| 1. |
- Boräng, Frida, 1977, et al.
(författare)
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The Quality of Government Determinants of Regime Support
- 2015
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Ingår i: University of Gothenburg and Stellenbosch University World Values Survey workshop, August 12-13 2015, Gothenburg. - : Whily.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper argues that in addition to “what democracies do,” “how democracies do it” produces an independent source of support for democracy. We argue that a high procedural quality of bureaucracy may promote support for democracy by diminishing the likelihood of the occurrence of cognitive dissonance between democracy as an ideal and the experienced. Furthermore, we expect the beneficial impact of a higher quality of government (QoG) to be more visible in younger democracies. We subject this claim to a multilevel empirical analysis with large n and N and across a considerable time span. The analysis reveals that higher QoG is linked with higher levels of diffuse support, and that this effect is stronger in younger democracies. The data are less supportive with respect to the positive impact of QoG on specific support, calling for further research into the matter.
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| 2. |
- Boräng, Frida, 1977, et al.
(författare)
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The Quality of Government Determinants of Support for Democracy
- 2017
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Ingår i: Journal of Public Affairs. - : Wiley. - 1472-3891. ; 17:1-2
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper argues that in addition to “what democracies do,” “how democracies do it” produces an independent source of support for democracy. We argue that a high procedural quality of bureaucracy may promote support for democracy by diminishing the likelihood of the occurrence of cognitive dissonance between democracy as an ideal and the experienced. Furthermore, we expect the beneficial impact of a higher quality of government (QoG) to be more visible in younger democracies. We subject this claim to a multilevel empirical analysis with large n and N and across a considerable time span. The analysis reveals that higher QoG is linked with higher levels of diffuse support, and that this effect is stronger in younger democracies. The data are less supportive with respect to the positive impact of QoG on specific support, calling for further research into the matter.
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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- 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. ; 47:2
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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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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- 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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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Broms, Rasmus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Provider Ownership and Indicators of Service Quality: Evidence from Swedish Residential Care Homes
- 2024
-
Ingår i: Journal of public administration research and theory. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1053-1858 .- 1477-9803. ; 34:1, s. 150-163
-
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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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- D´Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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Land Property Rights, Cadasters and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Panel 1000-2015 CE
- 2021
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Since the transition to agricultural production, property rights to land have been a key institution for economic development. Clearly defined land rights provide economic agents with increased access to credit, secure returns on investment, free up resources used to defend one's land rights, and facilitate land market transactions. Formalized land records also strengthen governments' capacity to tax land-owners. Despite a large body of extant micro-level empirical studies, macro-level research on the evolution of formal rights to land, and their importance for economic growth, has so far been lacking. In this paper, we present a novel data set on the emergence of state-administered cadasters (i.e. centralized land records) for 159 countries over the last millennium. We also analyze empirically the association between the development of cadastral institutions and long-run economic growth in a panel of countries. Our findings demonstrate a substantive positive effect of the introduction of cadasters on modern per capita income levels, supporting theoretical conjectures that states with more formalized property rights to land should experience higher levels of economic growth.
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| 11. |
- 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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| 12. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Outsourcing, bureaucratic personnel quality and citizen satisfaction with public services
- 2018
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Ingår i: Public Administration. - : Wiley. - 0033-3298 .- 1467-9299. ; 96:1, s. 218-233
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article investigates the relationships between outsourcing, bureaucratic personnel quality (BPQ) and citizen satisfaction with public services. Our baseline expectation is of a negative association between outsourcing and service quality; however, we argue that this tendency can be counteracted when the government buyer has a more competent and motivated personnel, not only in managerial positions, but across the board. Better‐educated and paid public employees are likely to have an important moderating effect on service quality through their input into quality specifications, their ability to recognize the provider's consummate or perfunctory behaviour, and their willingness to act on the observed performance. Using data from a cross‐section of Sweden's municipalities, our analysis reveals a robust association between higher levels of outsourcing and lower levels of citizen satisfaction, but the data do not provide unambiguous support for the hypothesis that the strength of this association diminishes when BPQ is higher.
