Municipal Size and the Local-National Turnout Gap

Conventional wisdom has it that turnout rates at local elections are higher the smaller the municipality. This perceived relationship between turnout and municipal size is often included in the discussion of “size and democracy” as one of the arguments for smaller local political units. We discuss the presumed correlation between size and turnout along two dimensions. First of all, we will argue that it is not always the case that turnout goes down when municipal size goes up. While the voter’s ability to affect the selection of politicians is ceteris paribus larger in smaller municipalities the larger municipalities also have advantages in terms of being able to attract more important tasks and more political discretion vis-à-vis the state level. Secondly, and most importantly, we will argue that in order to evaluate the effect of municipal size on voters’ turnout at local elections we should not look at the absolute turnout rate but instead at the relative turnout rate (percentage of the electorate who votes at the local election minus the percentage of votes who votes at the national elections). By studying this local/national turnout gap we get a more precise picture of the voters’ inclination to vote at the local election (and not just their inclination to vote at any election). The analysis of the turnout gap requires data on the turnout rate for national elections calculated for each municipality. These data are not available in all countries so we will start out by including countries where such data exists, including Norway, Denmark, Poland and the Czech Republic. The paper aims to contribute to the on-going debate on the peculiarities of local elections in the multi-level political systems and refine the assumptions of second-order elections theory in its application to the study of local elections and voting.