Slovenia has 212 first-level administrative divisions, the most in the world. Even Switzerland is larger and only has 26 cantons. Why does Slovenia need so much first-level administrative divisions?
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That’s still a lot of municipalities. For example, Lithuania is a bit larger and only has 60.
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Municipalities aren't the same everywhere. In some, they comprise multiple villages and towns. But in other countries, like France for example, or Switzerland, almost EVERY village is a municipality.
New England in the US has counties but they are pretty much ceremonial. The first order divisions of the states are really towns. Massachusetts has 351.
so your saying that they just forgot or didn't formalize it?
We cant agree how to shape them, but there are 7ish unofficial ones that are mostly agree upon and are used for a lot of statistics
Look at the EU NUTS standard. Slovenia complies and there are larger divisions, but they only exist for EU statistical purposes. In Czechia we also have a ridiculous amount of low level municipalities, but our NUTS 3 divisions are actually utilized for self-governance.
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It's a small country.
Each first-level subdivision is an individual city or town.
They don't have counties or states or provinces.
So it's more like they skipped the first-level, and went right to second.
They haven't needed a middle layer of government between local and national
There have been attempts to create regional governing. So far unsuccessful. And it’s true each town is its own subdivision.
Problem we have is that in city’s and big towns resources are spent unevenly. and so more and more towns have their own government and receive money each year to spend as they will. Ergo no country government is willing to stop this madness since they are afraid they won’t get in office come next elections.
Fun fact. smallest “obcina” has like 500 people in it.
Hodoš has 355, to be precise.
Slovenia doesn't have any regions (federal states, cantons, departments... or whatever). These are municipalities and basically they aren't that small compared to countries like Austria or France. There are some excesses like 500 inhabitants though.
Slovenia has tried to implement regional structures for a while now but it's too much of a political hurdle.
It only has one level of subdivisions, it doesn't have things like counties (which we have in the UK)
The UK's first-level divisions are the countries, with counties beneath, and sometimes multiple layers of councils below that. In England, none of the divisions above council level do anything.
Portugal is the same, we go from Central government to 318 municipals, we don't have a middle man.
Plus two autonomous regions.
Historical regions don’t really make sense in Slovenia anymore (see the map). We haven’t fully agreed on the other types of regions yet. Right now, we mostly just have statistical regions and municipalities (what you posted)
Statistical regions
Slovenia is just not divided into anything else than municipalities. It has regions, but those are used for statistical purposes or to simply describe an area, but they are not administrative divisions.
The regions are leftoves of old administrative divisions, though: Koroška is part of historic Carinithia (the rest of it is in Austria and a tiny bit in Italy), štajerska is the southern half of Styria (the northern half is Austria), Prekmurje is the bit of Slovenia that used to be Hungarian (the rest was Austrian), Primorska is the Slovene portion of the Austrian Primorska (the rest is in Italy and Croatia), and finally there's Carniola/krain, which is divided into Gorenjska (upper Carniola), Dolenjska (lower Carniola) and Notranjska (inner Carniola).
I don't know how many other countries don't have an official level between municapality and country - Denmark did away with its amter but they did create 5 regions with very limited tasks (mainly healthcare). but Denmark reduced its number of municipalities to just 98.
Slovenia's local government system has just two levels (municipalities and local/village/quarter communities). This is a striking difference to most other countries, which have much more levels (also regions, districts etc etc.). The process of instituting regions is politically stuck because parties cannot agree how many regions we need and which functions should they get.
If we compare our number of municipalities to other countries, our number is still high, but not that unusual. For example, Austria has 2095, Switzerland has 2121, Hungary has 3152, Slovakia has 2891, Czechia has 6258 ... all these countries are bigger than Slovenia but their municipalities are (i think) proportionally much more numerous than in Slovenia. Croatia has 428, Bosnia has 143, Montenegro has 25, Serbia has 145 municipalities, North Macedonia has 80, so if you consider that Slovenia had 58 municipalities before the local government reform in 1994, we obviously fit in that category much better. Then we have also other countries, which are in this line: Estonia has 79, Lithuania has 60, Latvia has 42, Cyprus has 37. I found information that the Baltic countries reformed their local governments in order to reduce the number of municipalities, which were previously also more numerous (more than 100 for Estonia and Latvia for example).
The thing in Slovenia is just that it uses municipalities as first level subdivisions, as we have not agreed yet how our regions should look like. That's all.
In Italian we call it "il posto fisso"
More money to steal from local government /s
As a matter of fact, Slovenia is supposed to have regions as the first-level administrative divisions as provided by the constitution. However, regions have not yet been established by law since it’s a highly politically charged subject and in the last 30+ years none of the proposals have passed in the Slovenian parliament. Namely, lawmakers (and other interest groups) have not been able to agree on how many regions should there be, how to structure them/ what they would comprise etc. As mentioned it’s a (ridiculously) touchy subject due to historic regional pride as well as certain municipalities’ fear of loss of importance and say in local matters.
Consequently, the 212 municipalities being the first level-administrative divisions is not by way of design but rather due to the inability to come to an agreement on the establishment of regions - the actual first-level administrative divisions as foreseen by the constitution.
Ridiculous, I know.
In fact, before that, Slovenia was a first-level subdivision of Yugoslavia.
I suspect, that a very tiny bit of local dialects. It changes a lot from village to village. It might be easier for a delegate to know the standard Slovenian, and only one additional dialect when acting as liaison between head of state and local people.
Nah, we've got only 49 dialects, and they don't follow the municipality borders. And tbf, they are not that diverse usually.
According to the Slovene constitution, our first level subdivisions are supposed to be provinces (ideally 6-8 of them), however due to various political interests, lack of motivation and most importantly, not being able to decide on the number of them (along with their size, names, capitals and authorities), we still haven’t manage to establish them.
We actually came quite close a few years ago however by the time any sort of consensus was reached, a new government was formed which doesn’t have provinces on their priory list. So for at least a couple of years, we will be stuck with municipalities as first level subdivisions
There's a quiz on JetPunk about all first level divisions in Europe (also, there's one for the whole world).
Slovenia and Iceland are the bane of my existence on this one.
Because Slovenia has only 212 municipalities/cities, so they are first and last level divison administrative divisions at the same time.
Slovenia is a bantam country (pun intended 'cause it looks like a chicken), and those are municipialities, some hillariously small, so calling them "first-level-divisions" is just bad wording...
The US states of Connecticut and Rhode Island have only nominal counties. They don't have governments. So they effectively have the same arrangement where you go from state to municipality.
Most people in Slovenia think 212 Municipalities is way too much. Should be about 60, like it was in early 1990s. There are a lot of municipalities that are not even self sustaining. But lots of mayors and other public jobs for political friends.