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| 13. |
- Dahlström, Carl, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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The QoG Expert Survey II Report
- 2015
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Quality of Government Expert Survey II is second second wave of the global online survey of experts on bureaucratic structure and bureaucratic behavior. The questionnaire contained 71 substantive questions, including questions on how bureaucrats are hired, fired and promoted; extent of impartiality in bureaucratic decision-making, corruption and others. About 1,300 questionnaire were completed and experts answers aggregated at the country-level. 122 countries have expert input from three or more experts.
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| 14. |
- D'Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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A taxing issue: the constraining effects of historical state capacity on European property taxes today
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of European Public Policy. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1350-1763 .- 1466-4429. ; 29:5, s. 689-707
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Property tax regimes in European states vary in design, yield and progressivity, but the sources of variation have been understudied. Through inductive process tracing of two diverse cases, the UK and Sweden, this paper explores the impact of the state’s capacity to value property. It finds that, in Sweden, routine and regular property valuation was historically institutionalized. This enabled a progressive property tax regime until house prices rose rapidly in the 1990s. Thereafter this capacity became a political liability: translating increasing prices into higher tax liability for typical homeowners, generating political resistance and incentivizing reform. In the UK, valuation capacity was never institutionalized enabling regressive nineteenth-century property taxes to become path dependent. Without routine valuations capturing increasing house prices, tax liabilities for ordinary homeowners remained stable, containing dissent and enabling a higher yield but regressive regime. In both cases, but via different pathways, property taxes under tax the rich.
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| 15. |
- D'Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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Cadasters and Economic Growth: A Long-Run Cross-Country Panel
- 2024
-
Ingår i: Journal of Political Economy. - 0022-3808.
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cadasters are public records of land ownership that facilitate clear assignment of property rights and land demarcation, thereby reducing transaction costs for economic agents and strengthening the state's capacity to tax. Macro-level research on the evolution of formal land registration has largely been lacking. Using a novel dataset on the emergence and development of state-administered cadasters in 159 countries over the last millennium, we analyze empirically the association between the development of cadastral institutions and long-run economic growth. Our findings suggest a substantive positive effect of the introduction of cadasters on modern per capita income levels.
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| 16. |
- D’Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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Intensified local grievances, enduring national control: the politics of land in the 2017 Kenyan elections
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Eastern African Studies. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1753-1055 .- 1753-1063. ; 13:2, s. 294-312
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Constitutional provisions for devolution and land reform sought to address local land grievances and decentralize land administration in ways that would prevent conflict. The article argues that partial implementation of this agenda has intensified local grievances in a context of enduring national control over land administration. Local grievances have intensified as devolution has empowered majority communities and stoked their attachment to homelands, while the constitutional recognition of ancestral land rights has provided them with a legal basis for their claims. The failed decentralization of land administration has left national institutions as the focus of these claims. We examine whether these trends affected the use of land as a political resource and the rhetoric of land grievance during the 2017 elections. Using regression analysis, we find that titles were used patrimonially in the presidential elections, with titles targeted at Kikuyu minorities outside of their homelands. Our qualitative analysis suggests that the rhetoric of land grievances was limited in gubernatorial campaigns, suggesting that continued centralization in land administration retains the focus of land issues at the national level. Overall, our findings suggest that the partial implementation of the Constitution has exacerbated the conditions that led to land-based conflict in the past.
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| 17. |
- D'Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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State Capacity, Quality of Government, Sequencing, and Development Outcomes
- 2021
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Ingår i: Oxford Handbook of the Quality of Government. - : Oxford University Press. - 9780198858218
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter provides a review of the state capacity and institutional sequencing literatures. It begins with a discussion on the conceptualization of the notion of state capacity, examining the pros and cons of the existing conceptual approaches with regard to measurement and inference. It also surveys the existing empirical indicators, highlighting recent progress in this area, particularly relating to measures of informational capacity and territorial reach. The chapter proceeds with a review of the scholarly debate about institutional sequencing, considering the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence of both the “state first” and “democracy first” literatures. This is followed by an assessment of the existing evidence of the effects of state capacity on economic development and public goods provision. The final section summarizes the state of the art, reflecting on challenges and outlining possible avenues for future research.
