| 1. |
- Nyman, Pär, 1984-
(author)
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Austerity Politics : Is the Electorate Responsible?
- 2016
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis contributes to the public finance literature concerned with fiscal sustainability, and consists of an introduction and four stand-alone essays. The first three essays analyse the reasons why governments accumulate large levels of debt. In the first essay, I find that parties that implement fiscal consolidations are punished by the voters in the following election. However, there does not appear to be a rewarding effect for governments that implement fiscal expansions. The second essay, which is co-authored with Rafael Ahlskog, shows how voter opposition to fiscal consolidation is shaped by moral considerations and feelings of personal responsibility. More precisely, we argue that voters are more likely to refuse fiscal consolidation when they do not feel responsible for the public debt. The third essay argues that misperceptions about the business cycle would have caused fiscal problems even if policy-making was conducted by independent experts. According to my estimates, biased projections have weakened annual budget balances by approximately one per cent of GDP. In the fourth essay, I argue that budgetary mechanisms created to improve fiscal discipline have a bias toward a reduced public sector. Because discretionary decisions are usually required to adjust public expenditures to price and wage increases, periods of rapid growth have repeatedly caused the welfare state to shrink. I use the introduction to discuss the commonalities between the essays and to situate the field of public finance in a broader, historical context.
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| 2. |
- Brännlund, Anton
(author)
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Wealth and the economic vote : How assets and liabilities shape election outcomes
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis contributes to the literature on economic voting, especially the subfield of the electoral impact in relation to wealth. The thesis consists of an introductory chapter and four independent research articles based on data from Sweden. Based on the first article, I find that the support for right-wing parties decreases in areas where voters are heavily invested in financial assets when there is a large amount of volatility in the world markets. Such patterns suggest that voters are responsive to financial risks. Through the second study, I illustrate that voters are sensitive to changes in monetary policies as well. More precisely, I show that voters tend to reward governments for decreases in interest rates. With the third study, I investigate the interplay of markets in a more direct way, estimating the effect of unemployment on voting in relation to household wealth. I find that the Swedish left-wing parties gain electoral advantage when the unemployment rates rise in less wealthy areas but that they lose support where voters are comparatively well-off. Finally, based on the fourth study, I investigate whether wealth has an impact on how voters behave with individual level data. The findings in this study suggest that wealthy citizens vote for right-wing parties to a grater extent. However, the estimated effect is small.
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| 3. |
- Cronert, Axel, 1986-
(author)
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All Interventionists Now? : On the Political Economy of Active Labor Market Policy as Micro-Interventionist Multi-Tools
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- As recent decades have seen a growing interest in reforming advanced welfare states to promote employment, active labor market policy (ALMP) has emerged as a major topic of inquiry among comparative political economists. Whereas the literature to date disagrees on, and mostly downplays, the role of partisan politics in the development of ALMP, this dissertation shows that political actors systematically use ALMP programs in different ways to achieve distinct political aims. Drawing mostly on a rich, new panel data set on approximately 1,000 programs across Europe, the dissertation draws attention to several politically salient dimensions of ALMP that need to be taken seriously to understand how partisan politics matter in advanced industrial democracies.Essay I reconciles the conflicting understandings of partisanship and ALMP in the ‘power resources’ and ‘insider/outsider’ schools by highlighting that ALMP programs may serve two overarching purposes. The essay shows that left-leaning governments are particularly inclined to expand programs designed primarily to reduce unemployment, whereas governments of all suits are equally supportive of programs that also, or instead, serve to increase labor supply.Essay II focuses on employment subsidies, documenting how these may be designed to tackle different labor market challenges among different target groups. Emphasizing institutional path dependency, the essay then shows that cross-national variation in employment subsidy design broadly reflects the varying institutional regimes in different parts of Europe.Essay III reconsiders the conventional view on the importance of employer involvement and corporatist institutions for ALMP by separating programs produced unilaterally by the state from programs, such as employment subsidies, produced jointly by the state and employers to the benefit of both. The essay finds that corporatist institutions primarily matter for ALMP by paving the way for governments—especially with business-friendly center-right parties—that favor joint over unilateral production.The introductory essay argues that ALMP forms part of a larger family of economic policies that are sufficiently versatile to be sustained and used by actors across the political spectrum. Reviewing long-term trends in economic policy in OECD countries, it shows that these policies, which are here labelled micro-interventionist multi-tools, have expanded considerably since the early 1980s.
