| 1. |
- Berglund, Christofer, 1985-
(författare)
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Borders and Belonging : Nation-Building in Georgia's Armenian and Azerbaijani Ethno-Regions, 2004–2012
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Since the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars researching ethnic politics have approached the South Caucasus as a testing ground for theories of separatism and conflict. But the 2003 Rose Revolution brought a new generation of politicians to power in Georgia. President Mikheil Saakashvili distanced himself from the ethnic nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. The incoming authorities instead sought to foster an inclusive nationalism, wherein belonging hinged on speaking the state language and all Georgian-speakers, regardless of origin, were to be equals.This thesis investigates this nation-building project and its influence on the integration of Georgia's Armenian and Azerbaijani borderlands. I first examine the mode through which these peripheries were incorporated into post-Soviet Georgia. Since Armenians controlled "their own" domain to a greater extent than the Azerbaijanis, I infer that the former were absorbed along integralist and the latter along colonial lines. Moving to the time-period after the Rose Revolution, I next explore if Georgian officials and Georgian adolescents were tolerant towards Georgian-speaking minorities. With the help of elite interviews and a socio-linguistic experiment (n = 792), I reveal that officials and adolescents were open to integrated Armenians and Azerbaijanis alike. I then proceed to inspect the centre's nationalising agencies and their efforts to incentivise minorities to interact with Georgians, and to use the state language during these contacts. Last but not least, I turn to the reactions this nation-building project elicited in the borderlands. On the basis of interviews with local elites and a socio-linguistic experiment involving Armenian and Azerbaijani adolescents (n = 434; n = 483), I discovered sharp differences: Armenians reacted with defiance and Azerbaijanis with compliance.These findings augment our knowledge of ethno-linguistic stereotypes in the Caucasus. They also demonstrate that inclusive nation-building projects can inspire minorities to integrate – despite adverse circumstances – but hint at one condition conducive to this end. Armenians perceived the state language as a battering ram against "their own" domain, while Azerbaijanis saw it as a tool to escape their isolation. This within-country comparison suggests that similar nation-building projects can trigger different reactions in integralist and colonial borderlands.
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| 2. |
- Öhrvall, Richard, 1975-
(författare)
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Growing into Voting : Election Turnout among Young People and Habit Formation
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis contains an introduction and four essays that together address the issues of turnout and habitual voting. Although voting is less unequal than other forms of political participation, it is still biased in favour of more socially affluent citizens. One way to achieve more equal participation is to increase the general turnout. This is the implication of the `law of dispersion', formulated by Tingsten in 1937, which states that as turnout increases, participatory equality also increases. In Essay I, co-written with Mikael Persson and Maria Solevid, we revisit Tingsten's law and find new empirical support for it.One possible path to improving general turnout is the formation of voting habits. It is argued by some scholars that voting is a habit formed early on in life, when young people encounter their first elections after coming of age. It is, however, still a matter of debate as to whether voting is an act of habit. Three of the four essays in this thesis tackle this question in various ways. In Essay II, I study voting among young people who encounter their first election in different social contexts depending on their age, and how these differing contexts affect their propensity to vote in their first and second election. In Essay III, I examine whether experiencing a European Parliament election with a low turnout as a first election affects the likelihood of casting a vote in a subsequent national parliamentary election. In Essay IV, co-written with Sven Oskarsson, we study student mock elections, which constitute the first, albeit hypothetical, election experience for many young people.The main result is that the first election a young person faces is not as important as has been claimed in previous research. Regardless of whether the initial experience takes place in a context that encourages turnout or the first election encountered is a low-stimulus election that fails to draw crowds to the polls, there is no substantial impact on turnout in subsequent elections. One implication of this finding is that lowering the voting age is not likely to increase voting rates, not even in the longer term.