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| 18. |
- D'Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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State First, Then Democracy: Using Cadastral Records to Explain Governmental Performance in Public Goods Provision : Using Cadastral Records to Explain Governmental Performance
- 2017
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Ingår i: Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions. - : Wiley. - 1468-0491. ; 30:2, s. 193-209
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents a theoretical argument of how and why democratization at different levels of state capacity matters for public goods provision and subjects the argument to empirical tests. Building on rational choice theories of public goods production, we argue that credible enforcement before credible commitment— democratizing after the state has acquired high levels of state capacity—leads to a more efficient social order than the opposite sequence. Using a theoretically grounded and novel indicator of historical state capacity—the extent and quality of cadastral records—the analysis shows that those countries where the state developed extensive enforcement capacities before democratization exhibit, on average, better provision of essential public goods and are less corrupt.
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| 19. |
- D'Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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The early modern origins of contemporary European tax outcomes
- 2018
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Ingår i: European Journal of Political Research. - : Wiley. - 0304-4130 .- 1475-6765. ; 57:1, s. 47-67
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- What explains variation in tax outcomes between European states? Previous studies emphasise the role played by political institutions, but focus mostly on the input side of politics – how access to power and policy making is structured – and the institutions of relatively recent times. It is argued in this article that output-side institutions related to the implementation of political decisions also matter and have deep institutional origins. As the classic literature has argued, the early modern period from 1450 to 1800 was formative for the development of fiscal capacity, but European states diverged in the stock of capacity they acquired. This article tests whether these differences still affect contemporary tax outcomes using a novel measure of fiscal capacity, based on the age, extent and quality of state-administered cadastral records. The empirical analysis shows that, on average, countries with higher early modern fiscal capacity have higher tax revenue today, compared to countries with lower early modern fiscal capacity. This association is robust to different model specifications and alternative measurements. The findings have important policy implications as they indicate how deeply the current fiscal problems of the continent are entrenched, but also point to what needs to be prioritised within ongoing tax reforms.
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| 20. |
- D'Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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The Early Modern Origins of Contemporary European Tax Systems
- 2016
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- What explains variation in tax outcomes? Many studies emphasize the role played by institutions, focusing on those of relatively recent times. We argue that contemporary tax systems have deeper institutional origins in the early modern period when states undertook reforms to centralize and rationalize taxation. We argue that the varying outcomes of these reforms map onto contemporary tax outcomes through the mechanisms of state capacity and social norms. Where states succeeded in introducing more comprehensive reforms they developed higher capacity to extract more tax, more equitably, and developing direct fiscal contracts with social groups below elites, fostering norms of trust. We test our argument using the extent of cadastral registration of land in the early modern period. We find that on average countries where reforms were more extensive have higher tax revenues, state capacity and trust in state authorities today than countries with limited early modern tax reforms.
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| 21. |
- D'Arcy, Michelle, et al.
(författare)
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The Irish Tax State and Historical Legacies: Slowly Converging Capacity, Persistent Unwillingness to Pay : Douglass Kanter and Patrick Walsh (eds.) Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662-2016.
- 2019
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Ingår i: Douglass Kanter and Patrick Walsh (eds.) Taxation, Politics, and Protest in Ireland, 1662-2016.. - London : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783030043087 ; , s. 331-355
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The hallmarks of the modern Irish tax state have been its low yield, narrow base, and instability. In 2016, tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) was 23 per cent, below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) average of 34 per cent. The European Commission has recently again warned about the dangers of the country’s narrow tax base. Ireland has faced persistent problems of fiscal sustainability, most recently since the financial crash in 2008. While proximate factors, like the state of the economy and policy choices around tax types and rates, help to explain the character of the Irish tax state, we argue that historical legacies are also important for understanding contemporary outcomes, as the development of tax states is a path-dependent process. We track the development of the Irish tax state along two main pathways: formal institutions related to the administrative capacity of the tax authority, and attitudes towards taxation, which are shaped by levels of taxation and fairness in its distribution and revealed through supportive or oppositional popular responses to tax.
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| 22. |
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| 23. |
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| 24. |
- Milosav, Dorde, et al.