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| 4. |
- Gustavsson, Gina, 1984-
(author)
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Treacherous Liberties : Isaiah Berlin's Theory of Positive and Negative Freedom in Contemporary Political Culture
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Contemporary attitudes in affluent Western societies are characterised by a growing emphasis on individual freedom. What, then, does this commitment to liberty entail for our openness to diversity; and ultimately for liberal democracy? Previous research on popular attitudes, for example by Ronald Inglehart, tends to assume that valuing freedom entails an encouragement of a plurality of life-styles. This thesis, by contrast, argues that there are several ideals of freedom in public opinion; ideals that may have opposing consequences for our permissiveness towards ways of life that differ from our own. The introductory essay in this book suggests that Isaiah Berlin’s theory of positive and negative freedom provides a fruitful analytical framework, which helps theorise and empirically nuance our picture of popular ideals of freedom. Essay I goes on to present a novel, psychological, interpretation of Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. This essay also suggests that Berlin was critical not only of enlightened ideals of positive liberty, but also of romantic ones, which might be even more widespread today. Essay II then applies Berlin’s framework to contemporary survey data. Through confirmatory factor and regression analyses, this essay demonstrates that Berlin’s negative-positive distinction does in fact hold also in popular opinion; and that the two dimensions have rather different effects on moral and legal permissiveness. Essay III, finally, revisits a recent example of disrespect in the name of liberty: the Danish cartoon controversy. This essay develops the concept of ‘romantic liberalism’, thereby deepening our knowledge of romantic ideals of positive liberty, and their particularly disrespectful tendencies. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin, and his critique of positive liberty, the essays in this thesis together suggest that it is crucial for liberal democracy to recognise the existence of treacherous liberties: ideals that lead their supporters to ridicule, condemn, or even prohibit ways of life that differ from their own – all in the name of liberty.
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| 5. |
- Österman, Marcus, 1982-
(author)
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Education, Stratification and Reform : Educational Institutions in Comparative Perspective
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The main argument of this thesis is that research has to take the institutional character of education seriously. Educational institutions carry considerable weight for outcomes of education and their design is a matter of intense political debate. This work focuses in particular on the institution of tracking that has wide-reaching consequences for the structure of education. The thesis consists of an introductory essay, together with three empirical essays. The empirical essays all acknowledge the main argument but study different outcomes and relationships connected to education. Essay I studies how the institutions of political economy and education together affect equality of income and equality of educational opportunity. This essay contributes to the literature by distinguishing the effects of the different institutions of political economy and education, as well as how they interact to affect the two contrasting conceptions of equality. The results reveal that tracking hinders equality of educational opportunity but is also related to better incomes for vocational education graduates in certain institutional settings. Wage bargaining coordination reinforces the more equal educational opportunities of weakly tracked contexts and improves the relative income of vocational graduates in these contexts. Essay II explores how education and tracking affect social trust. It makes two contributions. First, the empirical approach provides strong support for causal inference. Second, it is the first study to consider how tracking affects social trust. The empirical evidence finds no general effect of educational attainment on social trust, but decreasing tracking has a positive effect on social trust for individuals who come from weakly educated backgrounds. Essay III aims to explain cross-country differences in tracking by focusing on the impact of government partisanship. The study contributes to the literature by being the first comparative study to explore how partisan politics may explain differences in tracking and being one of few comparative studies there are on the topic at all. The results show that tracking is strongly related to a dominance of Christian democratic governments, whereas detracking reforms have mainly been carried out by social democratic governments.
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