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| 3. |
- Dahl, Viktor, 1979-
(författare)
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Breaking the law : adolescents' involvement in illegal political activitiy
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Illegal political activity has always been part of a democratic society. Despite this, not much is known about young people’s involvement in these political activities. Research portrays political influence attempts of this kind in different terms; as troublesome for the democratic political system, as expressions of conscious decisions vital for humanity’s future, and yet other times as illustrations of a coming-of-age rebellion. Overall there is a lack of collective knowledge on illegal political activity, and especially in adolescence – the age period when these political activities seem to peak.The aim of this dissertation is therefore to enhance knowledge of involvement in illegal political activity in adolescence. This dissertation addresses this task in four empirical studies. Results show that mostly boys engage politically with illegal political means. Adolescents involved are also interested in politics, believe in their own abilities to take part in political activities, have long-term political goals, and approve of violent political tactics. In addition, these activities also seem to associate with a challenge of authority. This could be seen in how political dissatisfaction was translated into illegal political activity, and in the way these activities seemed to be reactions to a non legitimized parental authority. Besides authority challenges, these activities are likely the result of important peer relations; influences from peers with experiences of illegal political activity seem to be a most probable answer to why adolescents adopt these political means. Taken together, the results of this dissertation show that adolescents involved in illegal political activity are well-equipped for political involvement, challenge authorities in most contexts of their lives, and are likely to adopt these political means from already involved peers.
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| 4. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, 1987-
(författare)
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Essays on the collective action dilemma of vaccination
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Vaccines famously possess positive externalities that make them susceptible to the collective action dilemma: when I get vaccinated, I protect not only myself, but also those who I might otherwise have infected. Thus, some people will have an incentive to free ride on the immunity of others. In a population of rational agents, the critical level of vaccination uptake required for herd immunity will therefore be difficult to attain in the long run, which poses difficulties for disease eradication.In this doctoral dissertation, I explore different implications of the collective action dilemma of vaccination, and different ways of ameliorating it. First: given that coercion or force could solve the dilemma, and democracies may be less likely to engage in policies that violate the physical integrity of citizens, democracies may also be at a disadvantage compared to non-democracies when securing herd immunity. In essay I, I show that this is, empirically, indeed the case. Barring the use of extensive coercion therefore necessitates other solutions.In essay II, I highlight the exception to individual rationality found in other-regarding motivations such as altruism. Our moral psychology has likely evolved to take other's welfare into account, but the extent of our prosocial motivations vary: a wider form of altruism that encompasses not just family or friends, but strangers, is likely to give way to a more narrow form when humans pair-bond and have children. This dynamic is shown to apply to the sentiments underlying vaccination behavior as well: appeals to the welfare of society of getting vaccinated have positive effects on vaccination propensity, but this effect disappears in people with families and children. On this demographic, appeals to the welfare of close loved ones instead appears to have large effects.In essay III, I investigate whether the prosocial motivations underlying vaccination behavior are liable to be affected by motivation crowding - that is, whether they are crowded out when introducing economic incentives to get vaccinated. I find that on average, economic incentives do not have adverse effects, but for a small minority of highly prosocially motivated people, they might.
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| 5. |
- Hultin Bäckersten, Oskar
(författare)
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Fractures in the Fabric of Democracy? : Change and Continuity in Public Opinion in Contemporary Europe
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Is representative democracy in Europe becoming undermined by developments in public opinion? This dissertation addresses this overarching question, by studying the development over time of (i) ideological polarization; (ii) the degree to which vote choices are structured by political attitudes; and (iii) the degree to which parties are internally congruent in political opinion across levels. Public opinion is understood as the metaphorical ‘fabric’ of representative democracy, where conjectures to the fact of a fracturing dynamic are plausible and recurrent in academic and public debate. Thus, this thesis contributes with studies in three particular areas, regarding the interaction between political attitudes and the political system. The studies show that there have not been dramatic ruptures in these aspects of political opinion. Neither polarization, disintegration, nor incongruence are the most appropriate words to characterize developments in general. Some changes are taking place, in particular as attitudes on immigration are becoming more important in all aspects considered.Paper I studies political polarization in a qualified sense, focusing on ideological views among the electorates of European democracies. The paper presents a conceptualization and measurement of ideological polarization that is partly novel, and proceeds to investigate patterns across countries and time. Paper II studies the degree to which vote choices in contemporary European democracies are connected to political views, in particular left-right placements, among electorates in Europe. This degree is gradually declining in most cases, and attitudes on secondary dimensions are generally rising in importance. In particular, the left-right scale is subsuming more issues than before, while issue attitudes are becoming gradually more important for explaining vote choices independently as well.Paper III studies intra-party ideological congruence, focusing on the case of Sweden. Here, the framework of May’s Law is utilized to formulate hypotheses of the structure of intra-party opinion. The study finds that May’s Law is supported in the Swedish case, with some qualifications, in contrast to recent studies. Additionally, there is not a sharp decline in opinion representation in the Swedish parties. Amidst declining levels of engagement in the parties, they still manage to represent the political opinions of their electorates relatively well over time.The general conclusion from the studies in the dissertation is that what we are seeing is not a wholesale transformation of representative democracy in these aspects, rather, there are signs of gradual change amid a general pattern of stability.
