We examine how one's adult political participation is affected by having social ties to a politician during adolescence. Specifically, we estimate the long-term effect of having had a classmate during upper secondary school whose parent was running for office on future voter turnout and the likelihood of running for and winning political office. We use unique Swedish population-wide administrative data and find that students in school classes with a larger number of politically active parents are more politically active as adults, both in terms of voting and political candidacy. Our results suggest that the effect of vertical social ties is predominantly mediated by indirect links between the politician and the student via the children of politicians. Moreover, we show that the strength of these mobilizing effects depends on the individual's basic predisposition to engage in different types of political activities.
What is the effect of membership in civil associations on political participation? Membership has been linked to providing social capital and personal networks, which in turn help citizens more easily navigate politics. Yet this link is empirically complex, since politically interested individuals self-select into networks and associations. This research note addresses the impact of membership on different forms of political participation using a panel survey from Sweden that distinguishes between passive and active membership in various types of associations. The baseline results reaffirm a strong association between membership and political participation. The survey's panel dimension is exploited to reveal that earlier scholarship has likely overstated the robustness of membership's participatory effects. Rather, the remaining impact of association membership in the panel specification is mainly driven by types of associations for which the highest degree of selection behaviour is expected.
We investigate the intergenerational transmission of political-party affiliation within families with at least two politicians. We use Swedish registry data that covers all nominated politicians for the years 1982 to 2014, as well as their family ties. First, we demonstrate there is a strong link between individuals and their parents concerning party affiliation. We also find that this intergenerational transmission persists over generations and across siblings. Our second aim is to investigate the mechanisms behind this result, which we do by first discussing two hypotheses: the one concerns a socialization pathway, the other a materialistic one. We then bring these hypotheses to the data, and we find that the socialization pathway matters more for intergenerational transmission.
We develop a general approach to measuring electoral competitiveness for parties and governments, which is distinct from existing approaches in two ways. First, it allows us to estimate the actual probability of re-electing the incumbent into office, which lies closer to the theoretical concept of interest than most widely used proxies. Second, it incorporates both pre-electoral competitiveness—that is, the uncertainty about the outcome of the upcoming election—and post-electoral competitiveness—that is, the uncertainty concerning who will form the government given a certain election result. The approach can be applied to, and compared across, a multitude of institutional settings and is particularly advantageous in analyses of multiparty democracies. To demonstrate its full potential, we first apply the approach on 1,700 local government elections in Sweden. Three advantages over existing approaches are documented: Our election probability measure shows substantial variation over the election cycle, it can be accurately measured for a single party as well as a government, and it is more capable of predicting re-election into office than any previous measure of electoral competitiveness. A second application on 400 national elections in 34 democracies shows that the approach also works well in a more challenging cross-national setting.
Immigrants are underrepresented in most democratic parliaments. To explain the immigrant–native representation gap, existing research emphasizes party gatekeepers and structural conditions. But a more complete account must consider the possibility that the representation gap begins at the supply stage. Are immigrants simply less interested in elected office? To test this explanation, we carried out an innovative case–control survey in Sweden. We surveyed elected politicians, candidates for local office, and residents who have not run; stratified these samples by immigrant status; and linked all respondents to local political opportunity structures. We find that differences in political ambition, interest, and efficacy do not help explain immigrants' underrepresentation. Instead, the major hurdles lie in securing a candidate nomination and being placed on an electable list position. We conclude that there is a sufficient supply of potential immigrant candidates, but immigrants' ambition is thwarted by political elites.
This thesis contributes to the public finance literature concerned with fiscal sustainability, and consists of an introduction and four stand-alone essays. The first three essays analyse the reasons why governments accumulate large levels of debt. In the first essay, I find that parties that implement fiscal consolidations are punished by the voters in the following election. However, there does not appear to be a rewarding effect for governments that implement fiscal expansions. The second essay, which is co-authored with Rafael Ahlskog, shows how voter opposition to fiscal consolidation is shaped by moral considerations and feelings of personal responsibility. More precisely, we argue that voters are more likely to refuse fiscal consolidation when they do not feel responsible for the public debt. The third essay argues that misperceptions about the business cycle would have caused fiscal problems even if policy-making was conducted by independent experts. According to my estimates, biased projections have weakened annual budget balances by approximately one per cent of GDP. In the fourth essay, I argue that budgetary mechanisms created to improve fiscal discipline have a bias toward a reduced public sector. Because discretionary decisions are usually required to adjust public expenditures to price and wage increases, periods of rapid growth have repeatedly caused the welfare state to shrink. I use the introduction to discuss the commonalities between the essays and to situate the field of public finance in a broader, historical context.
