When mayors hold the pencil: gerrymandering inside a territorial reform

28/08/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues (University of Minho), with Oliver Meza (CIDE) and Carmen Navarro (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Gerrymandering is usually filed away as an American problem — a decennial ritual of oddly shaped congressional districts and litigation. But the practice does not require an American ballot. It requires only two things: a boundary that has to be redrawn, and a politician with an interest in where the line falls. Territorial reform supplies both, and it does so in countries that would never describe themselves as having a redistricting problem.

Portugal is a case in point. In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we look at the 2013 reform that amalgamated Portuguese sub-municipal units — the freguesias, roughly comparable to parishes — and ask a question that the amalgamation literature has largely left aside: not whether mergers deliver economies of scale or damage local democracy, but who decides which units merge with which, and what they get out of it.

A reform designed to be captured

The reform came out of the 2011 Memorandum of Understanding with the troika. Cutting the number of local entities was one of the commitments made, and central government initially tried to impose specific merger criteria from above. Local government rejected that outright. So the government softened its approach: it kept the targets — urban units to be reduced by 50–55 per cent, rural ones by 25–35 per cent — and handed the map itself to the mayors. Across 278 municipalities, the number of sub-municipal units fell from 4,269 to 3,092.

The design has an unusual feature. The units that had to merge were not the units that decided. Mayors drew the proposals; municipal assemblies approved them. And Portuguese municipal assemblies are hybrid bodies: alongside directly elected members, every sub-municipal president in the jurisdiction sits with a full vote. Sub-municipal presidents are also, in practice, part of a mayor’s electoral machinery — the people who campaign, mobilise and deliver a vote in their own patch.

That makes an amalgamation reform something more than an administrative exercise. Reducing the number of sub-municipal units aligned with the mayor’s party reduces the mayor’s support in the assembly that approves the budget and the investment plan, and thins out the voices in the field who will be needed at the next election. Conversely, a well-drawn map can pack opponents into a single unit or dilute them inside a larger friendly one. The pencil was handed to precisely the actors with most to gain from how it moved.

Vulnerability and feasibility

We modelled the mayor’s decision on two dimensions. The first is vulnerability: does the mayor have a majority of politically aligned sub-municipal units, or not? The second is feasibility: does the mayor command a majority of the elected seats in the municipal assembly, and so the ability to get a map approved without concessions?

Crossing them yields four situations. Where mayors are not vulnerable, redrawing is either irrelevant or indifferent — there is nothing to gain. Where they are vulnerable but lack an assembly majority, redrawing is crucial to survival but has to be negotiated, which means sharing the spoils. Where they are vulnerable and hold the assembly, redrawing is appealing: the incentive and the means coincide.

Using the 2009 sub-municipal election results projected onto the new 2013 map — the only information mayors actually had when drawing it — we then estimated multinomial logit models on all 278 affected municipalities.

The pattern is clear. Across the country, 51 per cent of municipalities ended up with more aligned sub-municipal units after a reform whose entire purpose was to reduce their number. In the appealing quadrant, the odds of an increase in aligned units rise more than nine-fold; in the crucial quadrant, where the map has to survive a coalition, they rise just over four-fold. The gap between the two is itself the finding: opposition parties will not sign off on a map that benefits the incumbent alone, so the gains get shared and diluted. Results hold when we substitute a vote-efficiency measure of the kind used in the US gerrymandering literature.

Why this should interest anyone outside Portugal

Two implications travel. The first is procedural. Structural reform is often delegated downwards on the sensible-sounding grounds that local actors know their own territory. They do — and they also know their own electoral arithmetic. Where the reform reshapes the boundaries that determine who sits in the body that scrutinises the reformer, delegation is not neutral. Anyone currently watching local government reorganisation in England, where boundaries, wards and the composition of new authorities are all in play, may find the logic familiar.

The second is about what happens next. Since 2013 there has been sustained pressure in Portugal to demerge some units, and the initiative for those petitions again rests with mayors. If the same rationality holds, demergers will be permitted where they are politically harmless and blocked where they are not — meaning the same territories get gerrymandered twice.

None of this requires bad faith or illegality. Every map was lawful and approved through proper procedure. That is rather the point: an effective opposition, not a rule about compactness, was the only thing that reliably constrained the outcome.