(författare)
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Unpacking the relevance of interpersonal trust in the blockchain era: Theory and experimental evidence
- 2024
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Ingår i: JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL AND EXPERIMENTAL FINANCE. - 2214-6350 .- 2214-6369. ; 42
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Despite being proclaimed a "trust -free" technology, the link between blockchain and interpersonal trust remains understudied. By considering one of the most prominent use -cases of blockchain - smart contracts, we argue that the non -punitive nature of smart contracts may facilitate trustworthy behavior in human interaction by encouraging trustees to view themselves as internally motivated cooperators and to honor the trustor's move that exceeds the encoded response. We test this argument through an online experiment in which the hallmark property of smart contracts-automated enforcement-is exploited. The results show that trustees in the experimental treatment return ten percentage points more than their counterparts in the trust treatment, thereby exhibiting a more trustworthy behavior. This experimental evidence shows that the presence of blockchain technology does not crowd out all properties of trusting behavior from human interactions.
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| 25. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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Bureaucracy
- 2023
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Ingår i: Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Sociology. - Cheltenham : Edward Elgar Publishing. - 9781803921228 ; , s. 26-29
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This entry provides an overview of the feature of Weberian bureaucracy and a critical review of the literature on the effects of Weberian bureaucracy.
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| 26. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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Bureaucratic structure, regulatory quality, and entrepreneurship in a comparative perspective: Cross-sectional and panel data evidence
- 2016
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Ingår i: Journal of public administration research and theory. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1053-1858 .- 1477-9803. ; 26:3, s. 519-534
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The article examines the effect of meritocratic recruitment and tenure protection in public bureaucracies on regulatory quality and business entry rates in a global sample. Utilizing a cross-country measure on the extent of meritocratic entry to bureaucracy and a time-series indicator of tenure protection, it subjects theoretical claims that these features improve the epistemic qualities of bureaucracies and also serve as a credible commitment device to empirical test. We find that, conditional on a number of economic, political, and legal factors, countries where bureaucracies are more insulated from day-to-day oversight by individual politicians through the institutional features under consideration tend to have both better regulation, specifically business regulation, and higher rates of business entry. Our findings suggest that bureaucratic structure has an indirect effect on entrepreneurship rates through better regulatory quality, but also exert a direct independent effect.
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| 27. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina
(författare)
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Corruption as a Collective Action Problem: A Review and Agenda for Future Research (in Russian)
- 2014
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Ingår i: People. Community. Management. - 2619-0567 .- 2618-8007. ; 4, s. 45-56
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- На протяжении последних нескольких десятков лет модель «принципал-агент» была основной теоретической базой для исследований причин и последствий коррупции и опре делила содержание антикоррупционных реформ во многих странах мира. Однако, оценив результаты этих реформ скорее как провал, чем успех, многие исследователи стали ставить под сомнение применимость теории «принципал-агент» к феномену коррупции. В статье рассматриваются основные положения новой, набирающей популярность теоретической трактовки коррупции как проблемы коллективного действия. Эта теория предполагает, что поведение людей зависит не от тщательности мониторинга и суровости наказания, установленного принципалом, а от того, что большинство людей думают о наиболее вероятных действиях других членов общества. Только тогда, когда подавляющее большинство полагает, что другие «не дают» и «не берут», новый низкокоррупционный эквилибриум может быть достигнут. Утверждается, что для достижения такого переломного момента антикоррупционные реформы должны быть революционными по своему характеру и проведены в достаточно короткий срок. Новые направления исследований о коррупции, открывающиеся в свете теории коллективного действия, обсуждены кратко.
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| 28. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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Expert Survey on the Quality of Government in Russia’s Regions
- 2015
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Expert Survey on the Quality of Government in Russia’s regions (Russia’s Regions’ QoG Expert Survey) focuses on the organizational design of public bureaucracy and bureaucratic behavior in 80+ Russia’s regions. It is based on the assessment of carefully selected 311 experts, whose responses are aggregated to provide region-level data. The questionnaire includes 42 substantive questions, yielding 48-region-level indicators for 79 subnational units of the Russian Federation. The data for 64 regions is based on the answers of three or more experts.
