Does diversity undermine the provision of local public services in European regions?

The next Europe of regions will profoundly differ from the one we have observed so far. In fact, the current challenge in most European countries and regions comes from migration which is making the populations of Europe more and more heterogeneous. This puts great pressure on the welfare states and particularly on the provision of local public services. This work investigates i) whether national diversity reduces the performance of local public services, and ii) to what extent this problem is moderated by regional autonomy. The empirical analysis is based on 167 European regions: we employ a composite indicator developed by The QOG Institute to measure the citizens’ perception about local public services, and the Regional Authority Index developed by Hooghe et al. (2008a) to measure the level of regional autonomy; we calculate a regional diversity index based on nationalities using census data. We find that diversity is negatively correlated with the performance of local public services, and regional autonomy only partially moderates this problem.