| 1. |
- Bergh, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Higher education policy, enrollment, and income inequality
- 2008
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : Wiley. - 1540-6237 .- 0038-4941. ; 89:1, s. 217-235
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objective. The objective of this article is to examine whether public expenditure on higher education has an effect on income inequality by increasing enrollment. Methods. Combining data from the World Bank Development Indicators with data from the World Income Inequality Database version 2, we study the relation between government education expenditure and enrollment rates, as well as the relation between government education expenditure and the change in income inequality during the 1980s and the 1990s. Results. We find that public expenditure on higher education has no positive effect on enrollment. Increased enrollment is mainly explained by higher GDP per capita. Using carefully selected Gini coefficients to ensure comparability over time, we do not find a robust relation between higher education expenditure and lower income inequality, contrary to some previous studies. Conclusions. Government expenditure on higher education has very limited effects on enrollment and inequality. This finding, however, does not imply that there are no social benefits from such subsidies. For example, in countries where high marginal tax rates decrease the economic returns to education, governments may wish to compensate for this through subsidies.
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| 2. |
- Bergh, Andreas
(författare)
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On inter- and intra-individual redistribution of the welfare state
- 2005
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : Wiley. - 1540-6237 .- 0038-4941. ; 86:s1, s. 984-995
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objective. The redistributive effect of the welfare state is traditionally measured by comparing the gross and net distribution of annual income among adults. This standard approach does not account for the fact that a large share of the taxes paid by adults are paid back to the very same individuals later in life. The objective of this article is to examine the factors that determine the difference between redistribution according to the standard approach and redistribution of lifetime incomes. I also discuss under what circumstances intra-individual redistribution is beneficial for low-income earners. Methods. A formal model of a simple welfare state in a society with low- and high-income earners is used to describe inequality of gross and net income among adults and for complete lifetime incomes. The model is calibrated with data describing the Swedish welfare state. Results. Theoretically, the redistribution of lifetime income can be bigger or smaller than the redistribution indicated by the standard approach. Swedish data suggest that most welfare states are more redistributive when a lifetime perspective is used compared to the standard approach. Conclusions. Most of the redistribution carried out by modern welfare states is so-called intra-individual redistribution. Compared to the situation that would arise without the welfare state, intra-individual redistribution is likely to be favorable for low-income earners because it compensates for inequalities in the distribution of assets and access to capital markets.
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| 3. |
- Bergh, Andreas, et al.
(författare)
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Explaining the rise of populism in European democracies 1980-2018 : The role of labor market institutions and inequality
- 2022
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : Blackwell Publishing. - 0038-4941 .- 1540-6237. ; 103:7, s. 1719-1731
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objectives: This article aims to find country-level factors that explain the rise of populist parties in European democracies. While populism is often connected to inequality, we not that right-wing populist parties tend to thrive on fear, including fear of job loss. If flexible labor markets mean that unemployment is dedramatized because finding a new job is easier, labor market flexibility could dampen populism and inequality may be less important.Methods: We run country-level fixed effects regressions on populist party vote shares in 26 European countries from 1980 to 2018. We use two different classifications of right-wing and left-wing populist parties and control for employment protection strictness as measured by OECD, Gini coefficients of disposable income, and a large set of control variables.Results: Unemployment is positively associated with left-wing populism. Strict employment protection is positively associated with right-wing populism. Gini inequality of income is unrelated to (both types of) populism.Conclusion: Strong employment protection and low-income inequality may not be the most efficient way to combat right-wing populism. A strategy that promotes flexible labor markets, and job upgrading may be an alternative. More research on the link between labor market institutions and (in particular, right-wing) populism is needed.
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| 4. |
- Crepaz, Markus M L, et al.