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| 29. |
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| 30. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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Getting to Sweden: The Origins of High Tax Compliance in the Swedish Tax State
- 2018
-
Ingår i: Steinmo S. (ed.). The Leap of Faith: The Fiscal Foundations of Successful Government in Europe and America. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 9780198796817 ; , s. 33-55
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sweden is one of the strongest, most stable and high-compliance tax states in the world. As Steinmo (1993, 41) notes, “the hallmarks of the Swedish tax system have been its broad base, its stability, and its high revenue yield.” Tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was at least 25 percent above the OECD average from 1965 to 2013, putting Sweden in the top five tax-yield countries for nearly the entire period (OECD 2014). Since the 1980s collection losses (taxes levied but not paid) have been less than 1 percent of total tax receipts, standing at the level of between 0.3 and 0.5 percent for most of the period (STA 2013, 20). By comparison, in the UK a similar measure, known as the tax gap, was between 6 to 8 percent of total tax receipts in the period 2005–2013 (HM Revenue & Customs 2014, 4; authors’ calculations). Experimental data in the companion volume Willing to Pay? show that the Swedes are the most compliant taxpayers in the sample of five countries. Why is this the case? How did Sweden become one of the most successful states in terms of tax yield and compliance levels? While most of the classic works on the Swedish tax state have emphasized the constitutional structure of the state that emerged in the twentieth century (Steinmo 1993) and social democratic politics in the twentieth century (Jansson in this volume), we look at earlier periods, tracing the roots of Swedish exceptionalism as far back as the sixteenth century. We draw on the rich existing literature and add to it in a number of ways to make five key arguments as to how Sweden became Sweden and why it is such an exceptional case. First, we argue that the Swedish state adopted advanced methods for monitoring the availability, quality and use of the main economic assets for tax collection purposes at a very early stage, leading to both the creation of institutional capacity and the development much earlier than in most other European states of a direct vertical fiscal contract between the king, the embodiment of the state in the early modern period, and his subjects. Second, we show how the development of both the capacity to raise taxes and the fiscal contract were assisted by the use of the newly reformed Church of Sweden, which both collected population information for the state and legitimized its actions. Third, we argue that the fiscal contract was particularly strong because the extensive, accurate data available to the state allowed for fairness in the distribution of the tax and conscription burdens, and the military successes of the Swedish state in the early period of state-building delivered benefits to the population: peace within its borders, freedom from foreign rule, and law and order. Furthermore, the military allotment system – an organizational innovation, stimulated by war, for extracting tax in kind from a peasant economy – created conditions that could foster a horizontal contract between subjects. Fourth, we emphasize that these developments were aided by Sweden’s relatively unique social structure. Having a large free peasantry and a small weak nobility led the state into a direct fiscal contract with the broad bulk of the peasantry rather than, as happened elsewhere, through the land- and capital-owning nobility. Fifth, we show how the structure of the Swedish economy, particularly the late onset of industrialization, forced the state to find innovative administrative technologies, producing a tax structure and administration that could easily adapt to the collection of modern taxes. Taken together, these factors explain how Sweden, over the course of four hundred years, cultivated its fiscal capacity and strengthened the fiscal contract between ordinary taxpayers and the state. Its contemporary exceptionalism was set in motion centuries ago.
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| 31. |
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| 32. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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Is Women’s Political Representation Beneficial to Women’s Interests in Autocracies? Theory and Evidence from Post-Soviet Russia
- 2018
-
Ingår i: Gender and Corruption. Political Corruption and Governance.. - Cham : Palgrave MacMillan. - 9783319709284 ; , s. 145-167
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Previous research has revealed a connection between increased women’s political representation (WPR) and responsiveness to women’s interests in democracies; however, our knowledge about this in non-democracies is practically non-existent. Building on the authoritarian regimes and on gender and informal institutions literatures, we theorize WPR effects in the context of autocratic regimes, explaining why the positive dynamics between WPR and women-friendly policy outcomes and outputs may be disrupted there. Employing an original dataset from 80 subnational political units in a large electoral autocracy (Russia), we find that larger numbers of women in regional legislatures are associated with higher rates of infant mortality, while the level of democracy moderates the relationship. The analysis reveals no association between higher numbers of women in senior bureaucratic posts and child mortality.