In both economics and political science, conventional wisdom states that austerity policies are unpopular among voters, and that those governments which implement tax hikes and cutbacks in public spending will lose votes in the subsequent election. However, this claim has received little empirical support. This paper finds that parties which implement fiscal consolidations are punished by the voters in the following election, a result that goes against previous research, but one which is in line with conventional wisdom. The estimated effects are larger when the adjustments are visible and when there is a unified control of policymaking. There do not appear to be any electoral consequences for implementing fiscal expansions.
Cross-national variations in fiscal performance have traditionally been seen as resulting from differences in electoral systems and types of government. However, such politico-institutional explanations appear to be sensitive to the time-period analysed. This paper provides a new explanation of why some countries have managed to consolidate public finances, while others have accumulated unsustainable levels of debt. Using real-time data for a panel of 31 OECD countries over the 1997-2012 period, the paper shows that governments have responded to biased economic forecasts with more expansionary fiscal policies than they would have if projections had been unbiased. The estimated effects are large. On average, biased projections have weakened annual budget balances by approximately one per cent of GDP.
Differences in economic growth is one of the primary explanations for why welfare state retrenchment has occurred in some countries and not others. Because public spending is only partially indexated to earnings, the welfare state shrinks as the economy prospers. Using growth data from countries with synchronized business cycles as an instrument, I demonstrate that the relationship can be interpreted as a causal effect of growth on both tax ratios and social spending.
Voter opposition to fiscal consolidation is often attributed to intergenerational exploitation, short-sightedness or lack of information. While these mechanisms are likely at play, the effect of voters' moral considerations are largely absent from the public finance literature. This study addresses the effects of blame and feelings of personal responsibility on support for budget consolidations. We argue that voters will feel less responsibility for fiscal problems originating from a crisis in the banking sector than if those problems result from a continuous accumulation of deficits, and will therefore be less supportive of austerity measures to repay the resulting debt. Our results, which make use of both cross-country data and a survey experiment, are consistent with this. Since financial crises and many other costly events are practically random, this can have the profoundly counter-intuitive consequence that governments are punished harder for things that are outside of their control.
In this paper I report the results from a door-to-door canvassing experiment conducted in Sweden during the 2014 European elections. The canvassing was performed by members of the Social Democratic Party and the experiment closely resembles the partisan nature of most mobilizing campaigns in Europe. The paper is one of the first to provide causal evidence for the mobilizing effectiveness of canvassing outside the United States. Living in a household that was visited by canvassers increases the probability of voting by 3.6 percentage points. This effect is entirely driven by estimates twice as large for occasional and first-time voters. Compared to previous research, the high compliance rate gives precisely estimated effects that are closer to average treatment effects.
We investigate the role of information about tax incentives for the labour-leisure choice. We randomize 37,000 leaflets about the Swedish EITC, and then study the effects with pre-registered analyses and administrative data. Our focus is on the household decision to allocate between labour income and parental leave payments. The EITC and its interactions with the parental leave system is not well-known. Despite the substantial incentives involved, and the flexibility with which a person may earn labour income, we find that information about the EITC has a precisely estimated zero impact on labour supply on the extensive and the intensive margin.
Tillgång till information är en central aspekt i ekonomiska modeller. Genom attha tillgång till information kan individer och företag fatta ekonomiska beslut. Iverkligheten finns det dock flera tillfällen när information saknas eller därinformationen är svårbegriplig. Det svenska jobbskatteavdraget är tänkt att ökaincitamentet att arbeta där skatten sänks på arbetsinkomst men inte på andratyper av inkomst såsom ersättning från Försäkringskassan. Många svenskarkänner emellertid inte till hur jobbskatteavdraget är konstruerat i detalj. I dennarapport studerar vi hur information om jobbskatteavdraget påverkar arbetsutbudmed hjälp av svensk registerdata. Vi har genomfört ett informationsexperimentdär vi har skickat ut information om jobbskatteavdraget till föräldrar. Enförhållandevis okänd aspekt av jobbskatteavdraget är att det ger starkaekonomiska incitament att ha någon arbetsinkomst under ett kalenderår eftersomjobbskatteavdraget är riktat mot lägre inkomster. Vi finner inte några effekter avatt få information vare sig på sannolikheten att arbeta eller antalet arbetadetimmar.
Information plays a key role in economics. According to the benchmark neoclassical model, agents require information in order to optimize their choices. Information, however, is sometimes incomplete or asymmetric in the real world. In this paper, we investigate the role of information for the labour--leisure choice. We conduct an information experiment wherein we distribute a leaflet about the Swedish Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and then study the effects with registry data. More specifically, we focus on the household decision to allocate between labour income and parental leave payments. The EITC, it bears noting, applies to the former but not to the latter. The construction of the Swedish EITC generates a strong economic incentive to have some labour income during a calendar year, because it is tailored to benefit low labour income earners more in relative terms. Yet, despite the substantial economic incentives involved, and despite the flexibility with which a person may earn labour income, we find that providing information about the features of the EITC has zero impact on labour supply.