| 1. |
- Lundin, Martin, et al.
(författare)
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Leadership Experiences within Civil Organizations and Candidacy in Public Elections : Causal Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Approach
- 2016
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 38:2, s. 433-454
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Standing as a candidate in public elections has been characterized as the ultimate act of political participation. We test the hypothesis that acquiring office within civil organizations increases the probability of becoming a candidate in public elections. In order to take self-selection problems into account, we provide quasi-experimental evidence using election discontinuities, in which we compare the likelihood of being nominated for public office between closely ranked winners and losers in Swedish student union (SU) elections. Our original data cover 5,000 SU candidates and register data on their candidacies in public elections (1991–2010). The analysis provides support to the hypothesis: Students elected to SU councils were about 34 percent (6 percentage points) more likely to become a candidate in a public election than SU council candidates who were not elected. The causal impact is fairly stable over time. The analysis makes important contributions to two interrelated bodies of literature: First, it provides political recruitment literature with causal evidence that acquiring leadership experiences at arenas outside of representative democratic institutions facilitate entry into election processes. Second, it provides strong evidence to an increasingly contested issue within political participation research by showing that certain organizational activities increase individuals’ political involvement.
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| 2. |
- Adman, Per
(författare)
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Does workplace experience enhance political participation? : A critical test of a venerable hypothesis
- 2008
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 30:1, s. 115-138
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Several schools of thought claim that citizens can develop their democratic skills at the workplace. Here I focus on the hypothesis put forward by Carole Pateman and by Sidney Verba and colleagues that state that by practicing civic skills and democratic decision-making at the workplace, citizens become more active in politics. I test the hypothesis with a nationally representative panel survey of the Swedish population. My findings contradict previous empirical research as no impact on political participation was discovered. I argue that the effects may have been overestimated in prior studies because the tests were based on cross-sectional data: insufficient care was taken with a number of significant methodological problems. The study points to the importance of using panel models when investigating the causes of political participation.
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| 3. |
- Agerberg, Mattias, 1986
(författare)
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Corrupted Estimates? Response Bias in Citizen Surveys on Corruption
- 2022
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 44, s. 653-678
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Measuring corruption has become a global industry. An important and commonly used data source are several large-scale multi-country projects that survey citizens directly about their perceptions and experiences of corruption. Such indicators are regularly used by political scientists to test theories on political attitudes and behavior. However, we still know little about the quality of many of these measures. This paper deploys a large survey with two embedded experiments to investigate two potential sources of bias in indicators based on citizens' perceptions and experiences of corruption, stemming from political bias and sensitivity bias. First, I draw upon research on economic perceptions and argue that respondents are likely to respond in a political manner when asked how they perceive the level of corruption in their country. I test this argument by experimentally priming respondents' political affiliations before asking for their perception of corruption. Second, I argue that standard questions probing peoples' corruption experiences are likely to be subject to sensitivity bias. I test this second argument by constructing a list experiment. Overall, the results show strong and predictable sources of response bias that also vary significantly between important subgroups. I discuss implications for researchers and practitioners.
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| 4. |
- Agerberg, Mattias, 1986
(författare)
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The Curse of Knowledge? Education, Corruption, and Politics
- 2019
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 41:2, s. 369-399
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Education has consistently been found to be positively related to political participation, electoral turnout, civic engagement, political knowledge, and democratic attitudes and opinions. Previous research has, however, not sufficiently acknowledged the large existing between- and within-country variations in institutional quality when studying this relationship. This study asks the question: how do highly educated, well-informed, and critical citizens react to a political system with low-quality institutions; a system with high levels of corruption? Researchers have in recent years started to acknowledge corruption as a relevant factor in explaining democratic attitudes and behavior. However, how corruption interacts with individual characteristics in shaping political behavior is largely unexplored in the literature. This paper focuses on the interaction between corruption and education with regard to different political attitudes and democratic behavior. Using both individual- and country-level data from 31 democracies the results show that corruption thwarts many of the positive effects of education with regard to politics: The results indicate that when corruption is high, educated and politically sophisticated citizens are as likely as low-educated citizens to feel resignation with regard to formal political institutions. This, in turn, is likely to affect patterns of political participation among these citizens.
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| 5. |
- Aggeborn, Linuz, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Intergenerational Transmission of Party Affiliation Within Political Families
- 2021
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Nature. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 43:2, s. 813-835
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- 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.
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| 6. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, et al.
