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

By Sune Welling Hansen. 2015

126 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c435cd4a9e4525afd4831aed7f0a28f057ff34a1

Citations in the corpus

• Do mergers of large local governments reduce expenditures? - Evidence from Germany using the synthetic control method (2017, unknown): “, decreases in voter turnout (Fritz and Feld 2015), reductions in satisfaction with the local government (Hansen 2015), or common pool problems (Hinnerich 2009, Saarimaa and Tukiainen 2015), net benefits of local government mergers seem to be at least very low.”