| 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. |
- Wejryd, Johan, 1978-
(author)
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On Consumed Democracy : The Expansion of Consumer Choice, Its Causal Effects on Political Engagement, and Its Implications for Democracy
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This is a thesis about expansions of consumer choice, their causal effects on political engagement, and the democratic implications that follow. For material and ideological reasons alike, consumer choices have expanded over the last decades and are likely to become even more present in citizens’ lives in the future. Scholars’ appraisal of this expansion of consumer choice ranges from, on the one hand, seeing it as a threat to active citizenship to, on the other hand, celebrating it as inherently democratic.The thesis accepts the assumed democratic potential of consumer choice as a means for conveying legitimate political preferences and affecting political outcomes. Yet the introduction shows that, from the perspective of normative democratic theory, citizens’ consumer choices are under most circumstances democratically inferior to civic engagement that addresses formal political decision-making. It is thus a pressing question whether there actually are elements in consumer choices that reduce citizens’ inclination to engage in conventional forms of political participation. This empirical question is addressed in the three essays.The essays tap the effects of consumer choices in different contexts, such as parents’ school choices for their children (Essay I), consumer choices that interact with citizens’ political motivations, i.e. “political consumption,” (Essay II), and consumer choices regarding plainly private consumer goods (Essay III). All the three essays account for causality and do so by means of experimental designs. In addition, the essays are similar in that their results point in the same direction: expansions of consumer choice reduce citizens’ willingness to conventional political participation.Given the democratic significance of conventional participation and the pervasiveness of consumer choice, the results are important both from a scholarly perspective and from a broader societal perspective. The results cast new light on a wide range of issues about the extension of consumer choices and their presence in citizens’ lives, including e.g. decisions about user choice in welfare services and advertising regulation. This thesis does by no means end the discussion about such policies, but demonstrates the significance of a certain outlook: issues about the extension of consumer choice are issues about democratic values.
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| 3. |
- Vernby, Kåre, 1974-
(author)
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Essays in Political Economy
- 2006
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis consists of an introduction and three stand-alone essays. In the introduction I discuss the commonalities between the three essays. Essay I charts the the main political cleavages among 59 Swedish unions and business organizations. The main conclusion is that there appear to exist two economic sources of political cleavage: The traded versus the nontraded divide and the labor versus capital divide. Essay II suggests a political rationale for why strikes have been more common in those OECD countries where the legislature is elected in single member districts (e.g. France, Great Britain) than where it was elected by proportional representation (e.g. Sweden, Netherlands). In Essay III I present a theoretical model of political support for different types of labor market regulations. From it I recover two implications: Support for industrial relations legislation that enables unions to bid up wages should be inversely related to the economy's openness, while support for employment protection legislation should be positively related to the size of the unionized sector. Empirical evidence from a cross-section of 70 countries match my theoretical priors.
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| 4. |
- Zugic, Ognjen, 1991-
(author)
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Labor market segmentation and the politics of investment and compensation
- 2024
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation investigates patterns of policy reform that relate to labor market segmentation. It does so through two interrelated research questions. The first question aims to understand what policies are theoretically relevant for a regime-based model of labor market segmentation and how these policy regimes have empirically evolved over time in rich European democracies. The theoretical approach argues that previous studies have a narrow policy focus. Previous literature studies policy-based dualization primarily through how governments regulate the labor market status of standard and atypical workers through employment regulations. Some literature also incorporates active labor market policy (ALMP) or unemployment compensation as a way to include pro-outsider policy into models of policy-based segmentation. This thesis argues that current policy models of segmentation fall short of capturing the full scope of how government economic strategy approaches segmentation. Primarily, they do not represent governments’ efforts to either avoid segmentation by investing in a skilled insider workforce or compensating the effects of segmentation through outsider-targeted welfare tools. To integrate investment and compensation as policy dimensions alongside the literature’s focus on regulation, the dissertation incorporates tertiary education and minimum income benefits alongside employment regulations and labor market policy in a labor market policy regime. The second research question addresses the politics of these reform trajectories, asking why reforms were undertaken and what made them successful. Because the beneficiaries of higher education and minimum income benefits are politically diffuse, it develops an explanatory account of reform based on the role of political coalition-building in broader political processes that help secure reform coalitions for policies where beneficiaries are not concentrated labor market constituencies. The dissertation contrasts this theoretical account against two influential explanatory theories, one based on electoral politics and the other on economic interests. In the second and third chapters, the dissertation uses a descriptive strategy to investigate the first research question by investigating policy developments in sixteen rich European democracies combined with a deeper investigation into policy changes in Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands. It shows that a focus on regulations and labor market policy underestimates the variety of strategies governments take to intervene in the balance and outcomes of typical and atypical labor market participants. The chapters identify two empirical policy trajectories. One invests more in a skilled insider workforce but compensates outsider employment less; another invests less but uses more targeted welfare benefits to compensate for atypical employment outcomes. This variation occurs within similar trajectories of employment regulation and labor market policy.This dissertation’s fourth and fifth chapters use qualitative material to investigate influential reform processes in tertiary education and minimum income benefits in Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands. These chapters show that decisions are made in the context of labor market concerns and that where they benefitted diffuse constituencies, decisions to invest in insiders or compensate outsiders were a part of broader reform processes. The findings illustrate patterns of party and economic coalitions that deviate from predictions made by other explanatory accounts.
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