Miguel Ângelo Vilela Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation in the Department of Political Science, School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, and a researcher at CICP.

The full article — ‘Gerrymandering to survive: an explanation of the political conditions that shaped mayors’ decisions over an amalgamation process in Portugal’, by Miguel Rodrigues, Oliver Meza and Carmen Navarro — is published in Local Government Studies, 51(5), 993–1015. DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2024.2404104

Local Authorities engaging in housing delivery

24/08/202624/08/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Janice Morphet

The Secretary of State for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government frequently speaks to the media about the ways in which local authorities are providing more homes. She typically discusses two ways that she expects them to deliver – through the reform of the planning system and providing more social rent homes using Government Funding[1]. All councils use the planning system to negotiate affordable housing secured through planning agreements[2] and about half of local authorities retain and develop social rent homes using government subsidy. However, over five waves of research since 2017, we have found that, in 2026[3], 95% of local authorities are engaged in housing delivery, although much of this is not recognised by government.

How are local authorities increasing the number of homes they need in their areas? We look at this in detail in our research. Each round in 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2026 has used the same methods to find out what councils are doing. The first stage is to examine each council’s documents, reports, websites and records to provide detailed information about their levels of activity. These findings are published in a free report which is available now for 2026. Where the council has its own company to develop homes alongside other methods, like WV Living in Wolverhampton or Goram Homes in Bristol this is noted and weblinks provided. Some councils also have active Arm’s Length Management Companies (ALMOs), where the council retains ownership of its stock but some or all aspects of its housing management and delivery are undertaken independently. These ALMOs are also registered as housing associations and have separate assured access to government funding. While the number of ALMOs has been reducing, some that remain are very active including Cornwall, Derby City and the LB of Sutton.

Other councils enter into partnerships with private developers or housing associations. Some local authorities may enter into multiple arrangements of this type such as Oxford City Council, where the agreement will vary on each site. Others like Gateshead and Cambridge have developer agreements for several housing sites over a period. In some locations, such as LB Ealing, local authority estate regeneration is undertaken with both housing developers and housing associations. These relationships bring funding, expertise for councils and less risk for developers who will usually also be providing some market homes as part of the arrangements. However, when completed, despite local authorities often providing land, finance, advocacy and guarantees to third party funders, the homes are attributed to the developer and/or the housing association and not to the council.

Since 2022, housing construction costs have increased while government subsidies and restrictions on the use of receipts for properties sold under right to buy have limited local authority investment in housing delivery. Yet 82% of councils increased affordable housing in their areas. At the same time, homelessness has increased placing strain on wider council budgets. Local authorities have been looking for other solutions to provide more homes. In the 2026 survey we found 57% councils are acquiring homes to add to their stock. While these homes are not net additions, they can be used for different tenures and to relieve homelessness, overcrowding and multiple occupation. The funding for acquisitions has come from an Government easing of the use of RTB receipts such as Bassetlaw and through a Council’s General Fund rather than through the specific housing funding route. Some councils are managing acquisitions through setting a budget, numbers cap or location, others by seeking certain types of homes eg former RTB homes to enable future estate regeneration eg Ipswich or suitable for older people such as Bury. Where councils have been working with developers, they have been able to agree purchases of unsold new homes at different points in their construction – from design stage to completion including Birmingham City Council. Many councils are supporting the development of garden villages and urban extensions to provide additional homes including Sandwell, South Derbyshire and Cheshire East.

Some councils are engaged in a wide variety of activities to deliver homes including Stockport, Sheffield and most London Boroughs where the Mayor of London has the power to provide all with funding for 5-10 year social housing programmes. If the new Prime Minister wants local authorities to deliver more homes, then the expertise and skills built up in London Boroughs to deliver the Mayor’s programme and then applied to wider housing delivery should be available to every other local authority in the country.

Local authorities are providing more homes than popularly acknowledged. They should receive more recognition of what they are achieving and the model of funding for each local authority as available in London demonstrates that this approach has a significant role in expanding housing delivery across all tenures in England.

