1 - Scaling the Political World

Summary

This chapter explores differences of scale as manifested in political communities around the world. The first section of this chapter takes stock of scale differences across a variety of political units, highlighting the extraordinary demographic variation on display across nation-states, municipalities, and electoral districts. Next, we demonstrate the extreme skewness that characterizes most differences of scale. In the third section, we examine differences of scale across different organizational types, showing that political communities often contain greater size differences than other sorts of organizations. In the final section, we show that size affects our choice of subjects, with larger communities garnering the lion’s share of attention from academics and (we assume) the popular press. We highlight that this problem of knowledge bias is troublesome, not only because small units in combination contain a good number of people, but especially because our knowledge of the world tends to be based on highly unrepresentative samples.