Abstract
The final empirical chapter of this book presents a comparative study of European countries to assess the general propositions discussed in Chap. 6. The number of countries included in the analyses varies depending on data availability on both municipal amalgamation reforms and the relevant explanatory factors. The first section of the chapter compares and contrasts the evolution in the number of local governments in selected European countries and the developments of the Welfare State, urbanization and economic growth in the past century and a half. The second section emphasizes the developmental comparison design of this study by focusing on data comparing all European countries over time to assess patterns of convergence, divergence and diffusion of amalgamation reforms across local government systems.
Repetition is a form of change.
—Brian Eno
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Notes
- 1.
The 10 countries for which I was able to gather data for the yearly number of municipalities in the past 100 years are Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland. Portugal also has a long time series available but no municipal amalgamation reforms in the past 100 years, so it was excluded from the analysis.
- 2.
Depending on the number of data points available, four groups of countries were analyzed: 1850–2020: Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland; 1920–2020: Finland, Ireland, Poland, Romania, Turkey and Spain; 1950–2020: Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Luxembourg and Slovakia; and 1990–2020: Albania, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, North Macedonia and Ukraine.
- 3.
Similar patterns are visible for urbanization rates for which data is available starting in the 1960s.
- 4.
If one considers the amalgamation of sub-municipal units of local governments in 2013, then convergence is also visible.
- 5.
The Danish reform is a landmark, not only due to its large-scale and highly structured approach to change, but also, and perhaps most notably, due to the significant number of empirical studies, many of them using highly sophisticated methods, produced by Danish scholars.
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Tavares, A. (2024). Taking Time and Space Seriously in the Study of Amalgamation Reforms: Causal Inferences Based on Cross-Country Analyses. In: Municipal Amalgamation Reforms. Palgrave Studies in Sub-National Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54736-2_7
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