Local governments are increasingly relying on municipally owned corporations (MOCs) to provide public services. Some describe this development as a rational response to austerity challenges and emphasise the cost-efficiency of MOCs ('the optimistic view'). Others identify complications and associate MOCs with weak supervision, lack of accountability, and corruption risks ('the sceptical view'). Hitherto, no studies have analysed these opposing claims on MOCs in the one and same inquiry. We address this gap by focusing on Sweden, which has experienced a dramatic growth in the number of MOCs. We examine the association between the number of MOCs, the business climate, satisfaction with local government, local tax rates, and a corruption index for all 290 Swedish municipalities. Putting the 'optimistic view' into doubt, results indicate that municipalities relying heavily on MOCs are associated with more perceived corruption and higher taxes but do not have more satisfied citizens nor a better business climate.
Facing the threat of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines are important for limiting the spread and consequences of the pandemic. In this study, we provide a descriptive overview of the within-country variations of vaccine rates by examining to what extent voter turnout, support for an anti-establishment political party (Sweden Democrats), presence of first-generation immigrants, and Evangelical religiosity are associated with the within-country variation in vaccine uptake rates. We use official register data for municipality-level vaccine rates and municipality-level regressions with regional fixed effects. Our analyses show that vaccine uptake, on average, is lower in municipalities where the anti-establishment political party Sweden Democrats has higher vote shares and where a larger share of the population is first-generation immigrants. We discuss that potential explanations for these associations between vote shares for an anti-establishment party and shares of first-generation immigrants could be lower levels of trust in institutions and language barriers.
Transparency is recognized as a crucial condition for accountability, good governance and democracy. As right to information (RTI) laws have spread, it is crucial to ask whether ambitious legislative frameworks translate to de facto transparency. In this article, we test how well local governments in Sweden – a ‘most-likely country’ for implementing RTI-laws – comply with its comparatively ambitious Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act. As a side-effect, we also gauge if New Public Management-reforms, here illustrated by increased public ownership of enterprises in local government, implies lessened compliance with RTI-legislation. Requesting information from 462 randomly selected public administrations and municipally owned enterprises, counter-intuitive findings are observed. Less than half of the organizations respected the RTI-legislation, and no significant differences were found between the public administrations and publicly owned enterprises. The findings have methodological as well as empirical implications. They highlight the importance of not only studying legislative frameworks, but also analyzing actual implementation of RTI-frameworks in everyday situations. Also, they demonstrate that problems relating to openness can be observed in low-corrupt, mature democracies with strong bureaucratic capacity that traditionally are hailed for their long history of ambitious RTI-laws. Lastly, and contrary to much popular belief, the findings indicate that publicly owned corporations not necessarily do imply a ‘accountability deficit’.
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