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- Bäck, Hanna, et al.
(författare)
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Does European Integration Lead to a 'Presidentialization' of Executive Politics? : Ministerial Selection in Swedish Postwar Cabinets
- 2009
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Ingår i: European Union Politics. - London : SAGE Publications. - 1465-1165 .- 1741-2757. ; 10:2, s. 226-252
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this article, we address recent claims that executive legislative relations in parliamentary democracies are undergoing important changes owing to either a 'presidentialization' or a 'Europeanization' of domestic political systems. Therefore, we test empirically whether parliamentary democracies are indeed experiencing changes in executive-legislative relations and whether these developments can, in part, be explained by an increase in European integration. Using data on ministerial selection in Swedish cabinets during the years 1952-2006, we find that there appears to be a slight tendency towards 'presidentialization', which is indicated by a decrease in ministers with a parliamentary background being appointed, and that there exists some support for the notion that Sweden's political and economic integration into the European Union is part of the explanation for this change.
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| 4. |
- Bäck, Hanna
(författare)
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Explaining Coalitions : Evidence and Lessons From Studying Coalition Formation in Swedish Local Government
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to better understand coalition formation. To date, a vast number of theories have been presented with the goal to explain coalition outcomes. For example, early coalition theories assumed that parties were motivated solely by the goal of attaining the power and prestige that come with being in office, and predicted that minimal winning coalitions would form. Later coalition theories are instead often based on the assumption that parties are interested in implementing a policy program.Three problems with much of the existing coalition research are identified and solved in this study. First, many coalition theories have only been evaluated on the data set of Western European national governments despite the fact that these theories often emerged from consideration of this same data set, which implies that these theories have not been subjected to proper evaluations. In this study, a new data set consisting of a large number of formation opportunities in Swedish local government is used to evaluate coalition theories. Second, few empirical investigations have focused on comparing alternative coalition explanations using careful controls. In this study several different statistical techniques are used to evaluate the relative importance of a number of important coalition variables. Third, coalition researchers have not focused on giving adequate causal explanations to coalition formation in terms of measuring both the causal effects and the causal mechanisms underlying these effects. In this thesis, a large-n statistical study is combined with in-depth case studies, which makes it possible to measure and isolate effects, and to investigate the mechanisms that explain these effects.The analyses performed here indicate that when explaining coalition formation we should take into account that parties are neither pure office-seekers nor pure policy-seekers. Instead, parties are driven by multiple goals. The results also indicate that we should consider that parties are concerned with the effects that coalitional choices may have on future election results. The results found here show that parties should not be treated as unitary actors, and that some parties may be less likely to be in government due to the fact that they use highly democratic decision-making procedures, or because they are highly factionalized. Another conclusion drawn here is that when explaining coalitions, we should consider that the history of interaction between parties matters and that parties are concerned with minimizing the transaction costs with forming a coalition. Many other theories are either backed up or discredited by the evidence.
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| 5. |
- Bäck, Hanna, et al.
(författare)
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Explaining Modes of Participation : A Dynamic Test of Alternative Rational Choice Models
- 2011
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Political Studies. - : Wiley. - 0080-6757 .- 1467-9477. ; 34:1, s. 74-97
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Rational choice accounts of political participation identify two major solutions to “the paradox of participation” — collective incentives and selective incentives. Prior findings regarding the viability of these solutions are seemingly inconclusive and contradictory. In our view, one important reason for this is that the applicability of these solutions varies across participatory modes. In this paper, we make a first attempt to develop a theoretical answer to the question of why this may be the case. We then test our predictions across four different modes of participation, using longitudinal data that eliminate or reduce the biases inherent in cross-sectional designs. Our results show different types of incentives to strike with distinctly variable force across different modes of participation. Most importantly, we find that whereas electoral modes of participation (voting and party activity) are affected by selective incentives only, the non-electoral modes (contacting and manifestations) are the consequence of both collective and selective incentives.
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| 6. |
- Dumont, Patrick, et al.
(författare)
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Why so few, and why so late? : Green parties and the question of governmental participation
- 2006
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Ingår i: European Journal of Political Research. - Univ Luxembourg, L-1511 Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Catholic Univ Louvain, B-3000 Louvain, Belgium. Uppsala Univ, Uppsala, Sweden. : WILEY. - 0304-4130 .- 1475-6765. ; 45, s. S35-S67
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Green parties have been represented in the parliaments of European Union countries since 1981, but it was not until recently that a few have entered national governments. Using a data set comprised of 51 government formation opportunities (where the Greens were represented in parliament), the authors of this article show that the parties involved in these bargaining situations are more office-oriented than earlier studies had found. As Green parties are seen to be less office-seeking than other parties, this general tendency for office-seeking behaviour in government formation may partly account for the scarcity of Greens in government. Furthermore, a number of hypotheses derived from theories that account for the specific nature of Green parties in terms of their office-, policy- and vote-seeking orientations are tested. It is found that Greens participate in government when they have lost votes in at least one election, when the main party of the left identifies them as a clear electoral threat and when the policy distance between the Greens and either the formateur party or the main left party is small (the latter condition must be accompanied by a substantial proportion of seats for the Green party in parliament). As most of these simultaneous conditions only materialized recently, and in a few countries, it is argued that this analysis, which is the first comparative and multivariate test focused on this question, explains the scarcity and the delay of Green governmental participation.
