Size and local democracy

Size and local democracy. Bas Denters, Michael Goldsmith, Andreas Ladner, Poul Erik Mouritzen and Lawrence E. Rose. Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2014. 462 pp. £105.00 (hardback).How large should local governments be? This the first sentence in the introduction (p.3) to the Size and local democracy book by five well-established experts in local government studies. But it also the pivotal question that has exercised minds of scholars and experts from old ages to the present. Many countries have implemented local government reforms in last few decades trying to find best answer to this basic question, resulting in more or less substantial changes in the population size of local government units; either in the direction of small units of only few hundreds inhabitants or large behemoths of several tens or even hundreds of thousands inhabitants. Territorial reform has the nasty habit of being the most important aspect of any local government reform process, and typically accompanied by heated debates about the effectiveness, desirability and rationality of small- versus large-scale local government units. Such debates are by no means recent occurrence, but definite answer to the basic question still very eluding one.Recent political debates about the merits of the amalgamation reforms and the academic debate about the questions is small really so beautiful and is big really so ugly and deriving point of the most recent comprehensive study by group of five scholars, all senior researchers of local government reform and devolution processes. Determining the optimum size of local government units complicating process that generates need for large amount of empirical evidence regarding the actual effects of size on relevant aspects of democratic governance. Authors set central question what the effect of size on the democratic quality of municipal government? As size has many possible dimensions (population, geography, density, etc.), authors concentrate on population size, seeking the answer to the research question on the basis of empirical analyses of conditions existing in 234 municipalities found in four countries - Switzerland, Norway, Denmark and Netherlands. Authors begin their analysis with the precise definition of the aspects of democratic government trying to clarify how these aspects may be related to size. In the introductory chapter authors are distinguishing between two fundamentally different positions in the debate. On the one side there the Lovely Lilliput camp of scholars, who hold the view that increasing the size of political units likely to have essentially negative effects on the democratic quality of local political life. …