Sammendrag
Studies of the municipal amalgamation reform in Denmark has demonstrated that political trust is vulnerable to changes in jurisdictional borders. In this paper, we explore the extent to which the large-scale municipal amalgamation reform in Norway of the 2010s affected citizens’ trust in local and national elected assemblies. Using data from before the merger and at the time of the merger, we compare the development of trust in local and national political assemblies in unmerged municipalities, ‘senior partners’ in merged municipalities, and ‘junior partners’ in merged municipalities. We regard the reform as a quasi-experiment and compare trends in merged and non-merged municipalities in order to examine the effect of size on political trust. Because trust in both the national government and local government could be affected by the reform, but only the local government changes in size, we compare trust in the two levels in order to separate the effects of size from the effects of reform in itself. Unlike results from studies of a similar reform in Denmark, we do not find evidence that the Local Government Reform has had significant negative effects on political trust. We argue that the likely reason for the difference between the Danish and Norwegian findings may be differences in the procedural aspects of the two reforms, but also that previous studies may not have been able to separate the effect of the reform process from the effect of size as such.
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