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Country Size and State Performance: How Size Affects Politics, Administration and Governance

  • This dissertation addresses the question how the size of a country affects the performance of ist political and administrative system. It advances the literature on small states by explicitly theorizing large states and empirically comparing countries of different sizes. Country size, operationalized as population size, is expected to be related to three clusters of country characteristics: First, a perception of vulnerability in small states vs. a lack of awareness for external threats in large states; second, social homogeneity and proximity in small states vs. heterogeneity and distance in large states; third, institutional centralization and concentration of power in small states vs. specialization and de-centralization in large states. The effect of country size and these three characteristic features on different aspects of procedural state performance is analyzed in three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 develops the argument that small country size favors the stability of political regimes, namely authoritarian monarchies. It iterates between theoretical reflections and the empirical analysis of different data: statistical data on population size and monarchic regime durability between 1946 and 2008; two most similar comparative cases of monarchic regimes, Egypt and Jordan; and supposedly deviant cases. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of population size on the effectiveness of national bureaucracies and expects a trade-off between economies and diseconomies of scale. It estimates multivariate OLS regression models and within-between random effects models for more than 150 countries. The analysis supports the hypothesized inverse U-shaped relation and finds that administrative effectiveness is highest, ceteris paribus, at medium levels of population size. Chapter 4 consists of a comparative case study of Germany and Luxembourg and investigates whether country size affected how the two states prepared for and reacted to the 2015 migration crisis. The analysis builds on newspaper articles and 20 expert interviews. It shows that Luxembourg’s small size favored identities and structures that allowed early crisis recognition and preparation as well as swift communication and coordination, whereas Germany’s large size led to attention biases that inhibited a quick reaction. In sum, the findings show that country size affects several aspects of state performance, which has important normative and practical implications.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Marlene Jugl
Advisor:Kai Wegrich, Ellen Immergut
Referee:Kai WegrichORCiD
Hertie Collections (Serial Number):Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School (05/2020)
Publication year:2020
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2020/02/25
Number pages:139
DOI:https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3680
Release Date:2020/12/16
Notes:
List of individual papers and pre-publications
This cumulative dissertation consists of an envelope (chapters 1 and 5) and three stand-alone research papers (chapters 2, 3 and 4). All three papers are single-authored.
Chapter 2 has been published with minor changes as:
Jugl, Marlene. 2020. “Country Size and the Survival of Authoritarian Monarchies: Developing a New Argument.” Democratization 27 (2): 283-301. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2019.1689960
Chapter 3 has been published as:
Jugl, Marlene. 2019. “Finding the Golden Mean: Country Size and the Performance of National Bureaucracies.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 29 (1): 118–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muy044
Notes:
Shelf mark: 2020D006 + 2020D006+1
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Licence of document (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - 4.0 International
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