Scaling democracy: How population size shapes citizen-politician relationships in European municipalities

European countries are increasingly decentralizing responsibilities from national to regional and municipal levels. This process is partially based on the belief that smaller communities foster more direct connections between citizens and politicians. Citizens can more easily approach politicians informally, have regular contact with them and share social networks with politicians via overlapping social roles. At the same time, parties and politicians in small communities are likely to be substantively similar in , which makes it less likely that the competitor’s program is an important factor for citizens’ vote choice. Building on these theories, this paper explores whether and how the size of municipalities in the Netherlands, Italy, Norway and Switzerland affects the relationship between citizens and politicians. Using a two-level comparative mixed-methods research design which includes participatory fieldwork observations and an original opinion survey in two municipalities per country, the findings reveal that while smaller municipalities encourage closer personal connections, they weaken the importance of political programs for citizen’s voting behavior, shifting the focus toward candidates' personal qualities instead. Smaller municipalities facilitate more frequent, informal contact with politicians, and citizens often share social networks with candidates, which can result in a clientelistic relationship between politicians and citizens. In contrast, in larger municipalities, citizens have less contact with politicians and are less likely to have personal ties with them, leading to a greater reliance on programmatic linkages for citizens’ vote choice. By conducting an in-depth study of specifically selected cases to test how population size affects citizens’ participation, the paper makes an innovative contribution to the literature on polity size and participation moving beyond existing large-N analyses on the link between population size and turnout.