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| 33. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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No taxation without property rights: Formalization of property rights on land and tax revenues from individuals in sub-Saharan Africa
- 2021
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The arguments that property rights and taxation positively affect development are well established in separate literatures, but the link between property rights and taxation is under-studied. To address this gap, we theorize that formalization of individual property rights facilitates economic exchange at scale, providing a viable opportunity for individuals to improve their economic standing, in exchange for which property owners assent to pay taxes. We illustrate the argument by comparing the historical evolution of tax states in early modern Europe and colonial Africa. Empirically, we examine the links in sub-Saharan Africa between (1) the ease of access to state-recorded information on land ownership and assent to paying taxes using individual-level data from Afrobarometer, and (2) the formalization of individual property rights on land, measured through novel data on the extent of cadastral records, and government revenue from taxes on individuals at the cross-country level.
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| 34. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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No taxation without state-assigned property rights: formalization of individual property rights on land and taxation in sub-Saharan Africa
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Institutional Economics. - 1744-1374. ; 19:3, s. 444-457
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The arguments that property rights and taxation positively affect development are well established in separate literatures, but the link between property rights and taxation is under-studied. To address this gap, we theorize, in the fiscal contract tradition, that property rights assigned and upheld by the state, as opposed to other political authorities, increase individual assent to taxation. We apply this argument to property rights on land in sub-Saharan-Africa, where the majority of land is governed by traditional authorities. Empirically we examine (1) the link between the state-assinged property rights on land and assent to taxation using individual-level data from Afrobarometer, and (2) the effect of state-led formalization, measured through novel data on state-produced cadastral records, and revenue from taxes on individuals in a panel of 37 sub-Saharan African countries across 35 years. We find support for our argument that there is no taxation without state-assigned property rights.
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| 35. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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Public Bureaucracy and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Russia’s Regions
- 2018
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The paper examines the government-business relationships, by focusing on the effect of organizational design of public bureaucracies on entrepreneurship in Russia. Using novel data from an expert survey on bureaucratic structures across a large sample of Russia’s primary administrative units, we find that higher rates of merit-based employment to regional bureaucracies and lower rates of “at will” dismissals are positively associated with lower investment risk and higher entrepreneurship rates. This is conditional on a number of socio-economic factors, and robust to alternative specifications.
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| 36. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina
(författare)
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Quality of Government (QoG) as Impartiality: Review of the Literature of the Causes and Consequences of QoG
- 2020
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Ingår i: KIPA Public Policy Review. ; 1:1, s. 25-49
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article discusses the quality of government (QoG) as impartiality research agenda in social sciences. The article has three sections. First, it considers the intellectual roots and the emergence of the concept, highlighting the attributes of the concept of the QoG—such as universality, unidimentionality, normativity, and procedurality—that distinguish the QoG from other conceptualizations of “good institutions.” Second, it reviews existing multidisciplinary literature on the effects of the QoG, focusing on a variety of data and methods employed to evaluate the link. The review concludes that there exists a broad consensus linking impartiality in the exercise of political authority with important macro- and micro-level outcomes, such as economic growth, legitimacy, political participation, and preferences. Finally, this article reviews the literature on the causes of the QoG, focusing on four factors whose positive effect on higher QoG has so far gathered the most robust empirical support: meritocracy in the allocation of bureaucratic jobs, gender equality, universal education, and taxation.
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| 37. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina
(författare)
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Russia
- 2014
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Ingår i: Comparative Public Administration. - London : Routledge. - 9780415569286 ; , s. 141-173
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
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| 38. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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State-building, Democracy and Taxation: Why Ireland will never be Sweden
- 2015
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Ingår i: University of Tokyo journal of law and politics. - 1349-0672. ; 12, s. 110-123
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Sweden is often held up as a model of institutional development, while Ireland has faced persistent governance problems, particularly in the area of taxation. Why is this the case? Our paper investigates how different pathways of institutional development, and in particular democratization at different levels of state capacity, help to explain these different outcomes. While Sweden was a highly effective state before it democratized, particularly in terms of its ability to monitor its population and collect taxes from them, the Irish state was not as effective in either of these functions, with long term implications for its ability to collect tax up to the present. Our conclusions suggest that what matters for beneficial social outcomes is not democracy per se, but the timing of democracy in state development.
