The incidence of regional and metropolitan area intergovernmental relations is often explained in terms of efficiency gains for the participating jurisdictions (Stein 1990; Rusk 1993; Waste 1998; Katz 2000; Drier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2001). It is generally believed that local governments seeking to cut costs or provide a higher quality of services will look to other neighboring jurisdictions and private sector entities to partner with in the provision of goods and services. The economic rationale behind regional and intergovernmental cooperation is well understood. Not obvious are the political and professional motivations that influence decisions to cooperate and collaborate with neighboring jurisdictions.

We theorize that local officeholders view decisions to engage or not engage in intergovernmental cooperation as avenues for promoting their political careers. Two different theories that exist in the literature on intergovernmental cooperation lead to two distinctly different expectations about how intergovernmental cooperation affects electoral trajectories. In one view, local elected officials with ambition for higher office (especially higher political offices that represent a larger geography) may pursue intergovernmental relations as a way to promote themselves to a larger constituency. This view draws on the seminal work of Joseph Schlesinger on ambition theory. In a second view, intergovernmental cooperation reflects the goal of incumbents to protect themselves from electoral threats. In this view, a high incidence of intergovernmental cooperation leads to fewer, rather than more, challenges by quality challengers and is thus associated with fewer opportunities for incumbents at lower levels of government to realize their ambitions for higher office.