What Makes Member States opt for Hybrid Implementation Structures When the Federal Policy Asks for It?

Public private partnership literature promotes hybrid implementation structures as a potential solution to deal with limited resources and high levels of implementation burden and complexity. Despite the growing relevance and promises of hybrid implementation structures, we lack systematic knowledge on what makes governments opt for the establishment of this type of implementation structure. We modify Sabatier and Mazmanian's (1980) seminal model of effective implementation to examine the determinants of policy compliance in the case of a distributive Swiss federal policy that aims at incentivizing hybrid service delivery in its subnational units, that is, the cantons. The Swiss New Regional Policy (NRP) disburses funds to foster peripheral regions and sets the output goal for the cantons to involve private actors as project managers. Analyzing a dataset of 977 implemented NRP projects at the cantonal level using Bayesian logistic multi‐level models, we find that opting for hybrid structures in implementation is not only (1) influenced by the willingness of the cantons to comply with the overall goals of the policy but (2) also by project costs and the amount of financial and personnel resources the cantons possess. This latter insight implies that hybrid implementation structures can be a valid alternative for traditional forms of implementation when governments do not have enough capacities to set up and run regional projects without the help of private actors.