Deliberating dilemmas of local democracy: Two survey experiments on citizens’ sensitivity to arguments in favor and against local taxation and interregional cooperation

Since 2014 the decentralization of legislative and executive power to the local level led to increased pressures on municipalities in the Netherlands. Municipal administrations are becoming increasingly responsible for a range of policy fields. However, their financial opportunities (in terms of taxation) and democratic legitimacy (in terms of accountability and turnout) have not yet followed suit. To deal with these new challenges, municipalities have looked for solutions via interregional cooperation and increased local taxation. This paper aims to study to what extent Dutch citizens are sensitive to arguments in favor and/or against these measures. For that purpose, we set up two survey experiments in the first Dutch Local Election Study, covering approximately 1,250 respondents each. The first experiment focuses on support for interregional cooperation, the second on support for increased possibilities for local taxation. In each experiment the respondents were divided into five subgroup: a reference group with the neutral support question, and four experimental groups that were assigned one argument in favor or against, or both arguments (in different sequences). This setup allows us to test respondents’ sensitivity to both sets of arguments. We test a range of hypotheses on citizens’ sensitivity to these arguments. On the one hand, in line with the work on political sophistication by a.o. Converse and Dalton, we argue that support for both policies is more likely to be affected by the arguments (both in favor and against these policies) among the lower educated, the politically disinterested, and politically unsophisticated. On the other hand, in line with the work on perceptual screens by a.o. Campbell et al. and Zaller, we argue that arguments are more likely to sway citizens when they line up with pre-existing preferences: i.e., left-wing citizens will be more strongly affected by arguments emphasizing social facilities, right-wing citizens by arguments emphasizing efficiency, and citizens who favor more democracy by arguments emphasizing democratic accountability.