The Effects of Urbanization and Size Over Local Elections

Electoral participation in municipal elections is a traditional topic in local politics studies. Municipal size (in terms of population) and degree of urbanization of a municipal unit have long been established as crucial factors accounting for variance in municipal turnout. However, quite often and for a long time, the two aspects have been used interchangeably. Recent empirical studies dealing with municipal electoral participation in a comparative European setting have pointed out that size and urbanization, while being correlated, are also two independent factors, which can be linked to differentiated effects on local turnout. Moreover, municipal size and urbanization have been shown to have relevant mutual interactive effects. Something that remains unexplored is the extent to which these two crucial local factors interact with other relevant predictors of municipal electoral participation measured at the country level. This is the gap in the scientific literature we address in this paper: whether national-level variables yielding significant effects over local turnout show the same effect regardless of the size and the degree of urbanization of the municipalities, or instead vary significantly according to the levels of size and urbanization. To investigate this crucial research question, we combine arguments originally developed in various scientific fields to derive specific and testable hypotheses that guide our empirical investigation. Such hypotheses are then tested against a cross-national dataset including 14 European countries we have assembled, for which we have separate measures for municipal turnout, municipal size, and degree of urbanization – alongside crucial economic and political factors measured at the national level. Overall, more than 65,000 municipalities are part of our dataset, which sufficiently covers the different portions of the European continent – namely, North, South, East, and West. In short, our findings reveal that both size and urbanization have statistically significant interactive effects on most of the basic national-level predictors of municipal electoral participation. This opens up promising strands of future research, as it unveils the complexities linking local- and country-level factors among each other and to local turnout, and it suggests the relevance of investigating even more in-depth these dynamics to make sense of a crucial aspect of contemporary politics as a whole.