(författare)
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What's Trust Got to Do With It? The Effects of In-Group and Out-Group Trust on Conventional and Unconventional Political Participation
- 2017
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : Wiley. - 0038-4941 .- 1540-6237. ; 98:1, s. 261-281
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- © 2016 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.Objective: This article explores whether there is a systematic variation in conventional and unconventional political participation as a function of in-group versus out-group trust. We postulate that the narrower the moral community is, the more political participation is restricted to conventional activity that is perceived as an obligation, as a political act to be fulfilled, something akin to citizenship duty. However, individuals with high levels of out-group trust-trust in people who are different or unknown-are more likely to participate in unconventional political activities that are public in nature and transcend concepts of duty, citizenship, or nation. Methods: To obtain measures of in-group and out-group trust, we rely on various items in the fifth wave of the World Values Survey. Applying confirmatory factor analysis yields two separate forms of trust, which become our central predictor variables in addition to other, theoretically-derived independent variables. We employ logistic regression with country cluster robust standard errors. Results and Conclusion: The results support our central assertions, even when controlling for the standard measure of generalized trust and a number of other factors. Individuals with higher in-group trust report having voted at higher levels than individuals with lower in-group trust. Individuals with higher levels of out-group trust, however, participate more actively in nonconventional political activity. Surprisingly, the presence of out-group trust has a slightly negative impact on voting. Our findings further emphasize the importance of differentiating between types of interpersonal trust, and answer recent calls for empirical research on the impact of forms of trust on political behavior.
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| 5. |
- Desai, Raj, M, et al.
(författare)
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The middle class and the modalities of political protest: evidence from the Arab world
- 2023
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : Wiley-Blackwell. - 1540-6237 .- 0038-4941. ; 104:4, s. 684-701
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objective The middle class has historically played a decisive role in mass movements and rebellions against the status quo, including in both peaceful and violent protests that spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa following the events of the Arab Spring. Yet, we know little about why the middle class tends to be over-represented in protest movements, or why that protest takes nonviolent versus violent forms. Methods We develop a model in which protest constitutes a “costly” signal of discontent, where violent actions are more costly than peaceful demonstrations and where the cost of action increases with individual income. Under such assumptions, the upper-middle class will engage in nonviolent protest, the lower middle class will support violence against the government, while the poorest and richest will abstain from opposition activities. Results Survey data from the World Values Survey and the Gallup World Poll across 20 Arab countries supports these hypotheses. Using both parametric and semi-parametric analyses, we find that participation in nonviolent protests and general strikes rises from the first (lowest) and peaks at the fourth income quintile, then declines thereafter. Meanwhile, support for political violence rises sharply between the first and second quintiles, falling for individuals in the upper quintiles. Our findings are robust to broader measures of wealth and status, as well as to corrections for regime type, levels of regime support, and joint determination of anti-regime behaviors. Conclusions These findings shed light on why certain socioeconomic groups engage in anti-governmental behaviors, while others do not, and suggest that income subgroups within the middle class may choose different modalities of protest.
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| 6. |
- Fredén, Annika, 1981-, et al.
(författare)
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Voters' view of leaders during the Covid-19 crisis : Quantitative analysis of keyword descriptions provides strength and direction of evaluations
- 2021
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0038-4941 .- 1540-6237. ; 102:5, s. 2170-2183
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objectives Previous research suggests that governments usually gain support during crises such as the Covid-19. However, these findings are based on rating scales that only allow us to measure the strength of this support. This article proposes a new measure of how voters evaluate Prime Ministers (PM) by asking for descriptive keywords that are analyzed by natural language processing. Methods By collecting a representative sample of citizens' own key words describing their PM in 15 countries in Europe during the outbreak of Covid-19, and analyzing these by latent semantic analysis and a multiple OLS regression, we could quantify the strength and direction of voters' view. Results The strength analysis supported previous studies that describing the PM with positive words was strongly associated with vote intention. Furthermore, a change in the direction of the attitudes from "good" to "honest" was found. A new finding was that the pandemic was associated with an increase in polarization. Conclusions The keyword evaluation analysis provides opportunities of evaluating both strength and direction of voters' view of their PM, where we show new results related to increased polarization and shift in the direction of attitudes.
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| 7. |
- Jagers, Sverker C., 1967, et al.
(författare)
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Trust, corruption, and compliance with regulations: Attitudes to rule violations in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park
- 2021
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : Wiley. - 0038-4941 .- 1540-6237. ; 102:6, s. 2661-2675
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Objective While trust is proposed as a key concept to understand people's compliance in natural resource governance, research would benefit from being more precise. Our aim is to test whether more specific survey measures of people's tendency to violate rules and the degree to which law enforcing rangers are seen as corrupt trumps more commonly used items on intra-personal trust and trust in institutions. Methods We analyze an original survey of residents within the boundaries of the Great Limpopo Park, straddling Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Results While general trust items predict compliance intentions in a first model, these effects largely disappear when we introduce more specific measures. We find consistent negative effects from perceived corruption among rangers. We also report negative effects from perceptions of other people's noncompliant behavior. Conclusion Compliance to natural resource regulations hinges on specific perceptions of how rule enforcing agents and other resource users act.
