Disentangling citizen participation and population size with a quasi-experimental survey

This pre-analysis plan outlines a quasi-experimental survey designed to disentangle the relationship between polity population size and citizens’ likelihood of participating in democratic decision-making. Building on the long-standing theoretical debate on how political scale affects democratic quality, the study examines whether and why citizens in smaller polities display higher levels of political participation. It does so by integrating three theoretical perspectives — marginal utility, institutional accessibility and social proximity — and by jointly testing them with six hypotheses for three main forms of democratic participation — electoral direct and deliberative.