Lago Peñas, Ignacio2024-03-272024-03-272024Lago I. Making countries small: the nationalization of districts in the United States. Political Sci Res Methods. 2024;12(2):416-25. DOI: 10.1017/psrm.2023.62049-8470http://hdl.handle.net/10230/59598I rely on data from 31,754 electoral districts in the United States from 1834 until 2016 to explore how the nationalization of politics occurs within districts. I argue that in the early stages of the American democracy local concerns were more prominent in the distant districts from the capital city than in the nearby districts, and therefore the number of parties was greater in the former than in the latter. However, these differences vanished after the New Deal, when authority was centralized. Nationalization reduced the number of parties everywhere, but above all in the most distant district from Washington, D.C.application/pdfeng© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2023.6Country sizeDecentralizationDistrictNationalizationUnited Statesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess