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Municipalities, as the front lines of service delivery, use websites as one of the tools to communicate information to the public. While it is considered a record, many organisations, including municipalities, do not manage websites as such. This study aims to explore the archiving of websites as records in the municipalities of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province in South Africa by using the web archiving life cycle model.

This study used a mixed-methods research with an explanatory design, with quantitative data collected first through content analysis of websites and qualitative data collected through interviews. Researchers used multilevel sampling, first quantitatively analysing all available websites of the municipalities (52) in KZN, and then qualitatively selecting only records managers, information managers, web administrators, communication managers and website managers or designers from municipalities because of their understanding and involvement with websites in some way.

This study established that some records on municipal websites are often in paper format in record-keeping systems, whereas others are born digital and are not captured in the systems. Municipalities lack a dedicated web online harvesting tool as well as an archiving policy or strategy to guide website archiving. Furthermore, municipalities placed a high reliance on service providers to keep their websites operational.

It became clear during the interviews that most of the participants were unfamiliar with web archiving. As a result, only 12 of the 56 selected participants from the municipalities provided the required information in relation to the current study as others could not provide answers. Data for other participants were not analysed.

Due to a lack of infrastructure for ingesting digital records into archival custody, a framework for harvesting web content of value is proposed both internally in municipalities and externally to an archive repository.

Municipalities seek new opportunities for co-producing services in rural areas. One potential partner is community-based social enterprises (CBSEs). However, whilst service co-production through CBSEs obscures the traditional roles of actors, it may lead to a legitimation crisis in local service provision. In this paper, the ways CBSEs are legitimised as service providers in rural areas are addressed from the CBSE and municipality perspectives.

Empirical data combine interviews with CBSE representatives and open-ended national survey responses from municipality decision-makers. The data analysis is based on a qualitative content analysis to examine legitimation arguments.

Results show that unestablished legitimacy and un-institutionalised support structures for co-production models build mistrust between CBSEs and municipalities, which prevents the parties from seeing the benefits of cooperation in service production.

The research focusses on the legitimation of CBSEs in service co-production in rural areas. As legitimation seems to be a context-specific process, future research is needed regarding other contexts.

Municipalities interested in the co-production of services might benefit from establishing a collaborative and responsive (rural) service policy forum that would institutionalise new models of co-production and enable better design and governance of service provision.

Results will give new theoretical and practical insights into the importance of legitimacy in the development of service co-production relationships.

Adolescent pregnancy stands as a societal challenge, compelling young individuals to prematurely discontinue their education. Conversely, an expansion of high school education can potentially diminish rates of adolescent pregnancy, given that educational attainment stands as the foremost risk factor influencing sexual initiation, the use of contraceptive methods during initial sexual encounters and fertility. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the implementation of the public educational policy introducing full-time schools (FTS) for high schools in the state of Ceará, Brazil, on early pregnancy rates.

Using the difference-in-differences method with multiple time periods, we measured the average effect of this staggered treatment on the treated municipalities.

The main result indicates a reduction of 0.849 percentage points in the teenage pregnancy rate. Concerning dynamic effects, the establishment of FTS in treated municipalities results in a 1.183–1.953 percentage point decrease in teenage pregnancy rates, depending on the timing of exposure. We explored heterogeneous effects within socioeconomically vulnerable municipalities, yet discerned no impact on this group. Rigorous tests confirm the robustness of the results.

This paper aims to contribute to: (1) the consolidation of research on the subject, given the absence of such research in Brazil to the best of our knowledge; (2) the advancement and analysis of evidence-based public policy and (3) the utilization of novel longitudinal data and methodology to evaluate adolescent pregnancy rates.

Since 2009 Swedish municipalities may apply the Act on System of Choice (LOV) in, among other things, eldercare. About half of the 290 Swedish municipalities have chosen this within home-care services for older citizens, thus creating conditions for a welfare mix where private and public providers compete. Some of these municipalities later made decisions to abolish LOV. This article aims to analyse the arguments put forward by municipal politicians to abolish LOV and discusses if the case of abandoning LOV represents a case of re-municipalization.

Qualitative method was used to analyse decision protocols and media materials from 20 Swedish municipalities that had abolished LOV in home-care services.

The article shows that politics and ideology seem to have only a limited significance in abolishing LOV. The most important arguments found in the empirical materials were instead pragmatic and related to the transaction costs: in smaller municipalities about the weak position of private providers and in larger municipalities about reported cases of welfare crime and extensive needs to control and review. In smaller municipalities, LOV was replaced by public monopoly and in larger municipalities by other types of procurements.

With its focus on eldercare in party-dominated municipalities, the article adds knowledge to the literature on drivers of re-municipalization but also discusses possible delimitations of the concept of re-municipalization.

Corruption is a major social problem, and scholars have devoted considerable attention to this phenomenon. However, less attention has been paid to how corruption spreads among organizations and what factors can make its spread more likely. This study aims to fill the gap by modelling corruption as an interorganizational contagion.

The authors used social contagion theory to model corruption as an interorganizational contagion, influenced by the susceptibility of organizations and the strength of contagion sources. The study analysed 736 medium and large Italian municipalities over a five-year period, with 3,146 observations (excluding missing data). The authors conducted a longitudinal analysis using panel logistic regression techniques and performed robustness and endogeneity checks through a dynamic panel data model.

The authors found that municipalities with a higher percentage of corrupt neighbouring municipalities were more likely to experience corruption. The probability of experiencing corruption was also significantly higher for municipalities with weaker organizational resistance to corruption contagion.

