Citizens' Attitudes Towards Municipal Mergers – Individual‐level Explanations

Abstract

Municipal mergers are one of the most common reforms of jurisdiction size. While there are many studies of municipal mergers at the contextual level and some about how mergers affect opinions, studies of how individual citizens regard prospective mergers are still scarce. Thus, we study why citizens have different opinions on prospective mergers that are yet to be decided on. Specifically, the factors of main interest in this study are political efficacy and political trust since these relate to how citizens make sense of the complex and uncertain reforms that municipal mergers are. To study this, we disseminated a population survey (N = 6,686) in the Finnish municipality of Korsholm in 2018. At that time, a merger was planned with the neighboring city of Vaasa. This merger was surrounded by a very heated debate, mainly due to the fact that the merger would have affected the position of language minorities (a very salient issue in bilingual Finland) whereby the Swedish-speaking majority in Korsholm would become a minority in a merged new municipality. Using regression analyses where internal-and external political efficacy and political trust are tested as predictors of opinions on this proposed merger, with control for demographic, socioeconomic and social factors, the study demonstrates that external efficacy and political trust have independent significant impact on citizens' opinions on mergers. The findings also show that salient issues connected to mergers are important factors as are social factors.

When citizens met politicians – the process and outcomes of mixed deliberation according to participant status and gender

“…Flinders et al 2016;Geissel and Hess 2017). Moreover, as the deliberations were held over a highly contentious issue (Setälä et al 2020;Strandberg and Lindell 2020), the findings may not be generalizable beyond contentious issues.…”

Participatory processes and their outcomes: comparing assembly and popular vote decisions

“…The local political landscape in Switzerland has indeed been marked by the 'wave' of municipal mergers in developed countries (Baldersheim and Rose, 2010), reducing the number of local jurisdictions by a quarter since the end of the 1990s. These territorial reforms took place on a voluntary basisfollowing a bottom-up approach that has become more widespread since the new millennium (Strandberg and Lindell, 2020;Folkestad et al, 2021). In other words, municipalities themselves forged merger coalitions, with financial or administrative support provided by higher The assembly designs we study are so-called municipal assemblies.…”

Organising and Governing Governmental Institutions

“…All these questions have a distinctly geographic aspect, since minorities, either locally or regionally, become majorities according to change in geographic scale and sub-national administrative boundaries. In recent debates on munic-ipal and regional reforms, these issues have come to the forefront, especially in Finland and Norway, greatly hinged on whether a locally dominant language will survive as official or not with actual or projected municipal or county mergers (Strandberg & Lindell, 2020). However, these matters do not in general question the legitimacy of the political system at large.…”