IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/flgsxx/v48y2022i5p951-972.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Municipal size and local democracy: understanding the trade-off between participation and contestation in Latin America

Author

Listed:
  • Karel Kouba
  • Tomas Dosek

Abstract

Municipal size affects local democracy through two mechanisms – participation and contestation. By drawing on national-level theories of democracy, this article identifies a necessary tradeoff: decreasing municipal size maximises the participatory dimension of local democracy but reduces the level of contestation, which is similarly crucial for a healthy democracy. Employing multilevel models that simultaneously account for national-level and local-level influences, this proposition is tested using a large dataset of over 9,000 municipalities in 15 Latin American countries with competitive local elections. The evidence supports the operation of such a tradeoff in a regional comparison, and single-country analyses suggest that it is present with varying force in most countries of the region.

Suggested Citation

  • Karel Kouba & Tomas Dosek, 2022. "Municipal size and local democracy: understanding the trade-off between participation and contestation in Latin America," Local Government Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(5), pages 951-972, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:flgsxx:v:48:y:2022:i:5:p:951-972
    DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2021.2013208
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03003930.2021.2013208
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/03003930.2021.2013208?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:flgsxx:v:48:y:2022:i:5:p:951-972. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/flgs .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.