Previous studies have not clearly explained the organizational mechanisms behind the spread of corruption at the interorganizational level. The study suggests that corruption contagion at the municipal level occurs via reduced uncertainty in decision-makers and is influenced by the prevalence of corruption locally. The spread can be driven by conscious or unconscious mechanisms. This study challenges the idea that corruption contagion is immediate and inevitable. Organizational resistance to corruption can affect the risk of contagion, highlighting the importance of anti-corruption controls and ethical systems in preventing it.

This study explores municipal leaders' perceptions on strategic human resource management in their local government organization. Previous studies on companies demonstrate that the top manager's perceptions of the importance of human resource management (HRM) for the organization are reflected in the quality of human resource management and its strategic role. The authors are interested in how leaders in municipalities perceive HRM.

The authors interviewed 30 leaders of Finnish municipalities for this qualitative study focused on municipal leaders' perceptions of HRM. The authors applied a discourse analytical approach in the analysis.

The authors recognized four discourses that frame perceptions of HRM: HRM as a strategic weapon, HRM as an underperformer, HRM as a matter of formality and HRM as a cost generator. In addition, the authors recognized that the discourses reflected leaders' self-positioning in relation to the power to impact issues related to HRM. Shifting between distinct roles demonstrated that municipal leaders' emphasis on HRM and its strategic alignment reflects the power relations in the municipality and the attitudes to the importance of HRM.

This study contributes to the academic discussions on HRM in municipalities and provides views on the municipal leader's role and impact on valuing and investing in HRM. From a practical point of view, the study will increase municipal leaders' knowledge of HRM's impact on the performance of the organization and also of the possible means of HRM.

This paper aims to determine whether local governments (LGs) use non-consolidated municipally owned companies (MOCs), excluded from public sector entities and, consequently, from sub-national debt to avoid fiscal debt limits. This paper contributes to the literature by analysing the fiscal debt rule’s impact on the off-budget municipal activities in total and separate in different types of local government units.

This paper uses difference-in-differences and the system general method of moments model with the Blundell–Bond estimator for dynamic panel data analysis of MOCs owned by 866 Polish municipalities in 2010–2018.

This paper shows that the MOCs’ revenues support limited local public debt capacity by indebtedness restrictions imposed on municipalities in 2014. As a result, less indebted municipalities have higher off-budget revenues. The tightening of fiscal rules related to sub-sovereign indebtedness increased off-budget activities, but that effect is much stronger in rural and rural–urban municipalities than in urban municipalities and big cities.

This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the fiscal debt rule’s impact on the off-budget municipal activities in total and separate in different types of local government units. In this paper, the authors combine theories relating to private and public finance; this is a novel approach and one that is also necessary – as, in fact, the worlds of public and private actors intersect – as exemplified by the existence of MOC.

The aim of the study is to deepen the knowledge about municipalities' risk communication for preparedness. This objective was pursued by analyzing how risk communication functions were organized in municipalities and by scrutinizing tensions in risk communication management.

The study relies on 19 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with communication practitioners in Swedish municipalities. The sample was purposive and included Swedish municipalities varying in number of inhabitants, geographical location, degree of urbanization, size and risk profile.

Risk communication is seen as a sub-field of crisis communication in municipalities' communication management. The task of initiating risk communication activities and campaigns is frequently assigned to the municipalities' safety units or emergency coordinators and is normally not part of communication practitioners' duties. Municipal communication practitioners often face challenges in trying to demonstrate the significance of the practitioners' role in risk communication and other risk-related activities within the municipality. The practitioners' work is characterized by four categories of tensions that are identified as follows: constitutional/legal, organizational, cultural and technological.

The identified tensions in risk communication are important for reflexive practitioners to consider, and the paper suggests three steps that municipal communication managers can take to handle them.

The study contributes with novel knowledge about municipal communication management in a context of risk communication. The study challenges the existing and dominant risk communication research and offers a more contextual and reflexive understanding of actual risk communication processes in municipalities.

The study covers two different forms of financial support for households, income support for single parents and reimbursements for depression medicines, and explores their relationships with the demand for child protection services.

The data were retrieved from the Sotkanet, the Finnish Indicator Bank, and included 292 Finnish municipalities. It was hypothesised that the effect of income support for single-parent households on the need for child protection is mediated by reimbursements for depression medicines. The hypotheses were tested by using a conditional process analysis program, PROCESS (Model 4).

It was found that income support reduces the proportion of reimbursements for depression medicines in a municipality, which in turn reduces the need for child protection services. At the level of social policy, the study tentatively suggests that the social welfare system may affect the demand for child protection by investing in income support for single-parent households.

The choice of variables does not fully explain the effect of the mechanism. The relationships that are found in this study can have hidden factors which affect them. Further, the data have only 292 cases, which is quite a small sample, and is limited to Finland.

The study suggests that the social welfare system may affect the demand for child protection by investing in income support for single-parent households.

This study aims to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of government auditing of local authorities’ compliance with the procurement rules.

A diff-in-diff approach is used where the measure of compliance is (changes in) the incidence of private litigation under the Public Procurement Act, in audited vs non-audited municipalities. Further, semi-structured interviews were conducted with chief procurement officials.

No statistically significant effect is found. While strong effects of audits can be ruled out, the statistical results and the interviews do not, however, contradict a modest but long-lasting effect.

Few studies have addressed the effect of public procurement auditing on compliance. This study develops an empirical framework and presents empirical results.