Felix Kersting and Erik Bengtsson revisit a long-standing claim in the social-science literature: that unequal rural class structures—often summarized as "landlordism"—create ideological domination of lower classes and tilt societies toward authoritarian politics. The authors contrast this "authoritarian landlordism" model with an alternative view that rural inequality can instead spur leftist mobilization when landlords fail to maintain hegemony.
Politicians’ prior jobs shape how credible they appear on specific issues, and that credibility helps parties build support for policy agendas.
Karl-Oskar Lindgren, Pär Nyman, and Sven Oskarsson test whether a simple text-message reminder can change voting behavior and whether those effects spread to others. Understanding these spillovers matters for scholars and practitioners who design low-cost mobilization campaigns: if reminders not only affect recipients but also household members or coworkers, the reach and cost-effectiveness of such interventions change considerably.
This article by KĂĄre Vernby, Nazita Lajevardi, and Moa MĂĄrtensson examines whether anticipated discrimination helps explain why racial and ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in Western politics. If minorities expect they will not be welcomed in political roles, that expectation could reduce their willingness to run for office and thereby shape who becomes a candidate and an elected official.
New research explores how birth order influences voter turnout, a factor previously overlooked in political participation studies.
Political responsiveness depends on officials' beliefs about public preferences. Existing work shows those perceptions are often distorted, but two questions remain: why reelection-seeking officials misperceive public preferences, and how to reduce those distortions.
This paper investigates whether the arrival of railroads affected the state’s ability to implement national school policy in nineteenth-century Sweden by making school inspectors more able to monitor remote schools. Using fine-grained local education data, the authors compare communities reachable by rail to those that were not and assess differences in school permanence and curricular content. The paper argues for a causal interpretation for at least some outcomes, and presents more tentative evidence on curricular change.
This study advances the concept of institutional performance voting: voters respond to the quality of public institutions as a whole, not only to isolated cases of corruption. It addresses a puzzle in the literature that finds limited evidence that voters punish corruption by asking whether broader institutional dysfunction provokes electoral penalties.
A general approach to measuring electoral competitiveness for parties and governments that differs from existing proxies in two key ways. First, it estimates the actual probability that an incumbent will be re-elected—bringing the measure closer to the theoretical concept of interest. Second, it combines both pre-electoral competitiveness (uncertainty about the upcoming election outcome) and post-electoral competitiveness (uncertainty about who will form government given an election result).
This study investigates how reform messages framing the welfare state affect public perceptions of future financial sustainability across Germany, Norway, and Sweden.
Partisan shifts can trigger significant turnover in seemingly insulated bureaucracies. This Research Note examines how changes in policy objectives affect screening and selection strategies for agency heads in Sweden's executive bureaucracy (1960-2014). It demonstrates that despite fixed terms and constitutional protections, agency personnel turnover increases considerably after government parties change. The findings suggest political dynamics strongly shape bureaucratic composition even within institutional frameworks designed to insulate expertise.
Many have suggested that expanding mass education could reduce political inequalities stemming from family background. This study examines if a large-scale school reform in Sweden during the 1950s achieved this goal.