Why Small States Offer Important Answers to Large Questions

Abstract

Small states are conspicuously absent from mainstream comparative political science. There are a variety of reasons that underpin their marginal position in the established cannon, including their tiny populations, the fact that they are not considered "real" states, their supposedly insignificant role in international politics, and the absence of data. In this article, we argue that the discipline is much poorer for not seriously utilizing small states as case studies for larger questions. To illustrate this, we consider what the case study literature on politics in small states can offer to debates about democratization and decentralization, and we highlight that the inclusion of small states in various ways augments or challenges the existing literature in these fields. On this basis, we argue that far from being marginal or insignificant, the intellectual payoffs to the discipline of studying small states are potentially enormous, mainly because they have been overlooked for so long.

State size and democratization in hybrid regimes: the Chinese island cities of Macau and Hong Kong

“…This finding is consistent with those of Veenendaal and Corbett (2015) that whereas media are considered key avenues for forcing governments to be accountable in large states, press independence is harder to sustain in small states with different economies of scale. In Hong Kong, the daily newspapers are mostly government-affiliated, but the larger population can provide more financial and human resources to support online news media, which promotes diversified opinions.…”

“…Thus, hybrid regimes, being regimes with both democratic and authoritarian elements, fill a gap between two polarizing regime types. In recent years, there has been more discussion of the implications of state size for "non-democratic regimes" (Veenendaal & Corbett, 2015). This newfound interest is explained by the considerable number of hybrid and authoritarian regimes in the world.…”

Westminster in small states: comparing the Caribbean and pacific experience

“…(see Przeworski et al, 2000;Barro, 1999) -typically identified by modernization theory as necessary for sustained democratic transition (Veenendaal and Corbett 2015).…”

All the world is a stage: global governance, human resources, and the ‘problem’ of smallness

“…Interviews have limitations; they can be a platform for self-justification, perhaps more so for politicians, but they provide the most practical way of establishing how insiders interpret their roles within political institutions, and the more we conducted the more confidence we had in the emerging patterns (Xu and Weller 2009: 17). This perspective is also of particular value given its absence from the existing literature (Veenendaal and Corbett 2015).…”