Democratic innovations and the challenges of parliamentary oversight in a small state : is small really beautiful?

Abstract

It is commonly asserted that, when it comes to democratic politics, ‘small is beautiful’. This assumption harks back to antiquity and is employed by advocates of participatory and deliberative democracy to justify innovations that ‘scale-down’ decision-making in large states. Despite their obvious relevance, this literature fails to account for the democratic experience of the world's smallest states. In this article, I bring small states in to this discussion by examining recent democratic innovations in Tuvalu. Rather than ‘scalingdown’, in this instance Tuvalu is attempting to ‘scale-up’ its democratic institutions due tothe challenges posed by its small size. The lesson for advocates of decentralisation in large states and the orthodox view that ‘small is beautiful’ is a cautionary one: size matters but not necessarily in the manner democratic theory predicts or in ways that fulfil normative desires.