Effects of amalgamation on turnout compared: Opening the box through an analysis in nine countries

Municipal mergers are a growing phenomenon in Western political systems, and they have been receiving increasing attention from the scholarly research. Nevertheless, despite a great flourishing of studies on municipal mergers and their impact on local democracy, evidence concerning the effective impact of municipal amalgamation on electoral participation remains mixed. Most literature finds a detrimental effect of enlarged size in consequence of amalgamation on electoral turnout in municipal elections. Other studies reveal instead null or even positive effects. This link is therefore something deserving more careful scrutiny. In particular, we argue that the inconsistency in the empirical findings might derive from the fact that previous researches have analyzed this relation on single case-studies only, thus conditioning the results to the specific municipal population structure of that country and neglecting the possible intervening effect of crucial country-level variables. The contribution of this article is therefore twofold. First, it lies in the construction of an original harmonized nine-country dataset of municipal amalgamations, which is then employed to investigate the size/turnout link in comparative perspective across several European countries in the last decades, thus allowing the extension of the variance of the municipal population and the effects of characteristics of the countries.