In this paper, we review and comment upon the development of the literature on diversity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In an overview of previous studies and various strands of literatures, we outline and argue that to better understand the intricate dynamic relationships between diversity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and regional development there is a strong need to further develop "the economics of spatial diversity." We further argue that this development may benefit from combining various literatures based upon sound economic micro-foundations, to develop a more absolute understanding of diversity and fulfill the need of more clear mechanisms for future empirical testing. Obviously, this is important both from a research point of view and in order to provide policymakers with a powerful set of analytical tools. We call for more analytical work and more high-quality empirical studies. With a set of papers, we believe this special issue to provide a contribution in this direction.
In a number of recent elections in Western Europe, support for far-right populist parties has been significantly higher in non-urban areas than in urban areas. This paper answers the following questions; (1) Can the urban–rural divide in voting behavior be explained by the fact that urban and non-urban populations differ in terms of education, income and other individual characteristics of voters, or by variations in immigration? (2) Can variations in public service supply explain parts of the urban–rural divide in far-right populist support? and (3) How does population growth and public services relate to voting behavior when examining urban and rural municipalities separately? The analyses combine survey data on individual characteristics and register data aggregated on municipalities. The results in this paper suggest that voter characteristics and immigration explain a substantial part of the urban–rural divide. However, the propensity to vote for a far-right populist party is still higher in regions with lower population growth even when controlling for individual characteristics and immigration. When considering public service supply, the urban–rural divide is further weakened. The propensity to vote for a far-right party decreases with higher public service supply and higher share of immigrants. The findings in this paper thereby support the hypothesis that individuals in shrinking areas with lower access to public services are likely to respond to the deterioration of their location by casting a vote on the far-right (i.e., protest voting).
This study investigates the role of media owners for the political bias of newspapers in Sweden, using an original dataset on outlets, consumer preferences, and ownership between January 2014 and April 2019. We construct an index of slant based on similarities in the language between newspapers and speeches given by members of parliament.Our results indicate that newspapers held by the same owner tend to offer the same mix of slant, rather than aligning their bias with consumer preferences in their area of circulation.Owners are even less inclined to differentiate the slant across outlets before elections, when the political returns to persuasion are high. We find no evidence that owners impose a one-size-fits-all slant because product differentiation is too costly. In addition, we find suggestive evidence of owner-independent bias induced by the writers of opinion articles. The Swedish context illustrates that supply-driven slant cannot be ruled out in market-based media systems if the ties between media and politics are strong. | INTRODUCTIONPolitical media slant 1 can be driven by the demand side and the supply side of the news market. According to demand-side explanations, consumers often have a preference for news that confirms their existing beliefs. 1 We define political media slant as bias in news coverage that favors a certain ideology or political party. This bias may occur in the form of distortion or filtering, where the former implies that outlets frame the same fact in different ways, whereas the latter refers to the selection of facts and topics covered (Gentzkow et al., 2015).
In this paper we use survey and register data combined to examine how the view of the capital city among those living in other regions relates to geographic factors and the development of the home region. Our findings indicate that individuals who perceive the development of their own region as “less advantageous” are prone to say that Stockholm has a negative effect on their own area as well as on Sweden overall. These individuals tend to live in regions with negative migration, farther away from the capital region, and tend to have lower trust for e.g., politicians and scientists.
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