Population and Politics : The Impact of Scale

While population affects nearly every aspect of politics, its impact has been strikingly under-researched. This book rectifies this omission by examining scale effects across a great variety of political dimensions, encompassing all levels of politics. The authors provide generalizable findings alongside detailed analyses of specific cases.

Every country, every subnational government, and every district has a designated population, and this has a bearing on politics in ways most citizens and policymakers are barely aware of. Population and Politics provides a comprehensive evaluation of the political implications stemming from the size of a political unit – on social cohesion, the number of representatives, overall representativeness, particularism (''pork''), citizen engagement and participation, political trust, electoral contestation, leadership succession, professionalism in government, power concentration in the central apparatus of the state, government intervention, civil conflict, and overall political power. A multimethod approach combines field research in small states and islands with cross-country and within-country data analysis. Population and Politics will be of interest to academics, policymakers, and anyone concerned with decentralization and multilevel governance.