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| 8. |
- Jagers, Sverker, et al.
(författare)
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Testing the Importance of Individuals’ Motives for Explaining Environmentally Significant Behavior
- 2017
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0038-4941 .- 1540-6237. ; 98:2, s. 644-658
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- ObjectiveThis article explores how different motives affect behavior, and attempts to explain how the causal chain of values and beliefs forms our understanding of and motives for private-sphere environmentally significant behaviors (ESBs). As a point of departure, we postulate that traditional models focusing primarily on individual-level motivation as a driver for ESB should benefit significantly from making a distinction in the dependent variable between: (1) behaviors that are explicitly pro-environmental, judging both by their outcomes and the individual's stated motives for undertaking them; (2) behaviors that have a positive environmental impact but that are connected to motives other than environmental ones; as well as (3) behaviors where both environmental and other motives coincide as drivers for ESB.MethodsIn order to answer our research questions, we use survey data collected from a random sample from the Swedish population register. The main dependent variable is the self-reported frequency of 12 different kinds of nonactivist, private-sphere behaviors. We employ ordinary least square regressions to analyze the explanatory strength of individual-level motivational factors for ESB when taking stated motives for behavior into account.Results and ConclusionThe results support our main assumption that to explain drivers for ESB, stated motives should be taken into account. For all of the 12 ESBs in the survey, a considerable share of the respondents do not perceive or motivate behavior as pro-environmentalism at all, and others provide multiple motives for their behavior, combining, for example, economic or health with environmentalism. Furthermore, when analyzing the relationship between a scientifically well-established model aspiring to explain pro-environmental behavior, and individuals’ behavioral perceptions and their stated behavior, we find that the explanatory power of this model is clearly sensitive to people's stated motives.
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| 9. |
- Jagers, Sverker, et al.
(författare)
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The Environmental Psychology of the Ecological Citizen : Comparing Competing Models of Pro-Environmental Behavior
- 2016
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : Wiley. - 0038-4941 .- 1540-6237. ; 97:5, s. 1005-1022
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- ObjectivesThe overall objective of this article is to contribute to the identification of underlying factors causing individuals’ pro-environmental behavior (PEB).MethodsThis is done by the amalgamation of an empirically-derived theory originating in the behavioral science research—the value-belief-norm (VBN) theory (e.g., Stern et al., 1999)—and a rather recently developed theory in political science—the ecological citizenship (EC) model (e.g., Dobson, 2003). Using survey data, this article empirically tests the explanatory power of these two theories, both separately and as a joint model.
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| 10. |
- Lindenfors, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Sequential Requisites Analysis: A New Method for Analyzing Sequential Relationships in Ordinal Data*
- 2019
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Ingår i: Social Science Quarterly. - : Wiley. - 0038-4941 .- 1540-6237. ; 100:3, s. 838-856
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- © 2019 The Authors. Social Science Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Southwestern Social Science Association Objectives: This article presents a new method inspired by evolutionary biology for analyzing longer sequences of requisites for the emergence of particular outcome variables across numerous combinations of ordinal variables in social science analysis. Methods: The approach is a sorting algorithm through repeated pairwise investigations of states in a set of variables and identifying what states in the variables occur before states in all other variables. We illustrate the proposed method by analyzing a set of variables from version 7.1 of the V-Dem data set (Coppedge etal. 2017. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project; Pemstein etal. 2017. University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Working Paper No. 21). With a large set of indicators measured over many years, the method makes it possible to identify and compare long, complex sequences across many variables. Results: This affords an opportunity, for example, to disentangle the sequential requisites of failing and successful sequences in democratization, or if requisites are different during different time periods. Conclusions: For policy purposes, this is instrumental: Which components of democracy occur earlier and which later? Which components of democracy are therefore the ideal targets for democracy promotion at different stages?.
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