  Based on data sets provided by Statistics Netherlands and the International
Institute of Social History, we investigate the Dutch municipality merging
process and the survivability of municipalities over the period 1830-2019. We
examine the dynamics of the population and area per municipality and how their
distributions evolved during the researched period. We apply a Network Science
approach, where each node represents a municipality and the links represent the
geographical interconnections between adjacent municipalities via roads,
railways, bridges or tunnels which were available in each specific yearly
network instance. Over the researched period, we find that the distributions of
the logarithm of both the population and area size closely follow a normal and
a logistic distribution respectively. The tails of the population distributions
follow a power-law distribution, a phenomenon observed in community structures
of many real-world networks. The dynamics of the area distribution are mainly
determined by the merging process, while the population distribution is also
driven by the natural population growth and migration across the municipality
network. Finally, we propose a model of the Dutch Municipality Network that
captures population increase, population migration between municipalities and
the process of municipality merging. Our model allows for predictions of the
population and area distributions over time.
