“Is there anybody out there?” Political implications of a territorial integration

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Miguel Ângelo Vilela
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Meza, Oliver D.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/85284
• topic: Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão; Social Sciences

This article examines the effects of the amalgamation process of local governments on political participation. Electoral turnout is a topic that has received considerable attention from scholars, and the literature offers a generous amount of empirical studies: size of the population is one of the preeminent arguments to explain citizens’ political behaviors. The theoretical debate over the perfect fit of local government presents the confrontation of two opposite perspectives: an economic one focusing on scale and efficiency enhancements and a political perspective that, under the scope of the rational voter theory, discusses the quality of local democracy. This article addresses the traditional argument of size over political turnout, seizing Portugal’s rare case of territorial consolidation. It seeks to capture the effect of the process of amalgamation on the turnout levels. The article uses a quasi-experimental research design to compare turnout levels over time and among jurisdictions. The article makes a contribution by testing the rational voter theory under a dynamic context. The results show that the process of territorial integration has a negative impact on electoral turnout. Additionally, we found evidence that rural local governments were the ones where turnout was most affected by this process.