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| 7. |
- Erlingsson, Gissur, et al.
(författare)
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How Should Local Government Be Organised? Reflections from a Swedish Perspective
- 2013
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Ingår i: Local Government Studies. - Abingdon : Taylor and Francis (Routledge). - 0300-3930 .- 1743-9388. ; 39:1, s. 22-46
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Two main arguments are presented in this article. First, when alternatives for the future design of local government are debated, a government needs to address two basic issues simultaneously: (a) how big (and hence how many) municipalities ought the political system have?, and (b) how strong and well secured ought the principle of local self-government be in the constitution? Second, by using these two questions as guides for our analysis, we argue that there are instrumental as well as substantial reasons to guarantee a strong local self-government in the constitution. However, such a reform needs to be complemented by a politically neutral body of regulations that, under given conditions, secures geographically concentrated minorities a right to secede. Although we use the Swedish case as the empirical base for the discussion, our analysis has a bearing on recent developments in, for example, the other Nordic countries and England, where amalgamations at the local level have been on the agenda throughout the past decade.
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| 8. |
- Erlingsson, Gissur Ó, 1974-, et al.
(författare)
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A Normative Theory of Local Government : Connecting Individual Autonomy and Local Self-Determination with Democracy
- 2017
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Ingår i: Lex Localis. - : Institut za Lokalno Samoupravo in Javna Narocila Maribor. - 1581-5374 .- 1855-363X. ; 15:2, s. 329-342
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The issue of local government reform is high on the agenda in many developed democracies. The discussion is often framed in narrow terms, focusing on functional efficiency. In this article, we construct a normative argument for local government that values local government because it fulfills morally desirable purposes in itself, regardless of its functional efficiency. The argument is that the same foundational value – individual autonomy – constitutes the normative underpinning of both democracy and the right to local self-government. The implication is that if we value democracy, we must defend a strong and constitutionally protected local government.
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| 9. |
- Hultin Rosenberg, Jonas, et al.
(författare)
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Contributivist views on democratic inclusion : on economic contribution as a condition for the right to vote
- 2022
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Ingår i: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1369-8230 .- 1743-8772.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Prior to the democratic breakthrough in most Western countries, the right to vote was premised on a person’s economic contribution. No country today reserves voting rights exclusively to contributors, but economic contribution matters once again. It matters for immigrants’ access to citizenship and its associated political rights, and it matters for emigrants’ attempts to keep the right to vote in their ‘home country’. Economic contribution has attracted very little attention in the literature on democratic inclusion. The few scholars who have discussed it have rejected it based on its expected implications, without going into detail about its different instantiations and normative underpinnings. This paper lays the foundation for a more thorough critique. Informed by historical practices, we distinguish between two main types of economic contributivist regulations: those that condition the right to vote on the size of the contribution, and those that condition it on compliance with legally required contributions. We suggest that contributivism can be based either on property rights or on reciprocity. We conclude the paper by contrasting contributivism with established principles of democratic inclusion (such as the all-affected principle), and by arguing that, unlike these other principles, contributivism is incompatible with the democratic ideal of self-rule.
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| 10. |
- Lewin, Leif, 1941-, et al.
(författare)
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A kinder, gentler democracy : The consensus model and Swedish disability politics
- 2008
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Political Studies. - : Wiley. - 0080-6757 .- 1467-9477. ; 31:3, s. 291-310
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Arend Lijphart’s seminal consensus model of democracy does not only try to explain how democracy actually works. It also purports to be a ‘kinder, gentler’ form of democracy with regard to e.g. unemployment, disability, illness and old age. So far, this conjecture has not been brought to a systematic test which is the purpose of this article. We look into the consequences for one of the areas Lijphart singles out: disability. Does consensus democracy promote a more generous policy towards disabled people than majoritarian democracy? We transfer Lijphart’s theory to municipality level. In Sweden, disability care is namely the responsibility for the municipalities, which are comparatively large and independent and with the right to tax their citizens; they are like small nation-states. There is, however, a considerable variation in disability support between them. Some give ten times as much support than others. Is it those governed according to the consensus model? Our approach helps controlling for the variation in political and cultural context and expands the number of observations. The statistical comparison of Swedish municipalities does not, however, lend any confirmation of the famous theory. Instead, there are reasons to doubt that consensus democracy promotes more generous policies.
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