I think you're looking at an effect instead of a cause. The main reason for the desire for a small government is not some inherent and absolute obsession with smallness, but because of the belief that larger governments are incapable of effectively utilizing their power (for reasons beyond just incompetence), are prone to inevitable abuses, and so forth. And that belief itself is not simply ideological, but based on history through most of all time.
Even with rehab versus punishment - it's the same story. The view isn't that punishment is inherently superior, but simply that rehabilitation is more of an ideal than a reality, and that typical appeals to places like Norway - a relatively homogenous and extremely wealthy microstate - don't necessarily translate well to large diverse societies, especially ones where there are substantial chunks of society that adopt cultures that glorify criminality.
My views on this subject are far too detailed to want to get into here, but I am confused at your choice to call Norway a "microstate". It's certainly on the smaller side of countries, but there are over 5 million residents and 300,000km2 in size. It's just a normal country.
"Microstate" is a term generally reserved for tiny geographical locations that can't even support their own defense.
It has a lower population than e.g. Wisconsin, in an area about twice as large. You could fit 61 Norways (in terms of population) into the US. I think there's a lot of things that work really well at smaller scale, but just don't work at larger scale. It's not really possible to say where 'smaller scale' ends because it's going to depend on factors other than just population, but I think Norway is comfortably far into the very small side of things in part because of population and in part because of those other factors.
A microstate is not just "one smaller than another" though, and nobody lists Norway as a microstate of Europe/the EU.
But with what you had meant - it means Norway is pretty comparable to a typical US state division or, in other words, something US states could be expected to implement successfully in their state prison systems if there weren't other reasons than scale they do things differently.
And you'll find that a number of states of a comparable makeup as Norway have comparable and even lower recidivism rates than Norway. Oregon is the lowest in the US, with a recidivism rate of 12%, contrasted against Norway's ~20%. [1] And that has nothing to do with punishment vs rehabilitation.
Similarly, Asia is another interesting counter-example to Norway. For instance the Chinese penal system makes the US look like a trip to Disney Land. Beatings, physical+psychological torture, and more are regular aspects of their prison system which is not only punitive but borderline sadistic. And their recidivism rate? One of the lowest in the world, around 8%. And perhaps even more important than the recidivism rate is their crime rate, which is also one of the lowest in the world.
[1] - https://usasymbol.com/rankings/crime/recidivism-rates-by-sta...
As a former resident of Oregon, I would strongly suggest that the low recidivism rate is likely due to Oregon’s far above average level of available social services compared to most other states.
I would also loosely suggest that social services should be considered part of the rehabilitation pipeline.
This got me wondering, because I find the topic interesting but haven't really dug deeply into it in a while, and it's so much easier to get data (especially foreign language) now a days thanks to LLMs. It turns out that there's one huge factor that most people don't consider. That is - what is recidivism? Definitions vary radically between areas, and that goes a long way towards explaining the difference.
So for instance in both Norway and Oregon somebody isn't considered a recidivant unless they are arrested, prosecuted, and receive a minimal standard of punishment. In locations where you see much higher rates of recidivism it's because they use a more intuitive definition - if somebody's convicted of a crime, then they are a recidivant. By contrast here [1] you can see Oregon's raw data. And about 50% of people released from prison will be convicted for another crime within 5 years. In Norway 55% will face criminal charges within 4 years, and 42% will be convicted again!
So the whole point about Norway having an exceptional recidivism rate comes down, in large part, to statistical definitions! It'd be interesting to dig more into China/etc and see if there's some similar 'nuance' there. It often seems that so many things that 'everybody knows' just end up wrong upon closer inspection.
[1] - https://www.oregon.gov/cjc/CJC%20Document%20Library/2018SACG...
[2] - https://www.ssb.no/sosiale-forhold-og-kriminalitet/artikler-...
I don't think there is a clear cause and effect (or even separation) of those two things. The early views/situations of those who made America are largely the same force which drove the desire for small government and vice versa. I.e. what you believe is ideal in reality is going to be based on the way you weigh things morally just as much as the way you weigh things is going to be based on what ideal is held.
There is, of course, more than one reason people hold the views they do, but I do believe things like rugged individualism & the Protestant work ethic definitely played a major role in why the majority of Americans hold the desires and fears about government they do - particularly in the aspect of these examples. Without those influences, I think what America has tried vs what it has feared would be a very different list today (which is not to say whether it'd've been more successful or not).
Did you know that you can be sentenced to life imprisonment in the UK for suggesting that the monarchy should be abolished? [1] That's quite progressive, since it used to be the death penalty. Now in reality you probably won't be, but that law is an echo, still ongoing, of the sort of systems everybody used to live under. That directly leads to ideals of a smaller government. So I don't think these sort of values we're speaking of are abstract or moralistic in nature.
It's also not just in the past. We continue to live in the era of mass domestic surveillance, Patriot Act, Snowden leaks, regular oppression for political views (see: pro-Gaza protests), two tier legal systems, and much more. All the while governments with vast resources plunge sizable chunks, verging on a majority of discretionary spending, into militarism flirting with WW3 and the viable end of humanity it would entail. And I'm not even going to get into the insanity that's going on, worldwide - including the West, with the treatment of political candidates and elections. Suffice to say that's also enough to make a lot of people quite concerned.
So again all of this makes one begin to think 'perhaps governments shouldn't have this much power or wealth' at a point that I imagine you would say is, itself, already relatively low. I think that should all be fairly reasonable, even if one might disagree at some point. But I'm not entirely sure what the comparable evidence for the alternative is.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/13/calling-abol...
Well, again, it's not that these things take place of each other it's that they influence each other. Taking the first example, America only exists because individuals went to settle and conquer new lands and then pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to defeat the tyranny of the monarchy. There is no way in which this can happen without these cultural traits in the same way there is no way it could have happened and not driven these cultural traits further. The other examples follow the same line.
That's not arguing small government is supposed to be good or bad, it's just saying what the American mindset considers important when judging things - which is on traits which align with its mindset over its history, not on whether or not the application of policy seems evenly distributed to all.
I'm not going to debate the history beyond observing that most people were fleeing persecution or seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Scarcely few set out to conquer anything. But I think the most important point is that now a days I think if you put just about anybody in the current state of America, you'd see a trend towards desiring smaller government.
The exact phrase 'smaller government' is triggering because it's been so politicized into being a left vs right concept, but when left leaning individuals seek to decrease the strength of ICE, decrease the rights/capacity/scope of law enforcement, limiting executive powers especially as related to war, and other such things they are themselves also directly appealing for a smaller government, in at least some ways.
I think this hypothesis (that 'anybody' would trend towards seeking smaller government) is even testable with things like Asian Americans. Many/most have roots from more social type societies, and predictably trend towards voting liberal in America as a result of such, to say nothing of historical issues. But they are leaning more and more conservative over time, to the point that at current trends they will likely be a majority conservative bloc within a few decades.
It's simply that once one sees what 'big government' amounts to in the US and the current state of the US government, it quickly leads many people to start running in the opposite direction. And once you start running from such, the opposite (self responsibility/reliability/etc) inevitably grows in proportion simply because there is no other choice.