In the early 1970s Robert Dahl and Edward Tufte published an important book called Size and Democracy (1973), the purpose of which was to reflect on the question if and to what extent democracy was related to country size. What are, the authors asked, the comparative advantages and disadvantages enjoyed by political systems of different size, and how large should a political system be to facilitate rational control by its citizens? The outcome of the analysis was, however, somewhat cloudy and less than convincing, and in the epilogue of the book, the authors emphasized how illusory their initial hope had been to find a definition or determination of the optimal democratic unit. Indeed, they concluded, democratic goals conflict, and no single unit or kind of unit can best serve these disparate goals.

This view remained unchallenged for some time. About 20 years after the Dahl-Tufte investigation, in 1992, the Swedish political scientist Axel Hadenius, published a path-breaking study called Democracy and Development. Summarizing in this book what the empirical research on the relation between size and democracy had demonstrated, Hadenius came up with a disappointing answer: “Not much, actually” (p. 125). He did, however, on the basis of his own research contribute the highly interesting observation that whereas large states are less democratic, microstates with populations of less than 100,000 have surprisingly high values for democracy. This observation set the tone for a subsequent line of inquiry into a paradox, which has still not been well understood. On the one hand, comparative research has suggested that the quality of democracy has declined in several countries, and many studies have found that a shift to personalized, informal, and non-institutionalized forms of politics has been an important factor behind this decline. In other words, research has identified a cause, as well as an effect. On the other hand, however, the same factors are found to be present, even markedly so, in small-sized countries, but there the factors apparently do not contribute to a decline in democracy. On the contrary, small states perform exceptionally well in various democracy rankings and listings. Why, several studies have asked, is it so? Why are small states better equipped than larger states to moderate the impact of informality and personalization?

By means of a thorough mapping of how domestic politics actually works in small states, a recent book by Jack Corbett and Wouter Veenendaal with the apposite title Democracy in Small States: Persisting against All Odds advances in a long stride toward a fuller, if not full, understanding of this paradox. The focus is on 39 states with populations of less than one million: the standard cutoff point in studies that compare small and large political systems. The democratic performances of the small states and others are measured by the Freedom House freedom rankings, much used in comparative research (although the authors have neglected to tell their readers which year is used as a platform for deciding the country size and freedom rating). Points of departure and the bulk of the empirical analysis are found in consecutive chapters, each devoted to dealing with one group or family of factors, envisaged as independent variables: democratization and economic development, democratization and cultural diversity, democratization and geography, democratization and constitutional design, democratization and political parties, and democratization and small size.

In terms of method and execution, Democracy in Small States stands apart for both its novelty and pioneering effort. The literature on small states and island states has so far made only sparse use of data that are collected by means of interviews and other similar techniques like participant observation; Corbett and Veenendaal, in contrast, draw on more than 250 interviews in 28 small countries over the last seven years. The authors spoke to politicians, public servants, consultants, journalists, academics, and others. This impressive fieldwork took the authors to geographically diverse sites: Corbett conducted 95 interviews with political actors in 11 small countries during the years 2011–14, and Veenendaal conducted 22 interviews in Malta in 2017 and 21 similar interviews in Suriname in 2018. The authors also visited Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, and many other places. It is of course only natural that the authors take pride in their empirical effort and feel entitled to announce that the number of interviews and countries covered is one of the great strengths of the book. Are they right? Well, yes and no. Yes, insofar as the interview materials bring liveliness and richness to the analyses and contribute to formulating sets of hypotheses on the various mechanisms through which smallness molds political behavior and political style. No, insofar as the preoccupation of the authors with elaborating qualitatively tuned interview responses tends to become a hindrance to developing tables aimed at conveying and summarizing broad results in the form of quantitative observation.

Corbett and Veenendaal understand and recognize that very little is learned about small entities by studying such entities alone: only comparisons between small and not small reveal the very characteristics of smallness. However, rather than comparing explicitly the practice of democracy in small states with larger ones, Corbett and Veenendaal are, in their own words, making explicit comparisons between small states as against implicit comparisons between smaller and larger states. This distinction between explicit and implicit comparisons is not fully explained in the text and comes close to being equivalent to a distinction between good and not so good comparisons. A better solution, perhaps, would have been to select randomly or by some systematic method or criterion a set of, for example, 30 or so large states to form a manageable group for purposes of systematic comparisons of large and small. One variant of such a strategy would have been the selection and study of any number of matched pairs; for example, countries that differ in terms of the crucial independent variable, such as size, but differ only a little or not at all in terms of other conceivable independent variables.

The book has a useful and balanced appendix on background data, designed to give readers an overview of the 39 states that are discussed in the book. Another appendix registers previous publications on small states by the two authors; some 30 entries over the last seven years testify to the intensity and diligence with which their project has been accomplished. A reference list runs more than 30 pages, each reporting 30 or so entries; the list registers practically everything worth reading and knowing about the study and organization of small state politics. All told, aforementioned criticisms notwithstanding, Democracy in Small States is a thorough, well-researched, highly interesting, and well-written book by two prominent scholars in the study of small states and islands. It is an obvious strength of the presentation that the authors are capable of summarizing and presenting ramified research findings in a concise and lucid manner.