Handbook of Governance in Small States

Lino Briguglio, Jessica Byron, Stefano Moncada, Wouter Veenendaal, Lino Briguglio, Jessica Byron, Stefano Moncada, Wouter Veenendaal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429590122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume covers a wide spectrum of governance issues relating to small states in a global context. While different definitions of governance are given in the chapters, most authors associate governance with the setting and implementation of policies aimed at managing a country or territory, and with the related institutional structures and interventions by political actors. Generally, good governance is associated with concepts such as policy effectiveness, accountability, transparency, control of corruption, encouragement of citizens' voice and gender equality—factors which are, in turn, linked with democracy. What emerges from the book is that the societies of small states are being re-shaped by various forces outside their control, including the globalization process and climate change, rendering their governance ever more complex. These problems are not solely faced by small states, but small country size tends to lead to a higher degree of exposure to external factors.

The chapters are grouped into four sections broadly covering political, environmental, social and economic governance. Governance is influenced by many, often intertwined, factors; the division of the book into four parts therefore does not detract from the fact that governance is multifaceted, and such division was based on the primary focus of each particular study and its main disciplinary background. The expert authors have, moreover, used a variety of approaches in the studies, the subject of small states being well suited to scholarly work from different disciplines using qualitative, quantitative and mixed approaches to arrive at useful conclusions.

Part 1

POLITICAL GOVERNANCE

1
Governing small states: A review

Dag Anckar

Introduction

In the early 1970s, in their landmark study Size and Democracy, Dahl and Tufte (1973: pp. 12–16) put forward a set of hypotheses to guide research on the importance and impact of differences in size between jurisdictions. The hypotheses were about various aspects of political systems, including the extent of citizen participation, the maintenance of security and social order, perceptions of loyalty and the common interest, the nature of rational behaviour, and the control of leaders. Later research has confirmed the validity of several of these and related assumptions. For instance, it has been shown that small states are more prone to be democratic than larger ones (Ott, 2000; Masala, 2004; Srebrnik, 2004; Anckar D., 2002b), and that size impacts on the degree of party fragmentation (Anckar C., 2000; Anckar D. and Anckar C., 2000). It has also been shown that size differences impact on regime choices (Anckar D., 2004b) and on electoral system choices (Lundell, 2005). In addition, the size of a jurisdiction matters in terms of the relationship between party systems and electoral systems and the relationship between the executive and the legislature (Rush, 2013: p. 185).

Dahl and Tufte were, in a manner of speaking, much before their time. They embarked on a maiden scientific project, but the systematic study of patterns and consequences of state size variation on governance and politics remains somewhat of a neglected area of study. One illustration out of many may be picked from an early textbook, Comparative Government and Politics, authored by Rod Hague and Martin Harrrop and published in its sixth edition in 2004. Considered by the Publishing House as “long established as the leading text in the field”, this authoritative and influential textbook listed in its index a total of 49 individual country entries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, etc.). However, of these entries only two, Iceland and Tuvalu, were mentioned, in passing, on features of politics and governance in small states. Admittedly, recent institutional and other developments within the political science communities have led to improvements in the study of small states politics. The adoption of island studies as a specific focus of inquiry, given that most island states are small (Royle, 2001), is an encouraging prospect for the study of small states politics (Baldacchino, 2006). Also, the launching of the newly established journal Small States and Territories¹ promotes interdisciplinary debates relating to challenges and opportunities of such jurisdictions (Baldacchino, 2018). Furthermore, ambitious and even innovative separate research initiatives on political governance in small states have turned up in recent years, including Corbett (2015), Corbett and Veenendaal (2018), Veenendaal (2018), Sarapuu (2010), Randma-Liiv and Sarapuu (2019), Wettenhall (2001), and Elkins and Ginsburg (2011). This chapter is a contribution to a field of inquiry which is still far from fully explored.

