Mergers between municipalities are voluntarily. If a proposed merger gains a majority in all the participating councils, the merger
goes through and if not, the municipalities continue as they were. We analyze municipal elections before and after the mergers that
took place between the 2004 and 2008 municipal elections. Between these two elections, there were 47 municipal mergers involving
130 municipalities. The number of municipalities in a given merger ranged from 2 to 10 municipalities. Between these elections, the
number of municipalities diminished from 432 to 348.