Janice Morphet is a Visiting Professor at University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning

The full report is here:

2026 desk survey report for publication Download

[1] Eg BBCR4 Today Programme 19^th August 2026

[2] Often known as s106 agreements from role of s106 of the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act in providing the legal means to secure this housing

[3] Local Authority Direct Provision of Housing in England: Round Five Research Report 1 – Local Authority Activity to Directly Support Housing Provision: Desk Survey Report. Janice Morphet and Ben Clifford UCL Bartlett School of Planning

Is inclusion the wrong goal for local politics?: why how women are included matters as much as whether they are included.

14/08/202629/07/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Tanya Jakimow

There are several self-evident truths when it comes to achieving gender equity in local government. Increasing women’s political participation is the first step and an unproblematic good. The focus must hence be on removing barriers to ensure elected bodies are representative of the broader population. When gender parity is achieved, political institutions will change, to become more gender sensitive, more deliberative, less conflictual.

More than thirty years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action towards gender equality, these axioms are looking shaky. Why have substantial increases in women’s participation as party members, candidates and local representatives not significantly challenged men’s political dominance? Inclusion is not enough, and sometimes, it may even be the problem.

Research from parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, shows that women are not absent or excluded from democratic life, they are active participants. Put differently, women make important contributions to local politics but in ways that are rendered invisible, unrewarded, taken for granted, and exploited. They are included, but on disadvantageous terms.

Challenging the political dominance of ‘majority’ men hence requires going beyond addressing women’s exclusion to examine the terms of their incorporation: the contributions women make to democratic life and electoral politics; what they receive in terms of political opportunity or power; against the costs and burdens of their participation.

Take for example Gayatri*, who has been a loyal party worker in Dehradun: a city in North India. For two decades she has invested time, energy and money to her party, organising ‘supporters’ to attend rallies, connecting residents to government entitlements and campaigning during elections.

These activities generate significant positive political sentiment towards her party, but are often invisible, under-recognised, rendered ‘outside of politics’, and hence unrewarded. When she requested the party ticket to contest municipal elections in a seat reserved for women, the party instead selected the wife of a new party member. Gayatri declared: “This is exploitation! I will never work for the party again”.

Or Ibu Dewi*, who was approached to be a candidate in Medan’s 2024 local elections in Indonesia. The party needed her to fulfil gender candidate electoral quotas that require every third position on the ballot to be a woman. For over three months, Dewi spoke to small groups of women, organised campaign events and went door-to-door, promoting the party, then the presidential campaign, and only then her own campaign.

Dewi expended her physical and emotional resources, and depleted her household savings. For her efforts, she received less than 300 votes in a ward of 20,000 voters. She was heartbroken, and furious: ‘All this effort for what? Only the parties benefited from my campaign.’

Even as elected representatives, women often do more for less recognition. Sarah* was elected as a councillor in Sydney, Australia, on the basis of her community advocacy. After her election, she got to work reopening a swimming pool: applying for the government grant, chairing the committee, and liaising with community to redesign the facilities.

When it came to cutting the ribbon however, it was the Mayor who took centre stage, inviting his political allies alongside him. His party claimed this achievement in their re-election campaign material. Across councils in my home state of New South Wales, community members, council staff and councillors reported women as being diligent, putting in the work but not receiving the credit. This under-recognition has electoral consequences; Sara was not re-elected.

My comparative ethnography of local politics in India, Indonesia and Australia shows that the terms of women’s incorporation at each stage of the ‘ladder of political recruitment’ is often inequitable, and at times exploitative: women do more, bear more burdens, for fewer returns, compared to men. This is the case not only for women, and not all women equally. Structural relations of power such as white supremacy, religious majoritarianism, caste, ableism also shape the terms of incorporation into local politics.

I am not suggesting that we should not strive to achieve gender parity, or better put, to ensure that people of all genders are present and have influence within political systems. Inclusion remains an important goal, as are removing the barriers to exclusion. But reforming electoral democracy only through inclusion is insufficient. There is an equal need to transform its underlying value-system towards genuine democratic practice in which everyone participates on equal terms.

*All names are pseudonyms

Tanya Jakimow is a professor of anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Tanya’s current research concerns the enduring problem of political over-/under-representation in local government in India, Indonesia, and more recently, Australia. https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/tanya-jakimow/

‘Fix the Environment, not women’: achieving gender equity in local politics

07/08/202629/07/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Tanya Jakimow

Women’s under-representation in local politics is a global problem, and no less the case in Australia. In my home state of New South Wales (NSW), women make up 39% of councillors in rural and regional councils, with more than a quarter of local government areas (LGAs) having fewer than 30% women. To achieve ‘gender parity’, the government funds programs to encourage and train women to contest elections and become a councillor. While having a demonstrable positive impact, the focus on ‘fixing women’ arguably detracts from the more pressing need to ‘fix the environment’.

