Hello,

I am working on political professionalization. Precisely on the effect of country size on political parties' gatekeeper function. I have built a dataset about the political background of parliamentarians. My main independent variable is “size of country” (population), and my dependent variable is “experience in the party executive” (a dummy variable).

Because of problems of data availability, I only have data about six European micro-states. I have run a logit regression, where the unit of observation is “members of parliament”, and my results show that (after controlling for other factors) the bigger a micro-state is, the higher the likelihood parliamentarians have had “executive experience” in their parties. The effect is statistically significant. I have done a panel study given that some parliamentarians repeat, and also introduced country dummies.

I know that in my regression I have only used extreme cases in my independent variable (very small size of countries), but could I conclude that “country size” matters “in general” for parliamentarians having executive experience? Or I cannot say anything about the effect of this independent variable in general, just for my micro-states?
I know that studying all the countries would be better, but this is not possible.
What do you think?

Thank you in advance,