Voter turnout in local elections – the impact of municipal amalgamations. A study of 28 cases in Iceland

Abstract

In this article I deal with analyzing whether amalgamations of municipalities do affect the voters‘ participation in elections when it comes to the new merged municipality. I use data from six different local government elections in Iceland; the elections 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018. I have looked at 28 different municipal amalgamations implemented under that period with 102 municipalities involved. The main question is if the voter turnout in these amalgamated municipalities changes, not least due to the impact of size on democracy. Municipal population size is considered to have a negative effect on democracy as stated in the classic work of Dahl and Tufte (1973). I use accessible data from Statistics Iceland (www.hagstofa.is). The main result is that there is no clear evidence that increased size of municipality through amalgamations ultimately leads to lower voter turnout. However, what is found is that voter turnout seems to go down in pure urban amalgamations and tends to go up in pure rural amalgamations. Communities that are structurally and culturally similar, seem to develop in the same direction looking at voter turnout.