Mikrostater som företeelser och forskningsobjekt

Authors

• Dag Anckar

Abstract

A good fifth of the nations of the world are microstates, i.e. nations with a population of less than one million. However, these states are largely neglected in political research. For instance, for the 43 microstates that exist, the 1997 issue of International Political Science Abstracts provides a total of only 43 entries as against several hundred entries for the US and Germany. One main reason for this neglect is probably that microstates are regarded as unimportant and peripheral in terms of political impact and power. Such considerations are, however, external to scientific research and do not therefore merit attention. Internal considerations, on the other hand, justify a study of microstates in several cases. Besides being obvious choices in research efforts that employ country size as an independent or intervening variable, microstates are as a rule democratic regimes and may therefore as objects for research provide useful insights about the working of democracy in small-sized contexts. Also, the study of microstates makes the small-N-many-variables problem in comparative research more manageable. The number of units to study increases, and the ability to focus on essential variables becomes easier as many microstates are fairly similar in terms of control variables relating, for instance, to colonial history, social development and economic performance