On either side of the 2024 NSW local government elections, I conducted research to see what we could learn from rural and regional LGAs that either experienced a sharp increase in the number of women contesting and winning local elections in 2021 (from less than 25% to at least 50%), or that have had persistent men-dominated councils (more than 75% men) over at least 4 terms. The ten in-depth case studies entailing interviews with councillors, former councillors, candidates, community leaders and participant observation, yielded several lessons about what makes an environment more, or less, conducive to women’s local representation.

First, more women contested and won elections in LGAs where a ‘collective sentiment for change’ was cultivated. The 2021 election was a watershed; the Covid-19 pandemic and revelations of sexual violence in parliament sparked national conversations about the kinds of political leaders needed. In some LGAs, this national conversation became localised.

Residents looked at the record of men-dominated councils and initiated discussion about what the next council should look like. Councillors wrote newspaper editorials, organised events for women candidates, and tapped women on the shoulder to consider standing. All contributed to a shared sentiment that it was time for a more gender balanced council and a collective motivation by women to be part of that change.

Second, name-recognition was a key determinant of voter preferences in councils with persistent men-dominated councils; women performed well as candidates when they had opportunities to promote themselves as candidates. In councils where candidates communicated directly with voters through newspaper editorials, in door-to-door campaigning and especially candidate forums, women often impressed, and were elected in higher numbers

In contrast, a low-key electoral culture with limited campaigning can advantage men. Men are more likely to bear the name of established families in the area, to hold leadership positions in prominent organisations, and to be official heads of farms and large businesses. They also enjoy the premium of a masculine name in a low information context. In a system of compulsory voting, disinterested voters often vote “just because they know the bloke” (community member).

Third, a discourse that council should stick to the masculine-coded activities of ‘roads, rates and rubbish’, makes men the ‘natural leaders’. Australia has not been hit by austerity to the same extent as the United Kingdom, yet its local governments are cash strapped due to a poor revenue base and cost-shifting from state and federal governments. Hence the potency of a political message to ratepayers that we need to get ‘back to basics’, presenting feminine-coded services of childcare, libraries, community centres as a threat to fiscal responsibility, and hence women’s contributions to civic life as incommensurate with local government.

In contrast, in LGAs where councils have a strong relationship with community groups and sectors such as the arts and care, women see a natural progression from community leadership into council. Community events provide opportunities for women leaders to build relationships with councillors, which leads to informal mentorship and succession planning. Women majority or gender-equal councils thereby can persist over time.

These are just three of the ways that local conditions matter for the number of women contesting and winning elections. The research suggests alternative approaches to increasing women’s representation in local government beyond training women: initiating public debate about the qualities needed of councillors, enriching the information context, and ensuring strong relationship between councils and community groups.

The environment of course must be conducive for a diversity of women, including racialized minorities, First Nations, women with disability, and across age and income. The point is that the environment matters, not that there is a single set of conditions. Many of the first-time women candidates I spoke to had benefited from the training programs rolled out in the lead up to the election. While none said it was pivotal to their decision to contest, they felt more confident, and in some cases, the advice strengthened their campaigns. The question is not whether such programs are useful, but rather are they enough, and the best use of limited resources. Fixing the environment in which women become councillors, rather than treating the women as the ones who need to change, is an alternative approach worth considering.

How constrained is UK local government? International evidence on spending, taxation and autonomy

31/07/202630/07/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Paul Joyce, Jason Lowther, Philip Whiteman

What place does local government occupy within the UK system of public governance? International evidence suggests that UK local government combines three characteristics: comparatively low expenditure, small locally attributed tax revenue and medium-low institutional autonomy.

We now explore the evidence, draw conclusions, and clarify some of the assumptions and limitations of our conclusions.

Recently published OECD data indicate that United Kingdom local authorities account for expenditure equivalent to 9.3 per cent of GDP in 2023. This was below the EU27 average of 11.1 per cent of local government expenditure. Locally attributed tax revenue for the UK amounted to 1.7 per cent of GDP compared with an EU27 average of 3.7 per cent.

