In 1994, five municipalities in the Fredrikstad district of Norway were merged into one municipality. The merger was approved by the national parliament even though a majority of the elected representatives in four out of five municipalities were against the merger and a majority of voters in referenda held in all five municipalities were likewise opposed to the merger. Using data from surveys conducted both before and after the merger, this chapter investigates three sets of hypotheses regarding the effects of the merger for how residents’ experienced and viewed their local municipality. Results provide insight into the potential consequences of involuntary mergers in other settings.

This chapter focuses on European mayors' notions of 'participatory' and 'representative' democracy. The authors explore to what extent and why European mayors share the notions of either 'participatory' or 'representative' democracy. The first result is that mayors support both notions more or less independently from each other and that these two notions are not two poles on one dimension of support for democracy. Second, the aggregated change in support for notions of participatory and representative democracy from 2003–2004 to 2015–2016 is limited. While mayors' notions of participatory democracy can be explained by their political ideology (left-right), their value orientations, their age, and the size of the municipality in which they serve, support for representative democracy is significantly related to mayors' value orientations, their gender, and whether or not they are party members. Taking additional macro-variables into account adds only little to the explanatory power of the models: Directly elected mayors show significantly less support for representative democracy than do other mayors. The same holds for mayors from former Soviet countries. However, the more citizens tend to trust political parties, the more their mayors tend to favour representative democracy.

Soft regulatory measures are argued to represent a useful alternative to hard regulation when policy-makers seek to deal with difficult problems. This article investigates the impact of a national guideline on climate and energy planning adopted in Norway, a soft regulatory instrument, which sought to encourage stronger local climate mitigation policies. To assess the effectiveness of this policy approach the research reported here investigated the impact of the guideline on the institutionalization of local climate policy activity in a set of Norwegian municipalities. Our findings indicate that for municipalities in the early phases of developing their climate mitigation policy the planning guideline contributed to legitimizing climate policy by linking it to other policy areas. For municipalities that had come further in developing their climate mitigation policy, however, the planning guideline made little difference. The findings indicate that even if soft policy instruments might be needed in a situation with complex regulatory issues, it is difficult to achieve results without the support of harder policy measures. This is particularly the case if local authorities face financial constraints and lack manpower in their work in developing effective climate mitigation policy. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

A lot has been written about normative and theoretical expectations of local government. In this chapter we give the word to the citizens. How satisfied are they with the way local democracy works in their municipality and what do they expect from their municipalities in terms of facilities and services? With the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Switzerland, our study covers four relatively well-off countries holding top positions in most overall assessments of democracy. We start with a general evaluation of the citizens’ satisfaction with their life in their municipality. In a next step we address the different ideas citizens have about the very essence of local democracy and local governance. The chapter ends with a discussion of varying degrees of satisfaction considering the different expectations.

How large should local governments be, and what are the implications of changing the scale of local governments for the quality of local democracy? These questions have stood at the centre of debates among scholars and public sector reformers alike from antiquity to the present. This monograph offers the first systematic cross-national investigation of these questions using empirical evidence gathered specifically for this purpose. Results provide insights that offer important touchstones for reform activities and academic research efforts in many countries.

Whereas widespread, responsible political involvement of competent citizens is often considered to be of paramount importance, the notion of democratic government is also associated with the legitimacy of government in the eyes of the public. An important aspect of this legitimacy relates to what we have discussed in the previous chapter, namely citizens' confidence in their elected representatives. In this chapter we focus on a second aspect of legitimacy: citizens' evaluations of the performance of municipal governments. Such evaluations pertain to what has been referred to as output legitimacy (Scharpf 1999). As was seen in Chapter 3, municipal governments are important for our respondents' daily lives. Indeed, with the exception of the Netherlands, municipal government is seen as even more important than national government. The importance of local government reflects the prominent role of municipalities in shaping local policies and the provision of local goods, facilities and services. Here we explore whether or not the size of municipalities has an impact on how satisfied citizens are about the way in which municipalities take care of their responsibilities. The population size of local governments has not been a prominent factor in modelling citizens' satisfaction with local government performance. This is perhaps not so surprising, in as much as many studies have been designed as case studies of one or only a few cities (see e.g. Benton & Daly 1992; Das et al. 1995; Van Ryzin 2004; Winter & Mouritzen 2001).

Competitive elections may be a necessary and – if for no other reason than their widespread use – a defining institution of modern democracy. Nevertheless, elections constitute a weak and, in the eyes of many, insufficient condition for a fuller realization of the democratic ideal for several reasons. From a developmental perspective participatory democratic theorists argue that democracy requires more than just intermittent involvement of the public in elections arranged to select political leaders. Benjamin Barber, for example, characterizes voting as the 'least significant act of citizenship in a democracy' (1984: 187). In Barber's view 'strong democracy' should imply continual, on-going involvement in a variety of political activities. Such a view is shared by others (e.g. Bachrach & Botwinick 1992; Berry et al. 1993; Fung 2004; Mansbridge 1980; Pateman 1970), the argument often resting on the idea that political participation is important not only as a means for influencing policy making, but every bit as much because it contributes to the development and self-realization of the individual, an idea that in various forms was put forward earlier by such thinkers as Rousseau, Mill and Dewey among others (Dewey 1961; Mill 1880; Rousseau 1996). Different forms of political involvement – voting as well as other activities – offer a 'school in democracy' which provide people with opportunities to learn the rules of democracy and to see more clearly interrelationships that are likely to exist between personal and collective interests.