(författare)
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Uncovering the source of patrimonial voting
- 2022
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Nature. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 44:4, s. 1681-1702
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The boom in wealth inequality seen in recent decades has generated a steep rise in scholarly interest in both the drivers and the consequences of the wealth gap. In political science, a pertinent questionregards the political behavior across the wealth spectrum. A common argument is that the wealthy practice patrimonial voting, i.e. voting for right-wing parties to maximize returns on their assets. While thispattern is descriptively well documented, it is less certain to what extent this reflects an actual causal relationship between wealth and political preferences. In this study, we provide new evidence by exploitingwealth variation within identical twin pairs. Our findings suggest that while more wealth is descriptivelyconnected to more support for right-wing parties, the causal impact of wealth on policy preferences islikely highly overstated. For several relevant policy areas these effects may not exist at all. Furthermore,the bias in naive observational estimates seems to be mainly driven by environmental familial confoundersshared within twin pairs, rather than genetic confounding.
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| 7. |
- Brännlund, Anton
(författare)
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Labor Market Conditions and Partisan Voting : How Unemployment Hurts the Left
- 2021
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 43, s. 363-396
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Fluctuations in the labor market are a natural part of the business cycle, and they have attracted attention from political scientists for decades. Some scholars argue that left-wing parties benefit from rising rates of unemployment while others claim that voters rally behind conservative parties when the labor market weakens. I argue that the heterogeneous response of voters to a rise in the unemployment rate is due to differences in asset wealth. Put simply, the well-off have less need for social insurance, so they vote for conservative parties in order to put a cap on social spending when the unemployment rate rises; by contrast, asset-less voter opt for the left, with an eye to preserving their entitlements. I show with panel data from Swedish electoral districts that left-wing parties gain an electoral advantage when the local unemployment rate rises in less well-off areas, but they lose support when unemployment rises in wealthier districts.
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| 8. |
- Dinesen, Peter Thisted, et al.
(författare)
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Estimating the Impact of Education on Political Participation : Evidence from Monozygotic Twins in the United States, Denmark and Sweden
- 2016
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 38:3, s. 579-601
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this study we provide new evidence on the much-discussed effect of education on political participation by utilizing the quasi-experiment of twinning. By looking at the relationship between education and participation within monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs we are able to circumvent traditional sources of confounding of the relationship rooted in genes and early life family environment because MZ twins share both. The results of within-twin pair analyses based on surveys from the United States, Denmark and Sweden show that while the relationship between education and political participation is highly confounded by genes and/or familial environment in all three countries, a positive impact remains of years of education in the US and of high school completion in Denmark. No effect is found in Sweden. Robustness checks suggest that the observed effect is not confounded by within-twin pair differences in prenatal environment nor differential treatment during childhood, and, if anything, that it most likely constitutes a lower bound estimate.
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| 9. |
- Freeze, Melanie, et al.
(författare)
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Fake Claims of Fake News: Political Misinformation, Warnings, and the Tainted Truth Effect
- 2021
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 43, s. 1433-1465
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Fact-checking and warnings of misinformation are increasingly salient and prevalent components of modern news media and political communications. While many warnings about political misinformation are valid and enable people to reject misleading information, the quality and validity of misinformation warnings can vary widely. Replicating and extending research from the fields of social cognition and forensic psychology, we find evidence that valid retrospective warnings of misleading news can help individuals discard erroneous information, although the corrections are weak. However, when informative news is wrongly labeled as inaccurate, these false warnings reduce the news’ credibility. Invalid misinformation warnings taint the truth, lead individuals to discard authentic information, and impede political memory. As only a few studies on the tainted truth effect exist, our research helps to illuminate the less explored dark side of misinformation warnings. Our findings suggest general warnings of misinformation should be avoided as indiscriminate use can reduce the credibility of valid news sources and lead individuals to discard useful information.
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| 10. |
- Garz, Marcel, et al.
(författare)
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Political scandals, newspapers, and the election cycle
- 2021
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Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 43, s. 1017-1036
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Election outcomes are often influenced by political scandals. While a scandal usually has negative consequences for the ones being accused of a transgression, political opponents and even media outlets may benefit. Anecdotal evidence suggests that certain scandals could be orchestrated, especially if they are reported right before an election. This study examines the timing of news coverage of political scandals relative to the national election cycle in Germany. Using data from electronic newspaper archives, we document a positive and highly significant relationship between coverage of government scandals and the election cycle. On average, one additional month closer to an election increases the amount of scandal coverage by 1.3%, which is equivalent to a 62% difference in coverage between the first and the last month of a four-year cycle. We provide suggestive evidence that this pattern can be explained by political motives of the actors involved in the production of scandal, rather than business motives by the newspapers.
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