Citizens’ evaluations of local democracy: Does the organization of local government make a difference?

Developments observed in many countries have served to place concerns about the quality of local democracy on the political and academic agendas of many observers and commentators in recent years. Declining electoral participation and party membership, difficulties in finding people who are willing to stand for elected political office, and indications of declining confidence and trust in political leaders are among the «symptoms» which have led many to raise critical questions about the health of local democracy and the undertaking of various efforts to find answers to how local democracy can be (re)vitalized. Norway is no exception in this regard. The Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities (KS) has made local democracy one of several prioritized areas of work in recent years, and recently commissioned a research project entitled “The secret of success – What characterizes municipalities with good democratic governance” with the intent of identifying conditions associated with positive citizen evaluations of local democratic governance. This paper is a spin-off of the project. Data from citizen surveys, a data base regarding characteristics of municipal service delivery and political organization, and official statistics are combined in an investigation of how citizen evaluations of conditions pertaining to the character of local democracy in the municipalities in which they live may vary due to differences in the local political-administrative context. Special emphasis is placed on municipal size, the demographic composition of the population, local system capacity and selected organizational initiatives at the local level and how these factors may be related to the aggregate evaluations of citizens living in the municipality in question. Results suggest that municipal size appears to have a statistically significant direct effect on citizen evaluations for two of the four dimensions of local democracy investigated (reliable and citizen-oriented or responsive governance) even after controlling for other factors, and a similar direct effect which approaches statistical significance for the two other dimensions (accountable and effective governance). The relationship is negative for all four dimensions: positive evaluations decline with increasing municipal size. A countervailing positive indirect effect of size is found however. This effect occurs insofar as larger municipalities exhibit a stronger tendency to adopt various information initiatives directed at their inhabitants and adoption of these initiatives have a systematically positive effect on citizens’ evaluations on all four dimensions. Municipal population size is also strongly related to measures of the demographic composition of the population and system capacity. But there is no evidence to suggest that demographic composition has an impact on citizens’ evaluations, and the effect of system capacity (as measured by a fiscal indicator) is mixed, being negative with respect to citizens’ evaluation of responsive governance and positive with respect to evaluations of effective governance. While not guaranteeing success for local authorities looking to improve their standing in the eyes of their residents, externally oriented information initiatives would seem to be worth considering.