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| 39. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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State Capacity, Democracy and Public Goods Production: the Case of Child Mortality
- 2018
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The literature on public goods provision has emphasized the need to check abuse of power, but overlooked whether the state has power in the first place. We argue that it is only when democracy is institutionalized within a state with high infrastructural powers that it can have a positive effect on public goods production. We test this argument using a novel measure of accumulated infrastructural power – the age, extent and quality of cadastral records – for over 1,000 years for 155 countries. Our analysis shows that this variable has an independent positive effect on infant and child mortality, and it also conditions the effect of democracy.
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| 40. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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The Quality of Government Expert Survey 2020 Dataset: Wave III
- 2021
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Quality of Government Institute (QoG) Expert Survey measures the structure of public administration and behaviour of civil servants in countries across the globe. The survey is interested in how individuals are hired to public administration, fired and promoted, and to what extent the behavior of civil servants is impartial. The 2020 survey is the third wave of the QoG Expert Survey, following the first wave in 2008-2012 and the second wave in 2014. The QoG Expert Survey 2020 produced ten country-level indicators, pertaining to bureaucratic structure (meritocratic recruitment, security of tenure, closedness) and bureaucratic behavior (political interference into day-to-day bureaucratic decision-making and impartiality). The data is based on the assessments of more than 550 experts, carefully selected for their contextual subject-matter knowledge. The experts took part in the research pro bono. The main innovation of the third wave is the use of anchoring vignettes and Item-Response Theory (IRT)-based aggregation techniques to produce point estimates that account and adjust for systematic differences in expert subjective assessments and variation in expert reliability. The resulting indicators are internally coherent and also correlate well with other well-established measures for the same concepts. The strength of the association between the data from 2020 and the two previous waves of the survey suggests that the data is likely to measure the same underlying phenomena, while offering enough variability over time to be used in time-series analysis.
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| 41. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
-
The Quality of Government Expert Survey 2020 (Wave III): Report
- 2021
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Quality of Government Expert Survey (QoG Expert Survey) is a research project aimed at documenting the organizational design of public bureaucracies and bureaucratic behavior in countries around the world. This report documents the design and implementation of the third wave of the QoG Expert Survey, and initial analysis of the new data. The QoG Expert Survey 2020 produced ten country-level indicators, pertaining to bureaucratic structure (meritocratic re- cruitment, security of tenure, closedness) and bureaucratic behavior (political interference into day-to-day bureaucratic decision-making and impartiality). The data is based on the assessments of more than 550 experts, carefully selected for their contextual subject-matter knowledge. The experts took part in the research pro bono. The main innovation of the third wave is the use of anchoring vignettes and Item-Response Theory (IRT)-based aggregation techniques to produce point estimates that account and adjust for systematic differences in expert subjective assess- ments and variation in expert reliability. The resulting indicators are internally coherent and also correlate well with other well-established measures for the same concepts. The strength of the association between the data from 2020 and the two previous waves of the survey suggests that the data is likely to measure the same underling phenomena, while offering enough variability over time to be used in time-series analysis.
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| 42. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
-
The wealth of regions: quality of government and SMEs in 172 European regions
- 2015
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Ingår i: Environment and Planning. C, Government and Policy. - 0263-774X .- 1472-3425. ; 33:5, s. 1125-1155
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- With this paper we put forward a novel theoretical argument that the individual’s subjective evaluations of the quality of government (QoG) in terms of its impartiality influences his or her complex assessments of the opportunity and feasibility of a business venture, and calculations on expected long-term utility from business venturing. This in turn affects his or her decision to engage in legal business venturing or not. We hypothesize that high QoG is linked with higher rates of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a polity and a more even pattern of their territorial dispersion. Using original survey data on QoG from 172 regions in eighteen European Union countries, we find that regions where governments are perceived by their citizens as impartial and free from corruption have on average significantly more SMEs. We also find that in less corrupt countries the spatial distribution of SMEs is more even than in more corrupt countries. © 2015, The Author(s) 2015.
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