The structure of government is one of the fundamental institutional traits of a political system. Some traits are hard to change. It usually takes a war to change the size of a nation, for example. Other traits, such as the number of tiers of government or the size of local or regional units, can be adjusted by central authorities. Most notably, local jurisdiction size has been increased in many developed countries during the past half-century. The talk will assess the effect of jurisdiction size on local democracy, the cost of government, and the cost of service production.
