Public Budgeting in Times of Fiscal Stress: Advocates, Controllers, Priority-Setters and the Use of Private Suppliers in Danish Municipalities

This dissertation answers the following research question: How does fiscal stress affect local governments’ relationship with the national government as well as the local governments’ budget institutions, budget actors and budget output? And what drives the local governments’ use of private suppliers as a tool imagined to mitigate the consequences (for service standards) of fiscal stress?
This research question is fundamentally relevant from both a societal and scientific point of view. From a societal viewpoint, fiscal stress is imagined to be a main cause of changes in the distribution of power within a society and the overall conditions of public management. From a scientific perspective, the research question addresses issues which the literature has only modestly dealt
with before as well as topics that have been systematically studied before, but where the major part of studies dates back to the late 1970s and the 1980s.
The research question is answered by the study of Danish municipalities in a period with considerable spatial and temporal variation in fiscal stress. In total, 9 articles and a dissertation report shed light on the research question. These contributions cover the period from 2004 to 2015 with most data covering the period from 2007 to 2013. Internal validity is pursed by using a mixed methods design where 5 articles rest on statistical analyses of (almost) all localities, 3 articles rest on an in-depth, comparative historical case study of 5/6 selected municipalities and 1 article is based on a single-case study. Given this research design, the findings of the dissertation probably have the greatest potential for generalization with regard to local governments in other developed democracies.