Municipal size and local democracy: understanding the trade-off between participation and contestation in Latin America

ABSTRACT

Municipal size affects local democracy through two mechanisms – participation and contestation. By drawing on national-level theories of democracy, this article identifies a necessary tradeoff: decreasing municipal size maximises the participatory dimension of local democracy but reduces the level of contestation, which is similarly crucial for a healthy democracy. Employing multilevel models that simultaneously account for national-level and local-level influences, this proposition is tested using a large dataset of over 9,000 municipalities in 15 Latin American countries with competitive local elections. The evidence supports the operation of such a tradeoff in a regional comparison, and single-country analyses suggest that it is present with varying force in most countries of the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Municipal size
• political competition
• participation
• Latin America
• local democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Brazil is the only country in the sample that has a two round run-off system in some cities (those with a population of over 200 thousand inhabitants). There were 92 such elections in 2016 municipal election. The runoff takes place only if none of the candidates obtains 50% plus one of the votes in the first round (57 cities in 2016). In these cases, we use the results from the first round for the sake of comparability.

2. In Peru, elections are held at two different local levels: provincial and district. For the sake of comparability we use provincial data, given that capital districts do not have their own mayor. In these cases, provincial mayors also act as district mayors.

3. Including dummy variable to control for Brazilian municipalities with runoff elections in Models III and IV does not alter the principal empirical results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Grantová agentura České republiky) under a grant for ‘Political competition and local democracy in comparative perspective’ (GA20-02098S).

Notes on contributors

Karel Kouba

Karel Kouba is an associate professor of political science at the University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. His research focuses on voting behaviour, electoral institutions and comparative politics of Latin American and European post-communist countries. He has published in journals such as Electoral Studies, Contemporary Politics, Government and Opposition, Comparative European Politics and Democratization.

Tomas Dosek

Tomas Dosek is currently Professor of Political Science at the Pontificia Univesidad Católitica del Perú. His research focuses on political parties and party systems, electoral reform and subnational politics in Latin America. He s published in journals such as Democratization, Studies in Comparative International Development, Latin American Politics and Society, Bulletin of Latin American Research and Regional and Federal Studies.