The impact of public discourse on local representatives’ amalgamation preferences

Abstract

Municipal amalgamation reforms have taken place across democratic regimes since the 1960s. While much focus has been devoted to such reforms’ causes and effects, less attention has been on public discourse surrounding territorial consolidation. This study analyses how local issue salience may impact local representatives’ stance on amalgamating their municipality with one or more others. We focus on the 2014–2020 Norwegian Local Government Reform and utilise a broad survey of local representatives. The analyses show that no one issue (local democracy, local belonging, local employment, municipal services and municipal finances) was perceived to have dominated more than others during the reform. And though certain issues, once prominent in local debates, affect the propensity of local representatives to support amalgamation, this relationship tends to differ between the largest and smallest municipalities, and is also conditioned on localisation issues in the (potentially) new municipality.