), the findings underscore that effective FOGO participation is not driven by infrastructure alone. Rather, it depends on inclusive, participatory, and culturally responsive education that fosters understanding, builds confidence, and strengthens a sense of shared responsibility. Intergenerational learning emerges as a critical pathway, where everyday household interactions enable behavioural shifts and help reduce contamination at the source. While limited by a small sample size (n = 33) and its exploratory scope, the study makes a meaningful contribution to environmental education scholarship by extending the application of the ACF to informal residential settings. It also offers practical insights for local governments, highlighting the need to embed community-based learning strategies that can drive sustained engagement and support long-term sustainability outcomes in high-density urban environments.

The rise of internet celebrity cities has become one of the most striking phenomena in China since 2021. How do local governments respond and harness this trend to advance their development goals? This study focuses on local experimentation in creating such cities, drawing on the case of the Village Football Super League (Cun chao 村超) in Guizhou. We identify policy entrepreneurship as a key driver of local experimentation and highlight three core strategies for creating internet celebrity cities: crafting local symbols, co-producing viral content and mitigating public opinion risk. Further analysis shows that this experimentation, by attracting massive public attention, simultaneously promotes economic growth, strengthens social cohesion, reinforces state narratives and projects China’s national image onto the global stage. Overall, the findings suggest an emerging model in which public attention becomes a core resource for local development and governance in China’s digital era.

Although donating to private charitable organizations has been studied extensively, donating to local governments remains little examined. We advance this literature by applying Bekkers and Wiepking’s prominent theoretical framework of charitable giving drivers. Using nationally representative data from about 9,000 Vietnamese citizens, we test the relevance of some of these drivers in explaining the willingness to donate to local governments for road improvements. Our results largely corroborate previous findings about the roles of awareness of need (perceived issue importance), costs (the requested donation amount), and efficacy (trust in government). We also find support for the roles of altruism (the desire to help fellow citizens) and solicitation (the government’s ask)––two drivers whose application to local government donations was unexplored. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

It has long been argued that paying politicians higher salaries should help decrease corruption. However, the empirical evidence is mixed, partly due to the large variation in contexts, research designs, conceptual definitions and measures of corruption, and the predominance of case studies with potentially limited generalizability. To alleviate these challenges, we evaluate uniformly defined and validated corruption risk indicators from an original dataset of more than 2.4 million government contracts in eleven EU countries, covering more than half of the European Union population and gross domestic product. To aid causal identification, we exploit sizable changes in salaries of local politicians tied to population size across close to 100 discrete salary thresholds. Applying fixed effects estimators, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we consistently find that better-paid local politicians (by about 15 per cent on average) oversee less risky procurement contracts, by a third to one standard deviation on our measure of corruption risk.

Authoritarian regimes have long faced governance challenges arising from decentralization, as central governments struggle to control local government behavior due to information barriers. This paper argues that promoting the disclosure of local government information to the public is an effective strategy to alleviate issues associated with decentralization. Using a policy mandating the disclosure of local government information on social governance as a quasi-natural experiment, we examine its impact on a critical governance challenge emerging from decentralization – the decline of county seats. Using China’s county-level panel data (2015–2022) and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that local information disclosure significantly promotes county seat development. Specifically, it increases land allocation for both economic and public service purposes, thereby breaking the vicious cycle between deficient public services and economic stagnation. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that these effects are more pronounced in counties with higher citizen responsiveness and more constrained fiscal capacity.

What determines incumbent chief executives’ re-election in local government? Most of the literature focuses on the impact of political or economic factors. Yet, given that incumbents also strive to manage the administrative performance of local government, this is an important oversight. We examine whether and to what extent incumbents’ administrative innovation, as a new administrative factor vis-à-vis conventional political and economic factors, determines incumbents’ re-election. Analyzing 292 incumbents’ re-election and vote shares in the two most recent local government elections in South Korea, we find that both political and administrative factors are significant determinants. While political determinants, such as partisan alignment with the central government and affiliation with major parties, have the largest impact, administrative innovation also has a statistically and substantively significant effect. The implications of our findings are clear: incumbents are held accountable not only for their political attributes but also for their administrative performance in local government.

This article proposes a theory of mosque regulation to explain why state-mosque relations vary at the subnational level in Europe, using Belgium’s regions as comparative cases. Focusing on Belgium’s policy of formal recognition for mosque-communities, I argue that regulatory outcomes emerge from strategic interactions between local officials and mosque leaders, each responding to distinct audience pressures. I draw from original data on 270 mosques and 52 semi-structured interviews to argue that partisanship shapes regulatory practices: left-leaning governments pursue cooperative regulation to court minority voters, while right-wing officials adopt combative approaches to appease anti-Muslim constituencies. Mosque leaders, in turn, consider reputational costs when deciding whether to engage with the state, often pursuing recognition not for material gain but to signal trustworthiness to the broader public. These findings contribute to an emerging scholarship on the political behavior of Muslim leadership, as well as to broader literatures on minority incorporation and subnational governance.

This paper explores the complex dynamics between religion-based solidarity initiatives (RSIs) and local governments, focusing on government funding. RSIs, driven by religious values, support vulnerable groups but often face tension with secular, bureaucratic expectations. Using an institutional logics framework, the study identifies sources of tension and examines how RSIs in Antwerp and Louvain, Belgium, navigate these challenges. Our findings show that by mobilizing faith capital, RSIs strengthen community trust and resilience, enabling strategies such as segmentation or strategic non-engagement to counter government pressures while safeguarding their religious mission. However, state pressures can risk turning RSIs into “blocked organizations”, forcing them to abandon their religious mission. This research sheds light on how RSIs balance accountability to religious communities and government actors, offering insights into their strategies to preserve autonomy.

A cornerstone of democracy is the capacity of citizens to influence political decisions either through elections or by making their will known in the periods between elections. The aim of the present study is twofold: (1) to explore what factors inherent of the voluntary associations that determine the perceived success in their attempts to influence policy and (2) to investigate what role the composition of the local government have on the perceived success. This study is based on a survey conducted among 404 local voluntary associations in four different municipalities in Sweden. The results show that the frequency contacts influence perceived success positively, while the level of civic engagement of the voluntary associations affected the perceived success negatively. Having a heterogeneous local government also contributed positively to the perceived success to influence policy.

The extant literature on the relations between government and NGOs is limited in two respects—dominant focus on relations between central government and NGOs and a limited discussion of typologies of relations in countries in Africa. This study seeks to make a modest contribution to addressing these limitations by studying the relations between local government and NGOs in Ghana. This paper proposes a four-dimensional framework for analysing the relations between local government and NGOs in Ghana. It reports that the relations are varied, complex and multi-dimensional and characterised by superficial and suspicious cordiality; tokenistic and cosmetic collaboration; friendly-foe relation; and convenient and cautious partnerships.