The Democratic Costs of Size: How Increasing Size Affects Citizen Satisfaction with Local Government

Abstract

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.

The Effects of Local Government Consolidation on Turnout: Evidence from a Quasi‐Experiment in Switzerland

“…Based on the state of research in the field (cf. Hansen 2013Hansen , 2015Lassen and Serritzlaw 2011;van Houwelingen 2017), we can claim that local mergers have a significant and rather troubling effect on the workings of local democracy and that this is independent of the specific institutional contexts, at least with regard to participation in local elections. Another point that needs to be addressed is the narrow design of our model.…”

“…Yet, these size-anddemocracy studies are often cross-sectional and thus do not provide strong evidence for causality. Note, for instance, that the observed effects might be due to the deliberate choices of citizens with particular propensities for living in small or large places (Hansen 2013;Lassen andSerritzlew 2011). Further, Oliver (2000: 371) demonstrates that the population size effect is largely due to the different character of social relations in small and large places, and not due to size per se: "As city size increases, people are less likely to know their neighbors and less likely to have social contacts that are geographically proximate.…”

Do mergers of large local governments reduce expenditures? – Evidence from Germany using the synthetic control method

“…The findings neither indicate decreases in total expenditures, nor in main expenditure categories. Given the substantial political costs of mergers, e.g., decreases in voter turnout (Fritz and Feld 2015), reductions in satisfaction with the local government (Hansen 2015), or common pool problems (Hinnerich 2009, Saarimaa andTukiainen 2015), net benefits of local government mergers seem to be at least very low. 22 The results of Ems (2016) indicate that political participation in Saxon district councils after the 2008 mergers suffers to some extent from increased time-consuming travel costs and complexity.…”

Do municipal mergers reduce costs? Evidence from a German federal state

“…Overall, our findings suggest that policy makers should make further use of the instrument of compulsory mergers to harvest scale effects and reduce especially administrative costs. On the other hand, one should not neglect the non-monetary costs of mergers, such as less local democracy and lower satisfaction of the local electorate (Lassen and Serritzlew, 2011a,b;Hansen, 2015). Such political costs might be lower with voluntary mergers as these likely result in less heterogeneous preferences within the merged municipalities and thus possibly lower voter frustration.…”