Political participation and municipal population size: A meta-study

ABSTRACT

Do municipal amalgamations enforce or do they weaken (local) political participation? This is an important question considering a worldwide tendency for municipalities to merge. This question will be answered using a mixed-method approach based on a literature overview (meta-study) in general and additional quantitative (turnout figures, election studies) and qualitative (interviews) data regarding the situation in The Netherlands in particular. Political participation is consistently measured using indicators that measure behaviour (especially turnout figures) instead of perceptions and opinions such as trust or internal and external political efficacy. Local political participation seems to decrease with an increase in municipal population size.

KEYWORDS:

• Political participation
• municipal population size
• amalgamations
• The Netherlands
• local government

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Including within a meta-analysis studies on two different levels – individual and municipal – is a contested issue, however, since there are, as far as the author could establish, no theoretical reasons given in the literature, to argue for a different relationship between municipal size and local political participation depending on the level – individual or municipal – studied both levels are mentioned in Table 1.

2. Based on a binominal distribution with n as the number of studies and p = 0.5 as the success probability.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pepijn van Houwelingen

Pepijn van Houwelingen works as a researcher in the research group ‘Participation, Culture and Living Environment’ at The Netherlands Institute for Social Research. He studied Industrial Engineering and Management at Twente University and received his PhD from Hiroshima City University for his thesis ‘Social Capital in Japan’. He is involved in research concerning social cohesion and (political) participation.