Does municipal amalgamation affect trust in local politicians? The case of Norway
| Published date | 01 January 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/01925121231216426 |
| Author | Øystein Solvang,Jo Saglie,Marte Winsvold |
| Date | 01 January 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/01925121231216426
International Political Science Review
2025, Vol. 46(1) 57 –73
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/01925121231216426
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Does municipal amalgamation
affect trust in local politicians?
The case of Norway
Øystein Solvang
University of Tromsø – the Arctic University of Norway, Norway
Jo Saglie
Institute for Social Research, Norway
Marte Winsvold
Institute for Social Research, Norway
Abstract
When municipalities merge, they grow and, at the same time, experience a comprehensive reform process,
both of which may affect political trust. We explore whether and how the large-scale municipal amalgamation
reforms in Norway in the 2010s affected citizens’ trust in local and national elected officials and assemblies.
We examine the effects of both changes in size and reform processes using survey data on trust in local
and national political officials and assemblies before, and at the time, of the merger. In contrast to studies
conducted in Denmark, we do not find evidence that the Norwegian Local Government Reform had
significant negative effects on political trust. We argue that this difference between Denmark and Norway
can be explained by differences in how the two reform processes were implemented.
Keywords
Local government, reform, merger, trust, Norway
Introduction
Local government mergers involve two simultaneous but completely different processes. First, the
process of merging involves a comprehensive reorganisation of local government institutions.
Second, in merging, the sizes of the municipalities increase, in terms of both area and population.
Both factors can influence how citizens view their local government and democracy, particularly
Corresponding author:
Øystein Solvang, Department of Social Science, University of Tromsø – the Arctic University of Norway, PO Box 6050
Langnes, Tromsø, 9037, Norway.
Email: oystein.solvang@uit.no
1216426IPS0010.1177/01925121231216426International Political Science ReviewSolvang et al.
research-article2023
Original Research Article
58 International Political Science Review 46(1)
whether they choose to trust elected officials and decision-making bodies to act in their best inter-
ests. These potentially detrimental consequences are important to consider before deciding on local
government reforms, but, because the two processes occur simultaneously, differentiating their
impact poses a challenge.
We argue that this difference is important and propose a novel approach to deciphering these
interrelated effects by comparing the effects of reform on trust in national and local political actors.
Because national politicians are often instrumental in implementing local government reforms but
only local representation is affected by the change in size, this setup enables us to differentiate
between the two types of effects. Examining a recent large-scale local government reform in
Norway, we find no impact on trust in either category. We explain this lack of effect by the high
degree of bottom-up involvement in the Norwegian reform and argue that the negative effect on
trust associated with municipal mergers may be alleviated by comprehensive democratic participa-
tion at the local level.
With many local governments being merged, the adverse effects of making municipalities larger
through reforms has received considerable attention (see e.g. Bhatti and Hansen, 2019; Lassen and
Serritzlew, 2011; Swianiewicz et al., 2022). Among other consequences, reform has been found to
have a negative effect on citizens’ trust in politicians (Hansen, 2013). However, the causal mecha-
nisms connecting mergers to trust are not satisfactorily understood. Do mergers affect trust because
municipalities grow, or is it the process of reform itself that drives this effect? In this article, we
examine the relationships between size, reform and trust by comparing the effect of reform on trust
in local and national political institutions. The case we study is the Norwegian Local Government
Reform, a consolidation reform implemented between 2014 and 2020.
The optimal size of polities has been a recurring issue in political thought since Plato. In
political science, this debate has particularly focused on the size of local government units (see
e.g. Dahl and Tufte, 1973; Denters et al., 2014). The debate on optimal size concerns a wide
array of issues, such as economic efficiency, service quality, democratic efficacy and representa-
tion (Tavares, 2018). However, as Denters et al. (2014: 5) point out, with reference to Aristotle,
contemporary debates on municipal size tend to focus on two sets of criteria. First, there is sub-
stantive output: the capability to produce goods and services. Second, there is the democratic
quality of political procedures: citizens’ opportunity to assess their elected representatives and
participate in political decision-making. As described by Dahl and Tufte (1973), there may be a
trade-off between substantive and procedural values and, accordingly, no agreement on the opti-
mal municipal size. Several empirical studies have found such trade-offs (Tavares, 2018). The
trend in many countries has nevertheless been towards larger units, with the number of local
government units in Europe having declined by around 5% since the turn of the millennium
(Swianiewicz et al., 2022: 2).
The literature on the effects of reforms extensively leverages quasi-experimental research
designs, which are considered to be better than cross-sectional approaches (Gendźwiłł et al., 2021).
However, although the very process of contentious merger reform has been found to negatively
affect trust (Stein et al., 2023), and different types of merger reforms have been found to have dis-
tinct effects on voter turnout (Bolgherini and Paparo, 2023), the question of how to separate the
effect of size from the effect of the reform process has not received sufficient attention in the
literature.
In the first sections of this article, we review the literature on municipal size and political trust
and discuss how merger processes can affect local and national political trust. We then present the
case of Norway, before we turn to a description of our data, methods and analysis. The final two
sections discuss and summarise our findings.
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