Money, size, coalition type. How polity and coalition characteristics influence local party behaviour.

Local politics has commonly been characterized as consensus-oriented, pragmatic, depoliticized or even apolitical (i.e. Barber 2013; Copus et al, 2012; Kesselman, 1966; Boogers et al., 2018; Skoog, 2018, p. 18; Oliver et al, 2012; Warshaw, p. 2019, 462; Peterson, 1981). Although there have been quite a number of academic works on decision-making in municipal councils, the impression that local party politics is indeed different than national politics remains largely untested. Earlier work was mostly based on qualitative case studies and survey research amongst local political actors (Ashwort & Snape, 2004). To test aforementioned characterization, this article examines the proportion of unanimous votes (consensus) and the degree that council votes align with the coalition-opposition division. First, the level of consensus and coalition-opposition conflicts in Dutch municipal councils is compared with the Dutch lower house. Secondly, this paper seeks to identify causes for differences between Dutch municipalities on those dimensions. How do polity and coalition characteristics influence how parties and politics operate at the local level? The effect of population size, financial debt, coalition type (minimum-winning/oversized/minority) and composition are studied. Preliminary results show that Dutch municipal councils do indeed take more decisions by consensus, but that the degree that for non-unaniminous votes the coalition-opposition division is on average stronger in Dutch municipalities than in the lower house. There are however strong differences between municipalities. The analysis shows that differences in levels of consensus are best explained by polity characteristics: When the level of debt increases, the degree of consensus decreases. Consensus is also lower in populous municipalities, but this effect seems mostly driven by the higher social fragmentation in larger cities than a direct effect of size. Coalition characteristics also have some effect on consensus levels (higher when more parties are included in the coalition), but are a better explanation for the degree that voting aligns with the coalition-opposition division: Minority coalitions and council-wide agreements decrease coalition-opposition contestation, whilst excluding the largest party from the executive increases it. For this analysis an original dataset was created that consists of 172.532 votes in 145 of 350 Dutch municipalities. The votes were automatically collected from municipal council websites through webscrapping. The included municipalities are roughly representative of Dutch municipalities as a whole, including both larger and smaller municipalities.