The article examines the relationship between local government size and satisfaction with the input side and output side of local government. The literature on the relationship between size and satisfaction is extensive, but studies typically focus on structural differences rather than structural change, using traditional cross-sectional methods. The article seeks to remedy this by studying recent municipal mergers in Denmark as a quasi-experiment, using a unique data set consisting of a repeated and a cross-sectional survey of Danish citizens (combined with register data on the municipalities).The article finds that increases in population size have a negative, small to moderately sized effect on citizen satisfaction on both the input and the output side of local government. This implies that although local government consolidations are often motivated on economic grounds, they also have consequences for citizen satisfaction with local government.

This article examines the relationship between polity size and political trust in local government for which two schools of thought offer opposing expectations. The theoretical disagreement has received considerable attention and this article contributes with a dynamic perspective of how changes in polity size affect changes in citizens' political trust on the input-side of local government.The case examined is the recent municipal mergers in Denmark which were implemented on 1 January 2007. The article reports an analysis of a panel based on a repeated survey of Danish citizens using an untreated control group design with pre-test and post-test.A quasi-experimental difference-in-difference identification strategy is used to obtain the effect of municipal size on local political trust. The results show that changes in municipal size negatively affect local political trust, which is consistent with the expectation from the political economy theory that political trust tends to decrease with the size of the polity.

Improved fiscal management is a frequent justification for promoting boundary consolidations. However, whether or not this is actually the case is rarely placed under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Hence, this article investigates if fiscal outcomes are improved when municipalities are merged. The basic argument is that the conceptualisation of fiscal management in political science is often too narrow as it focuses on the budget and pays hardly any attention to balances in the final accounts and debts – elements of management which are central to policy making. On this background, the causal relationship between municipal mergers and fiscal outcomes is analysed. Measured on the balance between revenues and expenses, liquid assets and debts, municipal mergers improve the fiscal outcomes of the municipalities in a five‐year perspective, although the pre‐reform effects tend to be negative. For liquidity and debt, however, the improvement only entails re‐establishing the levels prior to the reform. The testing ground is the recent mergers of Danish municipalities, which, it is argued, constitute a quasi‐experiment. This forms the basis of a Difference‐in‐Difference design, allowing the alleviation of endogeneity problems and enabling causal inference. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Danish municipalities in the period 2003–11.

Being on the winning or the losing side in elections has important consequences for voters’ perceptions of democracy. This article contributes to the existing literature by showing that being on the losing side has persistent effects over a surprisingly long time. Based on a dataset that measures voters’ satisfaction with democracy three years after elections were held, it first shows that losers are significantly more dissatisfied with democracy than winners on both input and output side measures of perceptions of democracy. Furthermore, the article shows that turning from winning to losing has significant negative effects on voters’ satisfaction, and that this finding is robust across a number of different specifications. These results are remarkable given that the data used is from Denmark – a country that constitutes a least‐likely case for finding effects of being on the winning or the losing side.

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