Territorial Policy Agenda Revised

Abstract

This paper contributes to the ongoing debates on the relationship between municipality size and non-electoral citizen participation at the local level. We use the data from Lithuania as a case of strongly consolidated local government structures. We discuss three main points. First, our focus is on the limited question of how municipality size affects the intensity of citizens’ non-electoral participation in local decision-making, taking into account citizens’ participatory capacities, contact with municipal authorities and local agents, and municipal performance evaluations. Second, we consider the specificity of the territorial rescaling policy agenda in Lithuania, which is characterised by the long-term direction of the territorial consolidation process. Third, representative population survey data serve as a reasonable platform for testing the hypothesis on the relationship between different citizen participatory practices and municipality size. We assumed that citizen perceptions of municipal problem-solving capacities, local government accessibility, and assessment of local government performance could vary in municipalities of different size. We also expected to find significant correlation between citizen assessment of municipal performance, local government accessibility (varying by local contact activity), and citizen perception of municipal problem-solving capacities by producing statistical clusters of citizen participatory capacity types. The limitations of quantitative statistical approaches constitute a barrier to explaining the subjective perceptions of local citizens hold about their non-electoral participatory behaviour. Our conclusions demonstrate that the perceived potential of non-electoral democratic participation capacities is relatively limited in both small and large Lithuanian municipalities. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that citizens in large municipalities are more likely to establish local contact activity and have better perceptions of municipal problem-solving capacities than those in small municipalities.