We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
from Part III - Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2020
This concluding chapter pulls together the material of this book into a more synoptic account. We begin by clarifying the aims of our book, highlighting that our approach poses steep challenges but also offers important payoffs. We proceed by summarizing the findings presented in previous chapters, discussing the causality of scale effects and the dimensions along which scale matters. We then offer a tentative theoretical synthesis that ties together many of the themes introduced in previous chapters. Next, we evaluate the implications of scale for big topics like governance, democracy, and freedom, where we identify a series of recalcitrant trade-offs. These concern efficiency (preferences versus policies), political relationships (informal/personal versus formal/institutional), systems of rule (intensive versus extensive), models of popular rule (participatory versus competitive), power (individual versus collective), and freedom (where trade-offs are conditional on structural features of the landscape). In the final section, we discuss the relevance of scale for current policy debates, looking specifically at the effect of boundaries between polities, changes in electoral laws, levels of government in a polity, and suffrage rights.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