In this blog, “local government” refers to the OECD’s S.1313 local-government subsector. Depending on national institutional arrangements, this may include regional and other intermediate authorities as well as municipalities. See the note at the end of the blog for more on the OECD reporting of data.

The UK differs considerably in its expenditure and fiscal arrangements from some northern European countries, particularly Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, which have long been rated as having high scores on the published estimates of “Government Effectiveness” (see the World Bank published Worldwide Governance Indicators database). For the countries included in our analysis, local government tax revenue and expenditure are each moderately and positively associated with national government effectiveness (r=0.43 and r=0.44, respectively).

Three points should be kept in mind. First, these correlations establish association, not causation.

Second, “Government Effectiveness” is a national governance indicator that is based on perceptions of public services, the civil service, policy formulation and implementation, and government credibility. It is not a direct measure of local-government effectiveness. Its use in this analysis is on the grounds that local government is part of a multi-level governance system, interacts administratively and financially with central government, and may affect the effectiveness of the national governance system.

Third, the tax revenue data reported by the OECD do not measure only taxes over which subnational and local authorities have unilateral control and therefore are not appropriate for measuring tax autonomy. According to the OECD (2025), the reported tax revenue figure is partly own-source taxes and partly taxes shared with central government. We cannot immediately infer from these data how much discretion subnational and local governments possess over rates, tax bases, reliefs or use of revenue.

The results suggest that a relatively large and fiscally significant local-government sector is compatible with effective government, but they do not demonstrate that a large local fiscal role causes government effectiveness. Two findings stand out:

1. Countries with comparatively high local government expenditure or tax revenue generally have medium-high or high Government Effectiveness scores (see the World Bank’s databank).

2. Countries with low local government expenditure or tax revenue display a much wider range of government effectiveness scores. Türkiye, Mexico, and Colombia are at the lower end and Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland are at the upper end.

The relationship involving tax revenue data is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Scatterplot of government effectiveness and local government tax revenue, 2023

Note on tax data in Figure 1: For unitary countries we use the OECD’s main subnational figure, which corresponds to the S.1313 local-government subsector. For federal and quasi-federal countries, we use the separate “Local government alone” figures.

Using OECD data for 2023, we found a strong positive correlation (r=0.79) between local government expenditure and local government tax revenue. We hypothesise that countries with larger local government sectors provide the required finance partly through transfers of money from central government and partly through local taxes, fees and charges. Figure 2 illustrates the existence of a strong correlation between local government expenditure and tax revenue.

Figure 2. Scatterplot of local government expenditure and local government tax revenue, 2023

Note on tax and expenditure data in Figure 2: For unitary countries we use the OECD’s main subnational figure, which corresponds to the S.1313 local-government subsector. For federal and quasi-federal countries, we use the separate “Local government alone” figures.

Figure 2 also reveals the presence of a small group of countries in which locally attributed tax revenue is lower than would be expected based on the scale of their expenditure. This is evident visually: the countries lie noticeably below the general expenditure-taxation relationship implicit in the figure. As can be seen, this group includes Austria, Czechia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.

Table 1 presents two measures of the relationship between tax revenue and expenditure for these countries: the tax coverage ratio and the local government tax-expenditure gap. The tax coverage ratio is calculated here by dividing tax revenue by expenditure and multiplying by 100. The tax-expenditure gap is calculated by subtracting tax revenue from expenditure, with both expressed as percentages of GDP. It represents the scale of local government expenditure not matched by locally attributed tax revenue. It is not a measure of a budget deficit and should not be understood as consisting entirely of central government transfers.

Table 1 Local government expenditure and tax revenue in selected countries, 2023

Country	Local-government expenditure (% GDP)	Local-government tax revenue (% GDP)	Tax coverage ratio (%)	Local-government tax–expenditure gap (% of GDP)
Estonia	10.5	0.2	1.9	10.3
Czechia	12.2	0.4	3.3	11.8
Lithuania	9.2	0.3	3.3	8.9
Slovenia	8.9	0.5	5.6	8.4
Slovak Republic	8.5	0.5	5.9	8.0
Netherlands	12.7	1.2	9.4	11.5
Austria	9.2	1.3	14.1	7.9
United Kingdom	9.3	1.7	18.3	7.6

Source: calculated from OECD (2025) data. For Austria, the “local government alone” figure is used.