Comparative in terms of approach and methodology, this chapter undertakes the task of investigating to what extent small polities differ from larger ones in terms of governance patterns and strategies, and to what extent, therefore, it is really the case that size differences are noteworthy explanatory factors in the study of politics and government. In this study, a “small state” is defined as one with a population of 1 million persons or fewer. Since the topic of the chapter centres around the pursuit of political governance in small states, the title necessitates a brief introductory note on the relation between the concepts of “government” and “governance”. Much in line with prevailing doctrines, hazy as they may be, the concept of government is here reserved for references to the top level of special institutions for the making and enforcing of collective decisions, whereas “governance” denotes activities rather than institutions and refers to processes and qualities of governing, be they performed by governments or not (e.g. Johansson, 2002: pp. 21–34). Admittedly, this boundary line is not clearly generally adopted. The view that “governance” may stand for institutional properties is often found in acknowledged pieces of the comparative politics literature (e.g. Lane and Ersson, 1994: p. 153); indeed, The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, said to be the most comprehensive statistical measures of governance in terms of the variety of component indicators (Read, 2018: p. 394), cover “Government Effectiveness” as one dimension of governance.

Given the aim of this chapter is to investigate if and how small polities differ from larger ones, the selection of topics is guided here by relevant literature and by theoretical considerations that suggest that country size may, in specific cases, make a real difference. The chapter is organized in six sections. This introductory section is followed by a section on constitutional frameworks, including notes on the much debated issue of how smallness relates to democracy. There follow further sections on devolutions, legislatures and electoral systems, whereupon a few summarizing viewpoints bring the chapter to an end.

Constitutional frameworks

Several studies on the subject of small states emphasize that small size is conducive to democracy and that a significant feature of small jurisdictions is that they possess an ability to maintain democratic systems. While persuasive enough, this idea has been challenged by several noteworthy contributions to the small-state literature.

There are three considerations to be made on this matter. First, the 1 million population threshold may hide differences between differently sized small states. The Swedish scholar Axel Hadenius (1992, p. 125), investigating the relationship between size and insularity on the one hand and democracy on the other, discovered a link between small size and democracy, which was, however, strong only at a very low level of size. The connection between smallness and democracy, therefore, according to Hadenius, has a ceiling. Later statistical analyses have confirmed that the association between smallness and democracy indeed tends to weaken and even disappears when the threshold that defines smallness is raised from 500,000 to 1 million people (Anckar C., 2004: pp. 27–28; 2008: pp. 439–440). Follow-up analyses (Anckar D., 2010: pp. 5–7) supported this tendency, and showed that almost two thirds of small states with a population of up to half a million were democratic, while small states with a population of between half and one million exhibited a larger ratio of small states with democratic deficiency.

Second, studies of the roles, motivations and interests of small-state politicians as well as of particular small-state cases, have asserted that the political deliberations and processes in small environments may assume a distinctive character that is not always associated with ordinary conceptions of democracy (e.g. Corbett, 2015; Baldacchino, 2011; Veenendaal, 2015; 2018; Corbett and Veenendaal, 2017). The core of this argument is that a small state, even if democratic, is likely to be dominated by the few; the belief is that whereas small size promotes consistency in current power configurations, larger size, instead, promotes disintegration and a decomposition of the corresponding configurations. Or, in other words, the not so small polities reduce the likelihood that a single interest of one segment will dominate the whole system; in contrast, the small polity provides less opportunity for divergence of views on individual, group, and more general interests and goals. There is a problem, however, with this argumentation, namely that empirical research efforts often fail to seek contrasts: much too often the essential question of whether small really differs from large remains unanswered. Importantly, individual pieces of research do in fact contradict the view that small is different. Investigating electoral patterns of dominance in the small states of the world since the early 1970s, a study from some years ago concluded that small environments have indeed not been tyrannized by majorities, in that of 73 time periods during which state performances were observed, 42 were in a category of non-dominance (Anckar D., 2009). Interestingly, much of the variation between dominance and non-dominance could in this study be explained by variations in democracy, in that democratic states displayed non-dominance in the great majority of cases, whereas, in contrast, non-democratic states tended to being predominantly characterized by dominance. Furthermore, the use in many studies of the annual democracy surveys of the Freedom House organization or of similar devices for measuring levels of democracy is said to lead astray as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• The editors and contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Governance complexities in small states
• PART 1 POLITICAL GOVERNANCE
• PART 2 ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
• PART 3 SOCIAL GOVERNANCE
• PART 4 ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE
• Author Index
• Index