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| 6. |
- Lindberg, Björn, 1975-
(författare)
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Fit for European Democracy? : Party Discipline in the European Parliament
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study evaluates the fitness of political parties for the democratisation of the European Union. At the national level political parties have successfully functioned as transmission belts between voter’s preferences and political outcomes in representative democracies. Some scholars have therefore argued that an increase in party competition at the European level could make the European Union more democratic; other scholars claim that European political parties are too weak to fend off public pressure, which would arise from an increase in political competition. Since cohesive voting behaviour of political parties is the basic prerequisite for a functioning representative democracy, this study analyses how the transnational party groups of the European Parliament are able to generate voting cohesion. Drawing on rational institutionalist theories of political parties and theories of collective action, the study outlines two competitive scenarios for explaining party group voting cohesion in the European Parliament. In the party group disciplinary scenario, the party group leadership is able to enforce voting cohesion through its disciplinary powers. The national party discipline scenario predicts that party group voting cohesion is dependent on the voluntary cooperation of the national party delegations. The empirical analysis of party disciplinary effects in the European Parliament corroborates the party group disciplinary scenario. The party group leadership of the two largest party groups is able to discipline it is members for disloyal voting behaviour. The findings do, however, also show that the party group leadership is not able to sanction national party delegations if they fail to toe the party group line. The study concludes that it will be difficult for the party groups to maintain voting cohesion, if public pressure on Members of the European Parliament increases through a more open form of political contestation at the European level. The responsibility for a successful democratisation of the European Union through party competition, therefore, lies in the hands of national political parties.
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| 7. |
- M. Sjöberg, Fredrik, 1977-
(författare)
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Competitive Elections in Authoritarian States : Weak States, Strong Elites, and Fractional Societies in Central Asia and Beyond
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Why do some authoritarian states have competitive elections? This study shows that whenever there is a balance of power between candidates, competitiveness will ensue. Electoral fraud is often widespread in autocratic states, but if no single candidate or party is in a position to monopolize electoral support the result will be competitive. The contribution here is to analyze the relative strength of all the actors involved in a parliamentary election and to show that electoral returns reflect the district level balance of power, even in autocracies. Three main sources of candidate-level electoral power are identified: state, market, and society. State affiliated candidates in authoritarian states perform well due to favorable treatment by state institutions. Market actors perform well due to financial resources. These actors arise when market reforms create a class of entrepreneurs that defend their interests by running for public office, often challenging state sanctioned candidates. The strength of candidates using social cleavages, here mainly ‘clan’ and ethnic, is found to be exaggerated in the literature. The study also confirms that competitiveness did not result from an active civil society. Competitive elections matter because they can severely destabilize the regime, as was the case in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. However, electoral competitiveness that is the result of an intra-elite balance of power should not be confused with democracy. This form of self-interested competitiveness where clientelism is pervasive and accountability mechanisms are weak is an affront to the democratic ideal. For those of us who advocate democracy and genuine political participation competitive authoritarian regimes can be used as an informative cautionary tale. Power matters, and especially so in authoritarian states. Understanding the logic behind competitive authoritarianism helps us revise strategies for lasting democratic reforms.
