Laure Athias et  Pascal Wicht, IDHEAP, University of Lausanne

Contracting for Government services: Does Culture Matter?

Abstract: Today, most countries have adopted some form of public-service delivery reforms. However, these institutions differ widely across countries – also with similar levels of economic development – and the differences have been persistent. While the literature has always considered economic and political factors, in this article we ask whether cultural differences may help to explain the differences in actually implemented reforms. Switzerland, as a plurilingual and pluricultural country constitutes a very rich laboratory in order to observe such an impact, with the so-called Roestigraben (the Swiss language border). In particular, we focus on the organizational choices made by Swiss municipalities for the provision of their local public services. We use a regression discontinuity design in order to measure the impact of the Swiss language border. We find substantially higher implication of the private sector in the provision of local public services among German-speaking language border municipalities compared with their French, Italian or Romansh-speaking adjacent municipalities.