This article presents new evidence on the efforts of states to collect and process information about themselves, their territories, and their populations. We compile data on five institutions and policies: the regular implementation of a reliable census, the regular release of statistical yearbooks, the introduction of civil and population registers, and the establishment of a government agency tasked with processing statistical information. Using item response theory methods, we generate an index of “information capacity” for 85 states from 1789 to the present. We then ask how political regime changes have influenced the development of information capacity over time. In contrast with the literature on democracy and fiscal capacity, we find that suffrage expansions are associated with higher information capacity, but increases in the level of political competition are not. These findings demonstrate the value of our new measure, because they suggest that different elements of state capacity are shaped by different historical processes.
This article describes the development of corporatism in Sweden from the 1970s onwards. We demonstrate that the Swedish case differs a great deal from other small European countries, such as the Netherlands and Sweden's neighbour Denmark, where corporatism is alive and well and often credited with providing for economic success in recent years. We study corporatism indirectly rather than directly, in the sense that we start from public policy changes in labour market policy, pensions, and immigrant policy, and follow the policy-making chain backwards in order to identify the norms, institutions, and actors that have mattered for policy choices, and how they mattered. Our conclusion is that Sweden has not only experienced decorporatisation in terms of formal institutional changes, but also in terms of a decline in the norms regarding social partnership that previously guided policy making and the interaction of interest organisations.Across Europe, the 1990s witnessed a resurgence of corporatism, but in Sweden, which once ranked among the world's most corporatist countries, no such thing has occurred. We describe the changes that Swedish corporatism has undergone in the last 30 years from the point of view of public policy. That is, rather than describing institutions and organisations directly -which is the more common approach -we begin by identifying a set of crucial policy decisions and then follow the policy-making chain backwards in order to identify the norms, institutions, and actors that have mattered for policy choices. Evidence from all three policy areas included in our analysis (labour market policy, pensions, and immigrant policy) indicates that decorporatisation in Sweden has gone far -further than in other small, European countries.On the surface, this conclusion is not surprising. It is well known that the relationship between the government and major interest organisations in Sweden has changed over the last decades, especially since the late 1980s (
This Research Note is concerned with the relationship between party politics and the political behavior of insiders and outsiders in the labor market. 'Insiders' have stable and protected employment whereas 'outsiders' have insecure jobs or no jobs at all. Recent work in comparative political economy has identified the increasing political and economic relevance of this distinction. 1 So far, however, most studies of labor market 'dualization' have been concerned with macro-level factors such as political institutions, public policies, and structural economic change, not with individual political behavior. By contrast, we use both macro-level and micro-level evidence in order to examine how party strategies influence individual behavior and vice versa.Our main argument is that center-left parties face a dilemma. If they propose policies that benefit insiders, they may push outsiders to exit politics or support radical parties. If they propose policies that benefit outsiders, they risk losing support among insiders. In order to test this idea, we engage in a detailed analysis of Sweden, the home of what was until recently the world's most powerful center-left party: the Swedish Social Democratic Party. We combine an analysis of election campaigns with an analysis of data from the Swedish National Election Studies, concentrating on the five elections between 1994 and 2010, paying particular attention to the most recent election. We show that in these elections, the distinction between insiders and outsiders mattered to the vote shares of individual parties, to electoral participation, and to the ascendancy of the center-right 'bloc' in Swedish politics. 2 We are not the first to recognize the electoral dilemmas that left-wing parties face. For example, Adam Przeworski and John Sprague emphasized the historical contradiction between winning
I examine the outcomes of 31 parliamentary elections in 26 OECD countries in the period just before, during, and after the Great Recession (from 2007 through early 2011). I attempt to account for the outcomes of these elections on the basis of three factors: (1) economic conditions, (2) the general ideology of the incumbent party or coalition, and (3) specific policy choices in response to the economic crisis. My analyses suggest that voters consistently punished incumbent governments for bad economic conditions, with little apparent regard for the ideology of the government or global economic conditions at the time of the election. I find no evidence of consistent ideological shifts in response to the crisis, either to the left or to the right, but some evidence of electoral responses to specific fiscal policy choices-most notably, a boost in incumbent governments' electoral support associated with spending on economic stimulus programs. These general patterns are illustrated with brief case studies of elections in Spain and Portugal, Germany, and the United States. In general, my results underline the significance of retrospective voting even in periods of severe economic and political stress.
A number of influential studies in political science argue that important economic policy changes in the rich democracies since the mid-1970s were caused by the introduction of new economic ideas. This article claims that while experts exert strong influence over the selection of policy instruments, their influence over the formulation of policy objectives is much weaker. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the predominance of Keynesianism in Austria and Denmark did not lead Austrian and Danish governments to maintain low unemployment longer than Sweden, where Keynesianism was less strong. But it did lead them to regard fiscal policy as an instrument that can be used to control the level of activity in the economy, while their Swedish counterparts relied instead on exchange rate and monetary policy.
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