The effects of territorial reforms on gender representation in local councils

When municipalities are amalgamated, the aim is most often to reap benefits related to ‘economies of scale’ without harming democratic indicators such as voter turnout and citizens’ political efficacy. While an extensive literature has studied these effects, no studies have examined how scaling up municipalities through amalgamations affects political representation. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by examining the scale effects on one of the most salient representation dimensions: the descriptive representation of gender. We use the Danish municipal reform of 2007, which allows us to apply a quasi-experimental design (239 municipalities were forced to amalgamate while a control group of 32 municipalities were unaffected). Moreover, it allows us to observe the effects in the longer run by including five electoral terms after the reform in the analysis. On the one hand, we may expect a positive effect of amalgamation on the share of woman elected to the councils, since larger municipalities tend to have relatively larger share of elected women than smaller municipalities. However, such an effect may be hindered—at least in the short run—by a reform-effect since a geographical reform will tend to have politicians and voters focusing heavily on geographical representation. The paper will disentangle these effects and conclude on what matters most to representativeness—the short-term reform effect or the long-term size effect.