When is small beautiful? Preferences for territorial fragmentation in regional government

The number of local and regional political entites in the Nordic region and Europe as a whole has steadily declined as units at the lower tiers of government have been merged in territorial reforms. Largely driven by a desire to improve the economic efficiency of local services, these reforms have tended to produce harmful effects for local democracy (see e.g., Lassen and Serritzlew, 2011) while achieving only limited improvements in economic efficiency (see e.g., Blom-Hansen et al., 2016). At the same time, democratisation reforms and local opposition have at times led to territorial fragmentation. While there is a large and growing literature on the causes and consequences of local government mergers (see Tavares, 2018 for a review), only a handful of studies have examined government splits, leading to calls for further research on this topic (Gend ́zwill et al., 2021). This paper examines preferences for regional government fragmentation using survey data collected in round 25 of the Norwegian Citizen Panel. We exploit the recent implementation and subsequent partial reversal of a large-scale regional government consolidation reform in Norway (’The Region Reform’) as the context for mapping and explaining preferences for regional government size and reform. The paper makes three main observations: 1) Recent experience of a consolidation reform and grievances about centre-periphery relations create demand for territorial fragmentation; 2) The perceived legitimacy of de-mergers are contingent on popular support, but inelastic to the preferences of elected regional officials; 3) Preferences for regional government size are consistent between mergers and de-mergers.