The fiscal picture shown in Table 1 raises a broad institutional question: does it reflect a conception of local government as a distinct sphere of democratic governance, or primarily as an administrative means of delivering responsibilities determined nationally? The existence of low tax coverage (e.g., less than 20%) and a relatively large tax-expenditure gap (e.g., over 7 % of GDP) do not imply a fiscal imbalance because local government receives funding through a variety of mechanisms. Nevertheless, low tax coverage and a large gap is consistent with a system in which local authorities have significant service responsibilities but comparatively small locally attributed tax revenue.

We stress that expenditure and tax data do not by themselves establish the extent of local government autonomy. For autonomy has constitutional, political, and administrative dimensions as well as fiscal dimensions.

Therefore, we need to examine autonomy more comprehensively. We turn to the Local Autonomy Index (LAI 2.0) (see Ladner, Keuffer and Bastianen, 2025). According to this index, UK local government belonged to the medium-low autonomy group during the period 2015 to 2020. Its LAI score was below both the EU and OECD mean scores. It was not the lowest on local autonomy: some countries, including Ireland, Russia and Belarus, recorded lower levels of local autonomy than the United Kingdom.

The UK received a comparatively low score on the LAI’s “non-interference” dimension. This suggests that UK local government is subject to significant forms of financial and administrative supervision.

In summary, we conclude that the expenditure, revenue and autonomy evidence suggests that UK local government occupies a comparatively constrained position within the wider system of public governance. Local authorities perform important public functions, but the locally attributed tax revenue is small, and their institutional autonomy is only medium-low by international standards. In England, statutory intervention in authorities judged by national government to be failing provides a particularly visible example of the vertical powers of supervision and control retained by central government.

These findings do not demonstrate that greater fiscal decentralisation would automatically improve public services or government effectiveness. They do, however, provide grounds for carefully designed and evaluated pilot reforms intended to strengthen local fiscal and strategic autonomy. Such experiments would need to assess not only their effects on local choice and accountability, but also their implications for service performance, fiscal sustainability and territorial equality.

Note

The OECD uses “subnational government” to encompass state, regional and local government. In unitary countries without a regional tier, this may consist primarily of local government, which is municipal councils and higher levels of local government. In the case of the OECD data on the UK, the devolved administrations of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are included in central government. Most of the countries in the OECD data are unitary countries, and so mostly we are talking about local government when looking at subnational data. The federal and quasi-federal countries included in this analysis are Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and Switzerland, for which local government data alone is also reported.

References

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2025) Subnational governments: Structure and finance. 2025 edition. Paris: OECD. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-issues/subnational-finance-and-investment/subnational-governments-infrastructure-finance-2025.pdf (Accessed: 21 July 2026).

Ladner, A., Keuffer, N. and Bastianen, A. (2025) ‘Local autonomy around the world: the updated and extended Local Autonomy Index (LAI 2.0)’, Regional & Federal Studies, 35(2), pp. 163–185. doi: 10.1080/13597566.2023.2267990.

World Bank (2026) Worldwide Governance Indicators. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators (Accessed: 29 July 2026).

Do female mayors make local government more transparent? Only when politics lets them

28/07/2026 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Bruna Ribeiro (University of Minho), Miguel Rodrigues (University of Minho) and Francisca Tejedo-Romero (University of Castilla-La Mancha)

Why do some municipalities open their books, publish their contracts and document their decisions online, while their neighbours – operating under exactly the same legal framework – remain opaque? Freedom of information laws set a floor, but the striking fact about local government transparency is how much variation survives above that floor. If the law were the whole story, all councils would look alike. They do not.

In our recent article in Local Government Studies, we explore one part of the answer that has attracted growing attention across Europe: who leads. Specifically, we ask whether female leadership changes how much information municipalities actively disclose to their citizens — and whether the political context in which women govern conditions that effect.

Why leadership and gender?