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| 8. |
- Robinson, Darrel
(författare)
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Don't be late for school again : Essays on education and support for democracy
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An extensive body of work has found that countries with relatively educated populations are more likely to be democratically governed. Further, a large body of work argues that education is associated with a host of individual-level factors, such as political participation and democratic values, which provides a micro-level mechanism to explain the link between education and democracy. The central claim is that education universally engenders democratic values, which in turn, drives individuals to make claim for democratic governance. I build on this prior research in three respects. First, in Paper 1, using a sample of identical twins I show that the impact of education on political knowledge is highly confounded by family background. Education has a positive impact on knowledge for those individuals that were not exposed to political discussion in the home during upbringing. But for those that discussed politics with family, education has no impact on political knowledge. Second, I challenge the claim that education has a universally positive effect by examining the role of political context. In Papers 2 and 3 I leverage education reforms as quasi-experiments to study how the effect of education on political attitudes varies in authoritarian and democratic countries. In Paper 2 we find that education at the primary and secondary level has no impact on support for democracy in principle, but that education in an authoritarian context leads to less satisfaction with democracy after a country transitions, whereas education in a democratic context leads to greater satisfaction with democracy. In Paper 3 I find that higher education in an authoritarian context weakens support for authoritarian rule, but that this effect is mitigated by a strong economy. Finally, in Paper 4 we focus on the validity of survey measures of regime support in authoritarian states. Through a series of list experiments implemented in a novel web-based survey in China we find that respondents self-censor their true level of regime support to a large degree. Further, the level of self-censorship varies greatly by income, age, residence status, and education.
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| 9. |
- Grees, Nadja, 1983-
(författare)
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Changing Swedish sickness insurance : Policies, institutions and outcomes
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to contribute to welfare state theorising by analysing changing risk protection in Swedish sickness insurance and demonstrate how the understanding of such, and its implications, can be enhanced by strategic methodological choices. When analysing formal policy change in the compulsory sickness insurance system, it is concluded that the Swedish system fulfils almost every aspect of a so called social democratic welfare state, and no institutional shift can be discerned over time. When instead studying the interaction between compulsory and occupational benefits, and when investigating differences between diverse groups on the labour market and changes over time, it is demonstrated that there has been an institutional shift in the Swedish system. The balance in regulation between state and collective agreements has moved substantially in the direction of the latter. In terms of the basis for entitlements, a shift from citizenship/residence and labour force participation towards occupational categories has occurred. Considering the replacement levels of the public system, there has also been a shift towards inadequate benefits due to a low ceiling. Such findings emphasise the importance of including occupational systems, and of not treating the population as a homogenous mass, when studying risk protection. When focusing the analysis on how a system functions in practice rather than in theory as is usually done, and thus focusing on non-take-up of occupational benefits, it is shown that a large group of individuals are missing out on the benefit to which they have a right due to their occupational category. Such a fact has implications in terms of risk protection. The most obvious implication of high levels of non-take-up of occupational insurance is reduced individual income security for the affected groups. As the non-take-up is unevenly distributed among groups, such results also indicate that the traditional stratification in the system is strengthened but also that new groups of individuals are worse off than others, thus causing a new basis for stratification within the system.
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| 10. |
- Oskarsson, Sven, 1971-
(författare)
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The Fate of Organized Labor : Explaining Unionization, Wage Inequality, and Strikes across Time and Space
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The point of departure for this thesis is the divergent fate of organized labor during the last decades in the Western world. Given what we know about actual trends, how are we to explain the variation in the strength of organized labor across time and space? The thesis consists of four self-contained essays.Essay 1: Using aggregate data from 15 advanced capitalist societies, I show that the estimated effects of domestic cyclical, labor market structural, and globalization variables differ in a predictable manner across nation-specific institutional frameworks.Essay 2: In the second essay I argue that two institutional properties – the degree of centralization in the bargaining system and the workplace access of the union movement – will interactively influence the unionization process. The empirical results indicate that these institutional variables positively influence the aggregate density levels and cushion the effects of compositional factors on the probability of being a union member.Essay 3: In the third essay I argue that coordinated wage bargaining alters the causal logic when explaining wage inequality, in the sense that common explanatory factors have different effects depending on the degree of bargaining coordination. The evidence presented supports the theoretical argument.Essay 4: In this essay I propose a formal model of strike behavior predicting a curvilinear relationship between employer beliefs about union bargaining strength and the probability of a strike. Further, I argue that this curvilinear relationship is valid only under uncoordinated wage bargaining.
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