Small is Democratic ... or Just More Stable? Estimating the Effect of Population Size on Regime Stability and Survival

Following the seminal work by Dahl and Tufte (1973), several scholars (Anckar 2002; Corbett & Veenendaal 2018; Hadenius 1992; Ott 2000) have focused on the nexus between small country size and the prevalence of democracy. They argue that smaller states and societies provide a favorable environment for democracy to flourish. Unfortunately, these studies suffer from important limitations: Conceptually, they do not differentiate clearly between the emergence and survival of political regimes. Empirically, they tend to use dichotomous measures of democracy lumping all non-democracies together. Theoretically, some studies do not provide any in-depth explanations for the observed relations, while those that do limit analytical leverage by focusing exclusively on small state cases. In this study, I avoid these caveats and conduct survival analyses to model the effect of a country’s population size on the stability and survival of different regime types. I build on established concepts from the comparative democratization and regimes literature and on several data sets that cover the full variation in country size. This large-N study complements a recent article (Jugl 2020) in which I have developed (theoretically) and checked (qualitatively) the plausibility of the argument that three features typically ascribed to small states and societies (a feeling of vulnerability, social proximity, and institutional centralization) can not only explain the success of democracy but also the stability of authoritarian monarchies. The present study investigates whether and under which scope conditions this relation applies to different regime types; it contributes to the regimes literature by introducing an often-overlooked explanatory factor.