The theoretical case is well established. Research across countries has associated women’s political presence with lower tolerance of corruption, different risk preferences, and a stronger orientation towards accountability. Earlier work on Spanish municipalities found that women’s representation in local councils has a positive influence on transparency levels. But representation on the council and leadership of the executive are different things. Mayors set administrative priorities, control the machinery that produces (or withholds) information, and answer personally for what appears on the municipal website. If gender matters for transparency, the mayor’s office is where we would expect it to show.

Portugal offers an unusually good laboratory. Since 2013, the Municipal Transparency Index (MTI), produced by Transparency International Portugal, has scored all 308 municipalities from 0 to 100 on the information they make available through their official websites. This gives us a consistent, externally produced measure of active disclosure, in a system where women remain a small minority of mayors but where the 2006 Parity Law — recently strengthened from a 33% to a 40% candidate quota — has been steadily reshaping who enters local politics.

What we did

We linked each municipal election to the transparency performance of the government it produced: the mayors and councils elected in 2009 and 2013 were matched to the Municipal Transparency Index scores of 2013 and 2017, across all 308 municipalities. This temporal structure ensures that who governs strictly precedes what gets disclosed. We then tested whether the gender of the mayor is associated with transparency — on its own, and in interaction with two features of the political context: whether the mayor governs with an absolute majority, and whether they belong to a left-wing party. The models control for women’s presence in the council, financial autonomy, unemployment, turnout and population, and the results hold when we exclude Lisbon and Porto and under alternative specifications.

What we found

The headline result is not the one either optimists or sceptics might expect. Female mayors, on their own, have no statistically significant effect on municipal transparency. But the average conceals a striking conditional pattern. Without an absolute majority, female mayors are associated with transparency scores roughly 7.5 points lower on the 0–100 index than their male counterparts. Give them an absolute majority, and the association flips: the interaction adds around 10 points, turning the net effect positive — female-led municipalities with strong political backing outperform male-led ones. There is also suggestive (though weaker) evidence that belonging to a left-wing party partially offsets the negative baseline.

In other words, the question “do women govern more transparently?” is badly posed. The better question is: under what conditions can they? Women in Portuguese town halls are still rare — only about 7% of municipalities had a female mayor in the period we study — and those governing without a majority face weak institutional support that appears to hinder the implementation of transparency measures. Political strength provides the stability, resources and authority to translate leadership values into open governance; without it, being a pioneer is mostly an uphill struggle.

Why this matters beyond Portugal

Three implications travel well beyond the Portuguese case.

First, transparency policy is usually designed as if compliance were a purely administrative matter — build the portal, mandate the disclosure, audit the result. Our findings suggest that who is in office, and the political incentives they face, shape how far councils go beyond the legal minimum. Transparency is a political choice dressed up as an administrative one.

Second, the debate on gender quotas and parity laws tends to focus on descriptive representation — how many women get elected. Our evidence suggests that numbers are not enough. The mere presence of women in leadership does not, by itself, deliver more open government; what matters is whether they hold real power to act. Quotas should therefore go beyond numerical representation and be accompanied by the conditions for women to exercise actual influence — party support, resources, and genuine political authority. Putting women in office without power risks setting them up to underperform against expectations the literature itself created.

Third, for practitioners and transparency campaigners, the lesson is about where to aim. If disclosure responds to political context, then rankings and indices like Portugal’s Municipal Transparency Index are not just measurement tools — they are interventions, changing the reputational payoff of openness for the leaders most sensitive to it.

The bigger research picture

This article is part of a wider research agenda at the Research Centre in Political Science (CICP, University of Minho) on gender and local politics in Southern Europe. Companion studies have examined how women break the political glass ceiling at local level (Governance, 2025) and how voters respond to female candidates in local elections (South European Society and Politics, 2026). Together, they trace the full pipeline — from candidacy, through election, to what changes once women actually govern.

The transparency question sits at the end of that pipeline, and it may be the most consequential part: representation matters not only for who sits in the town hall, but for whether citizens can see what happens inside it.

Bruna Ribeiro recently completed her PhD in Administrative Sciences at the University of Minho (CICP). Miguel Rodrigues is Associate Professor with Habilitation at the School of Economics, Management and Political Science, University of Minho. Francisca Tejedo-Romero is based at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, University of Castilla-La Mancha.

The full article, “Transparency in local government: exploring the impact of female leadership and political context”, is available in Local Government Studies: https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2025.2612054

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The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham