| 1. |
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| 2. |
- Broms, Rasmus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Competition and service quality: Evidence from Swedish residential care homes
- 2020
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Ingår i: Governance. - : Wiley. - 0952-1895 .- 1468-0491. ; 33:3, s. 525-543
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Against a backdrop of increased levels of marketization of welfare services in OECD countries, this article aims to shed light on the separate effects of private ownership and competition for the market on service quality. Using residential elder care homes in Sweden as our case, we leverage unique panel data of ownership and competition against a set of indicators, pertaining to the structure, process, and outcome dimensions of care quality. The main finding of our analyses is that competition for the market does surprisingly little for quality: private entrepreneurs perform neither better nor worse under stiff competition and the quality of care is approximately the same in those nursing homes that are exposed to the market as in those that are not.
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| 3. |
- Broms, Rasmus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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COVID-19 Mortality and the Structural Characteristics of Long-Term Care Facilities: Evidence from Sweden
- 2024
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Ingår i: Public Performance and Management Review. - 1530-9576 .- 1557-9271.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As in many countries around the globe, older citizens in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) in Sweden were hit hard by the Coronavirus pandemic, but mortality varied greatly between different facilities. Current knowledge about the causes of this variation is limited. This article closes this gap by focusing on the link between the structural characteristics of LTCFs—ownership, size, and staffing—and the risk of dying from COVID-19 in Sweden during 2020. Having utilized both individual- and facility-level data, our results suggest that lower staff turnover, having a nurse employed at the facility, and smaller facility size are associated with an decreased risk of dying from COVID-19. Ownership type is not directly associated with COVID-19-related mortality, but public facilities have lower staff turnover and fewer personnel with additional employment than privately run facilities, while privately run LTCFs more often have a nurse employed at the facility.
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| 4. |
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| 5. |
- Broms, Rasmus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Marketization and the Quality of Residential Elderly Care in Sweden
- 2018
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Against a backdrop of increased levels of marketization of welfare services in OECD countries, this article aims to shed light on the separate effects of private ownership and competition on service quality. Using residential elderly care in Sweden as our case, we leverage unique panel data of ownership and competition against a set of indicators, pertaining to the structure, process and outcome dimensions of care quality. The main finding of our analyses is that competition does surprisingly little for quality: private entrepreneurs perform neither better nor worse under stiff competition and the quality of care is approximately the same in those nursing homes that are exposed to competition from private actors as in those that are not.
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| 6. |
- Broms, Rasmus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Political competition and public procurement outcomes
- 2019
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Ingår i: Comparative Political Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 0010-4140 .- 1552-3829. ; 52:9
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article asks if low political competition is associated with more restricted public procurement processes. Using unique Swedish municipal data from 2009 to 2015, it demonstrates that when one party dominates local politics, noncompetitive outcomes from public procurement processes are more common. What is most striking is that the risk of receiving only one bid, on what is intended to be an open and competitive tender, considerably increases with long-standing one-party rule. The article contributes to a significant body of work on the detrimental effects of low political competition, and the results are particularly interesting from a comparative perspective because Sweden—an old democracy with a meritocratic bureaucracy, characterized by low levels of corruption and clientelism—is a highly unlikely case in which to find such tendencies.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
- Broms, Rasmus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Provider Ownership and Indicators of Service Quality: Evidence from Swedish Residential Care Homes
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of public administration research and theory. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1053-1858 .- 1477-9803. ; 34:1, s. 150-163
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The provision of public services by for-profit and non-profit organizations is widespread in OECD countries, but the jury is still out on whether outsourcing has improved service quality. This article seeks to nuance existing debate by bringing to the fore variation in service quality between different types of non-public providers. Building on theories of dimensional publicness and incomplete contracts, we argue that different forms of non-public ownership are associated with varying intensity of incentives for profit maximization, ultimately affecting service quality. Using residential elder care homes in Sweden as our universe of cases, we leverage novel panel data for 2,639 facilities from 2012 to 2019, capturing the ownership type of the care home operators, against a set of indicators pertaining to inputs, processes, and outcomes. The results suggest that non-public providers with high-powered incentives to make profit, such as those owned by private equity firms and publicly traded companies, perform worse on most of the selected indicators compared to private limited liability companies and nonprofits. Our findings that the intensity of quality-shading incentives is not the same for all non-public providers have important implications for government contracting and contract management.
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| 10. |
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| 11. |
- Charron, Nicholas, et al.
(författare)
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Careers, connections and corruption risks: Investigating the Impact of Bureaucratic Meritocracy on Public Procurement Processes
- 2017
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Ingår i: The Journal of Politics. - : University of Chicago Press. - 1468-2508 .- 0022-3816. ; 79:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors, while others assign public contracts more impartially? This article emphasizes the important interplay between politics and bureaucracy. It suggests that corruption risks are lower when bureaucrats’ careers do not depend on political connections but on their peers. We test this hypothesis with a novel measure of career incentives in the public sector—using a survey of more than 18,000 public sector employees in 212 European regions—and a new objective corruption risk measure including over 1.4 million procurement contracts. Both show a remarkable subnational variation across Europe. The study finds that corruption risks are indeed significantly lower where bureaucrats’ career incentives exclusively follow professional criteria. In substantial terms, moving EU regions so that bureaucrats’ merit and effort would matter as much as in, for example, Baden-Wüttemberg (90th percentile) could lead to a 13–20 billion Euro savings per year.
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| 12. |
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| 13. |
- Charron, Nicholas, et al.
(författare)
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Measuring Meritocracy in the Public Sector in Europe: a New National and Sub-National Indicator
- 2016
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Ingår i: European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0928-1371 .- 1572-9869. ; 22:3, s. 499-523
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Since the late nineteenth century, the presence of an independent and meritocratic bureaucracy has been posited as an advantage for effective bureaucratic behaviour and a means of limiting patrimonial networks and corruption, among other benefits. There is little consensus on how the features of an independent and meritocratic bureaucracy should be measured across countries, however, and broad empirical studies are therefore rare. What is more, the few such studies that exist have advanced measures which are constructed exclusively on expert surveys. Although these have indeed contributed to the knowledge in the field, the data on which they are built come with problems. This paper proposes a set of novel measures that complement existing measures and thus fill important gaps in this burgeoning literature. The measures we present are not based on expert assessments but on perceptions of public sector employees’ and citizens’. We create two measures—that can be combined into one—from a recent survey (2013) of over 85,000 citizens in 24 European countries. One is purely based on the assessments from public sector employees’ and the other is based on perceptions of citizens working outside the public sector. The paper also discusses the survey and explores the external validity of the measures provided here, showing correlations with alternative measures based on expert opinions, as well as variables from the literature that we would expect to correlate highly with a meritocratic bureaucracy.
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| 14. |
- Charron, Nicholas, et al.
(författare)
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No Law without a State
- 2010
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Ingår i: QoG Working Paper Series. ; :2010:12
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 15. |
- Charron, Nicholas, et al.
(författare)
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No Law without a State
- 2012
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Ingår i: Journal of Comparative Economics. - : Elsevier BV. - 0147-5967. ; 40:2, s. 176-193
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- What explains cross-country differences in the quality of institutions, such as judicial independence and government regulations of economic life, and in desirable social and economic outcomes, such as a low degree of corruption and high degree of rule of law? In some of the most widely cited publications in the field of economics and political science, scholars have claimed that such cross-country variation is explained by a country’s legal origin (common law or civil law tradition). It is claimed that because of stronger legal protection for outside investors and less state intervention, common law countries have achieved higher levels of economy prosperity and social life than civil law countries. To a large extent, this hypothesis has been corroborated by much empirical evidence. This paper proposes an alternative interpretation of the cross-country differences observed. Building on scholarly studies of state formation developments, the basic proposition of this paper is that the state formation process affects the character of the state infrastructure to be either patrimonial or bureaucratic, which in turn affects institutions and social outcomes. We argue that this fundamental distinction of state formation precedes the legal origins of a country and thus offers superior explanatory power. This argument is tested empirically on a set of 31 OECD countries. It is shown that the state infrastructure is indeed more influential than the legal traditions on a set of institutional variables (formalism, judicial independence, regulation of entry and case law) as well as on a set of social outcomes (corruption, rule of law, and property rights).
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| 16. |
- Dahlberg, Stefan, 1975, et al.
(författare)
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The Quality of Government Expert Survey 2008-2011: A Report.
- 2013
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The literature on the quality of government generally, and corruption more specifically, focus main-ly on the political side of the state. There are however strong reasons to believe that bureaucratic structures have important effects on political, economic, and social outcomes, but with very few exceptions there are no cross-country datasets. In order to meet this challenge, and provide data on the bureaucratic structure on a large number of countries in the developed and the developing parts of the world, this paper presents the Quality of Government Expert Survey. The survey covers a variety of topics relevant to the structure and functioning of the public administration, such as mer-itocratic recruitment, internal promotion and career stability, salaries, impartiality, NPM reforms, effectiveness/efficiency, and bureaucratic representation of, for example, ethnic groups and gender. This paper describe the data-collection, provide some basic facts about the data and about the ex-perts, and, finally, analyze how experts have answered the items in the questionnaire in order to evaluate potential respondent perception bias.
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| 17. |
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| 18. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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A Losing Gamble. How Mainstream Parties Facilitate Anti-Immigrant Party Success
- 2012
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Ingår i: Electoral Studies. - : Elsevier BV. - 0261-3794. ; 31:2, s. 353-363
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The emergence of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe has provoked very different responses from mainstream parties. Some have tried to counter the anti-immigrant parties while others have tried to recapture lost voters by taking a tougher stance on immigration. Country comparative studies have tried to determine the effectiveness of different strategies, but systematic testing has been impaired by small-n problems. This paper therefore exploits sub-national variation in 290 Swedish municipalities to investigate the effect of mainstream party strategy on anti-immigrant electoral success. The paper finds that a tougher stance on immigration on the part of mainstream parties is correlated with more anti-immigrant party support, even when controlling for a large number of socio-economic, historical and regional factors. This result indicates that mainstream parties legitimize anti-immigrant parties by taking a tougher position on immigration. However, the results presented in the paper show that it is not sufficient for one mainstream party to take a tougher position; it is only when the entire political mainstream is tougher on immigration that the anti-immigrant party benefits. What is more, the toughness of the parties on the left seems to be more legitimizing than the toughness of the parties on the right.
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| 19. |
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| 20. |
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| 21. |
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| 22. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Budgetary Effects of Political Appointments
- 2013
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Ingår i: The 7th ECPR General Conference, Bordeaux, France, September 4-7 2013.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 23. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972
(författare)
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Bureaucracy and corruption
- 2015
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Ingår i: Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption. - London : Routledge. - 9780415617789
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 24. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Bureaucracy and Quality of Government
- 2021
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Ingår i: In Monika Bauhr, Andreas Bågenholm, Marcia Grimes and Bo Rothstein (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Quality of Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.. - : Oxford University Press. - 9780198858218
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
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| 25. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Bureaucracy, Politics, and Corruption
- 2009
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Ingår i: Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 26. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Comparative Bureaucratic Politics
- 2022
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Ingår i: Annual Review of Political Science. - : Annual Reviews. - 1094-2939 .- 1545-1577. ; 25, s. 43-63
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article discusses one of the most important institutions in the modern world, namely public bureaucracies, from a comparative perspective. Bureaucratic organizations can be seen as a result of handling dilemmas along two critical dimensions. The first dimension concerns whether bureaucrats should be autonomous or, on the contrary, directly accountable to their political masters. The second dimension is about whether bureaucrats should always be guided by the letter of the law, strictly following established rules, or, on the contrary, guided by the principle of management, searching for the most efficient solution. We review the extensive recent research on the effects of different ways of organizing public bureaucracies along these two dimensions. Specifically, we look at three fundamental outcomes: economic development, corruption, and the quality of public services. We conclude by discussing the pros and cons of the four types of bureaucracies-legalistic (accountability and law), populistic (accountability and management), Weberian (autonomy and law), and liberal (autonomy and management)-and how they relate to, but do not overlap with, the concept of administrative traditions.
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| 27. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Conflict-resolvers or tools of electoral struggle? Swedish commissions of inquiry 1990-2016
- 2020
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Many countries face growing challenges of democratic governance from political polarizationand the increasingly complex nature of policy problems. The question is then how can governments build consensus and confer legitimacy on policy proposals in an environment where negotiating agreement among competing interests is increasingly difficult? In the past, many governments have dealt with these types of challenges by appointing ad hoc, independent commissions of experts and stakeholders from both sides of the political aisle to provide independent policy advice and to serve as an arena for political negotiation. Such commissions have been especially prevalent in Sweden, known for its rational and consensus-oriented policy making process. Drawing on a unique database, we investigate whether Swedish commissions can still fulfill their role as the cornerstone of the Swedish policymak-ing process. We analyze commissions with regard to their membership, political independence, and resources. We find that broadly representative commissions with policy stakeholders and parliamen-tary politicians, which havehistorically constituted about 50 percent of Swedish commissions of in-quiry, are now only a small fraction of commissions. The government is also exerting more control over commission outcomes by giving a greater number of directives. However, commission resources have stayed about the same, and commission do not appear to be used as a tactical electoral tool.
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| 28. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Conflict-resolvers or Tools of Electoral Struggle? Swedish Commissions of Inquiry 1990-2018
- 2019
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Ingår i: Presented at the EUREX workshop Expertise and policy-making – comparative perspectives, The Hague, Netherlands, May 13-14, 2019, and at the the 26th International Conference of Europeanists, Madrid, Spain, June 20-22, 2019.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)
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| 29. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Corruption, Bureaucratic Failure and Social Policy Priorities
- 2013
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Ingår i: Political Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 0032-3217 .- 1467-9248. ; 61:3, s. 523-542
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article argues that bureaucratic capacity - the competence and reliability of the national bureaucracy - matters to the allocation of public spending among welfare state programmes since it is difficult for governments to justify high levels of spending on programmes that require bureaucrats to make case-by-case decisions, on a discretionary basis, if the bureaucracy is incompetent, corrupt or both. We expect bureaucratic capacity to have a positive effect on programmes that involve bureaucratic discretion, but weak or no effects on programmes that are more straightforward to implement. In order to test these hypotheses, we analyse public spending on active labour market programmes (which involve a lot of discretion) and parental leave benefits (which involve less discretion). Relying on data for twenty advanced democracies from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, we find that high bureaucratic capacity does have a positive effect on active labour market policy spending, but not on parental leave benefits.
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| 30. |
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| 31. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972
(författare)
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Delegering, politisering och svensk statsförvaltning
- 2023
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Ingår i: Dahlström, Carl (ed.) (2023). Politik som organisation. Seventh edition. Lund: Studentlitteratur.. - Lund : Studentlitteratur.. - 9789144158143
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 32. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Democratic and professional accountability
- 2015
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Ingår i: Accountability and Welfare State Reforms, co-sponsored by IPSA’s research committee The Structure and Organization of Government and the Uni Research Rokkan Centre and the Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, February 19-20, 2015. - Basingstoke, UK : Palgrave Macmillan.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 33. |
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| 34. |
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| 35. |
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| 36. |
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| 37. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972
(författare)
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Do you believe me? Incentive systems in the public sector
- 2008
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Ingår i: Presented at the conference New Public Management and the Quality of Government, co-sponsored by IPSA’s standing group The Structure and Organization of Government and The Quality of Government Institute, Gothenburg November 13-15 2008.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 38. |
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| 39. |
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| 40. |
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| 41. |
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| 42. |
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| 43. |
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| 44. |
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| 45. |
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| 46. |
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| 47. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Impartiality and Corruption in Sweden
- 2013
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper presents data on corruption and impartiality from a unique survey with local politicians in Sweden, which includes answers from about 78 percent of the 13 361 politicians active in the 290 Swedish municipalities. On the basis of a number of questions related to impartiality and corruption, and after checking for respondent perception bias, we construct three indices: one bri-bery index, one partiality index and one recruitment index. The paper also assesses the external validity of these indices, using previous surveys, crime statistics and media reports on corruption. Our main conclusion after these analyses is that the indices hold water, and thus that it is wort-hwhile to include them in future, more explanatory studies on both causes and consequences of corruption and impartiality in Sweden.
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| 48. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Is the Quality of Outsourced Public Services Contingent on the Quality of Bureaucracy?
- 2016
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Outsourced public services make up about half of the total public service delivery in OECD countries today and have increased dramatically over time. Reformers expected that outsourcing would both cut costs and increase quality through rather basic market logic. This paper investigates the impact of outsourcing on one of the fundamental goals of outsourcing – the quality of services. It draws on literature that suggests that markets for public services might often be dysfunctional, especially for complex goods, where highly incomplete contracts are rule, and that we should in fact expect a negative effect of outsourcing on service quality. However, we argue that potential negative consequences can be counteracted, at least to some extent, with more competent and motivated personnel on the buyer’s side, as contracts will probably be better and monitoring more efficient, which will lessen the room for the vendor’s opportunistic behavior. We test our theoretical predictions empirically using data on the extent of outsourcing, satisfaction with the quality of service and education and pay of the municipal employees in Swedish municipalities. Our analyses show that outsourcing and citizen’s satisfaction with service are indeed negatively correlated, but that the magnitude of this association is lower in municipalities with better educated and better paid staff. We interpret this as supporting the idea that outsourcing is contingent on bureaucratic quality.
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| 49. |
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| 50. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Loyal Leaders, Affluent Agencies : The Budgetary Implications of Political Appointments in the Executive Branch
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Politics. - : University of Chicago Press. - 0022-3816 .- 1468-2508. ; 85:2, s. 640-653
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A central issue in democratic theory concerns whether and how politicians can maximize their policy returns from bureaucratic delegation. In this article, we propose that politicians assure favorable delegation outcomes in part by strategically matching responsive personnel and prioritized resources across policy issues and over time. We substantiate our analysis with four decades' worth of data from the Swedish executive bureaucracy, taking particular advantage of the fact that the cabinet ministers generally appoint their agency heads on tenure-protected fixed terms. Using a within-agency research design, we show that the governing parties award more funds to agencies appointed by their ideological allies than to agencies appointed by their ideological opponents. Our findings underscore that political decisions about bureaucratic appointments and appropriations are both part of the same general delegation process but also highlight how political competition can undermine democratic control of bureaucratic policy making.
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