| 1. |
- Dahlberg, Stefan, Professor, 1975-, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring popular conceptions of democracy through media discourse : analysing dimensions of democracy from online media data in 93 countries using a distributional semantic model
- 2024
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Ingår i: Democratization. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1351-0347 .- 1743-890X.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Survey studies show that popular support for democracy is strong in democratic and non-democratic countries. Naturally, the question is if democracy actually means the same thing in different linguistic, cultural, and political contexts. Mass media is often mentioned as decisive in forming citizens' understandings of democracy, but the media discourse is rarely in focus in comparative studies on popular conceptions of democracy. This article contributes to the debate by analysing data collected from online media in 93 countries. By utilizing tools from natural language processing, we provide new insights based on methods that are both extensive, flexible and cost-efficient. Our analysis shows that the media discourse revolves around democracy as governance, as outcomes and as values, but that these abstract understandings have additional dimensions. Our main contributions are three: (i) we show that the media discourse is related to popular understandings of democracy; (ii) our results indicate that there are common denominators of how the D-word is discussed in media across the globe, but when analysing the dimensions in more detail, common denominators are few and (iii) by relating democracy to everyday politics, media seems to legitimize any regime as democratic rather than being a beacon for liberal democracy.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Esaiasson, Peter, 1957, et al.
(författare)
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In pursuit of happiness: Life satisfaction drives political support
- 2020
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Ingår i: European Journal of Political Research. - : Wiley. - 0304-4130 .- 1475-6765. ; 59:1, s. 25-44
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is argued in this article that citizens in democracies use their subjective well-being (SWB) as an evaluative criterion when deciding how willing they are to support and comply with government dictates (political system support). When life is satisfactory, government authorities are rewarded with support, when it is not, citizens punish authorities by withholding their support. To make sense of the relationship, it is suggested that citizens act as if they have signed a happiness contract with ‘those in power’. In support of this argument, comparative survey data shows that SWB predicts attitudes on political system support across country contexts and under strong control conditions. Establishing that the relationship is causal, panel data documents that attitudes on political system support can be undermined following the termination of a close personal relationship, and that the causal effect is mediated via changes in SWB. Finally, as predicted, the happiness-support relationship is weaker among individuals who are high on spirituality/religiousness and attribute blame for external events to both worldly and non-worldly powers.
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| 4. |
- Knudsen, Erik, et al.
(författare)
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How the public understands news media trust : An open-ended approach
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journalism - Theory, Practice & Criticism. - : SAGE Publications. - 1464-8849 .- 1741-3001. ; 23:11, s. 2347-2363
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Despite the central role that ordinary citizens play as ‘trustors’ (i.e. the actor that places trust) in the literature on news media trust, prior quantitative studies have paid little attention to how ordinary citizens understand and define news media trust. Here, trust tends to be studied from a researcher-defined – rather than an audience-defined – perspective. To address this gap, we investigate how the public describes news media trust in their own words by asking them directly. We analyse 1500 written responses collected through a Norwegian online probability-based survey, here using a semisupervised quantitative text analysis technique called structural topic modelling (STM). We find that citizens’ own understanding of news media trust can be categorised into four distinct topics that, in some instances, are comparable to academic and professional discourse. We show that citizens’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by many of the same variables that prior research has found to be important predictors of levels of trust. Respondents’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by education and satisfaction with democracy but not other known predictors of trust, such as ideological self-placement and political preferences.
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| 5. |
- Lindskog, Hilma, et al.
(författare)
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The Voter Next Door : Stigma Effects on Advance Voting for Radical Right Parties
- 2023
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Ingår i: Political Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 0032-3217 .- 1467-9248.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Despite the influence of stigmatization on vote choices, little attention has been given to the impact of social stigma on voters’ selection of voting procedures. To bridge this gap, our study focuses on Sweden, where the open-display ballot system at polling stations potentially compromises vote secrecy. Using survey data from the Swedish National Election Studies in 2014 and 2018, we examine the relationship between citizens’ voting procedure choices and their support for a highly stigmatized radical right party, the Sweden Democrats. Our findings reveal that voters of the Sweden Democrats are more inclined to vote in advance, particularly in districts with low general party support, indicating a high level of stigma. We argue that advance voting can be seen as a strategy to safeguard vote secrecy when voting for stigmatized parties within an institutional context featuring public displays of ballots. In addition, our research sheds light on the importance of electoral integrity in maintaining the confidentiality of voters’ choices.
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| 6. |
- Nilsson, Ragnhild, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Den samiska väljarkåren i val till Riksdagen : Deltagande och partival
- 2022
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Ingår i: Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift. - 0039-0747. ; 124:3, s. 591-621
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Sámi electorate in elections to the Swedish Riksdag: participation and party choiceThe Sámi electorate in Sweden votes to the same extent as the general population in elections to the Riksdag, something that differs considerably from other parts of the world where turnout in elections to national parliaments usually is significantly lower among people who identify themselves as belonging to an Indigenous People in com-parison with the majority population. How the Sámi in Sweden vote in parliamentary elections is, however, an unexplored field of research so far. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, to analyse how the Sámi electorate votes in elections to the Riksdag, and second, to explain the voters’ choice of party on an individual level. The study shows that the Social Democrats and the Left Party would have had a parliamentary majority in all elections since the 2010 parliamentary elections, if the Sámi electorate had the decision-making power. In comparison with the election results for the entire Swedish population in the elections 2018, the Social Democrats and the Left Party were about ten percent larger within the Sámi electorate, while the Conservative Party and the Sweden Democrats were around ten percent smaller. The analysis also indicates that the voters’ opinions on specific political issues are decisive for how the Sámi electorate votes in the Riksdag elections: the Sámi electorate votes to a large extent on the Left Party and the Green Party, two small parties in the Riksdag clearly stating that they work for a strength-ening of Sámi rights, simultaneously as the two parties that most clearly has opposed Sámi rights, the Conservative Party and the Sweden Democrats, have a considerably weaker support among the Sámi in comparison to the majority population in general.
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| 7. |
- 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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| 8. |
- Nistotskaya, Marina, et al.
(författare)
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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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