During the last two decades the corporatization of public bodies, i.e. the creation of private-law companies for the fulfilment of public-interest activities, has become a prominent phenomenon, especially at the local level and in the domain of public utilities.
Although corporatization is often presented as an effective tool for a more efficient management of public services in local policy-making, recent empirical researches have demonstrated that its success has not only to do with its “virtues” as a policy instrument, but also with the new opportunities it may offer to local politicians to adjust their preferences, to deal with various interests and to build unusual coalitions which mix together public and private stakeholders. In a nutshell, corporatization may (and does) have a political facet, which is worth to be explored.
However, so far the “politics of corporatization” has generally been intended as the reflex of the intrinsic ambiguity of corporatization itself, paying little attention to the impact of exogenous variables on the characteristics of public-private networks developing into the companies’ boards and during the policy making processes.
In this paper instead we hypothesize that the shape and intensity of politicization in the corporatization of local public services may also depend on the specific characteristics of the policy sectors and institutional context. Drawing upon the results of recent researches on the topic, the paper aims thus at formulating an interpretive framework for the comparative analysis of the public-private balance in local services management, focusing on two broad analytical dimensions: a) the nature of policies/services at stake (i.e. number and type of potential stakeholders, business structure and market opportunities, economies of scale, technology) and b) the characteristics of the institutional context (i.e. centre-periphery relations, degree of autonomy of the local levels, policy legacies in the specific domains of public service etc.)
