Population and Politics The Impact of Scale

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.

Part I. Framework 1; 1. Scaling the Political World; 2 Approaches; Part II. Scale Effects; 3 Cohesion; 4 Representatives; 5 Representativeness; 6 Particularism; 7. Participation; 8. Contestation; 9. Institutionalized Succession; 10. Professionalism; 11. Concentration; 12, Intervention; 13.Power; 14. Civil Conflict; 15. Other Outcomes; Part III. Conclusions; 16. How Scale Matters.

John Gerring is Professor of Government at University of Texas at Austin. He is co-editor of Strategies for Social Inquiry, a book series at Cambridge University Press, and serves as co-PI of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and the Global Leadership Project (GLP).
Wouter Veenendaal is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. He is the author of Politics and Democracy in Microstates (2014) and Democracy in Small States (2018).