Population and Politics

John Gerring is Professor of Government at University of Texas at Austin. He is co-editor of Strategies for Social Inquiry, a book series at Cambridge University Press, and serves as co-PI of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and the Global Leadership Project (GLP). Wouter Veenendaal is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. He is the author of Politics and Democracy in Microstates (2014) and Democracy in Small States (2018).

• Part I. Framework 1; 1. Scaling the Political World; 2 Approaches; Part II. Scale Effects; 3 Cohesion; 4 Representatives; 5 Representativeness; 6 Particularism; 7. Participation; 8. Contestation; 9. Institutionalized Succession; 10. Professionalism; 11. Concentration; 12, Intervention; 13.Power; 14. Civil Conflict; 15. Other Outcomes; Part III. Conclusions; 16. How Scale Matters.

The size of a polity is crucial to its politics. Political scientists have known this since Plato, but the impact of population size is complex because affects many political outcomes. Gerring and Veenendaal offer the authoritative account of the impact of scale by bringing together the results and ideas of a large and diverse literature with new empirical evidence on thirteen important aspects of how democracy thrives in small and large political communities. Søren Serritzlew, Aarhus University