Scale and Regionalism

A major but little discussed issue brought into focus by the Pluralist Commonwealth model is the relationship between scale and democracy. Although there have been some earlier studies of this by leading political scientists in the 1930s, and also in the postwar period, work on geographic scale has become far more sophisticated in economic studies in recent years.  Several studies also suggest economic processes that lead in many cases to the break up or devolution of very large-scale systems. New directions in the application of such work also appear to be converging with political developments moving towards scale reduction in many countries.
For more on regionalism and scale, and their relationship to the Pluralist Commonwealth, see Chapter 5 and Chapter 14 of American Beyond Capitalism.
We rarely realize how very large in scale the United States is; Germany, for instance, is smaller in scale than a state like Montana; France is smaller than Texas. A critical question is whether democratic practices can be managed effectively and in anything like a participatory fashion in very, very large-scale systems. James Madison, for one, judged this to be impossible. Although Madison is usually regarded as having urged the importance of larger scale systems, what he actually urged was a system of “mean” (middle-range) scale. In letters to Jefferson—at a time when the United States constituted a handful of colonies along the Eastern seaboard—he argued that if the system were to get too big, it would lead to tyranny as those at the center would be able to divide and conquer a population spread out throughout a continent. 
The question of scale has also become a matter of great interest around the world in recent years. Indeed, an intense exploration of regionalist constitutional changes has been underway for a number of decades in Britain and in nations as diverse as France, China, Italy, Indonesia, Canada and Russia.  
The Pluralist Commonwealth model takes seriously issues of scale and longer-term regional devolution—not simply because the United States is already a very, very large country (“a monster country” in the words of George F. Kennan) but also because it is all but certain to get much, much bigger in economic and population terms as time goes on. If a continent is too big to manage effectively in participatory democratic fashion, and if most states are too small economically, the intermediate unit we call a “region” becomes the logical focal point for future constitutional re-organization. And, accordingly, the region has become a focal point for study in the Pluralist Commonwealth model as well.

More work on regionalism and scale