Sven Steinmo
Biographic Data
| ID | 194936 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sven Steinmo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sven |
| FAMILY NAME | Steinmo |
| SIGNATURE | STEINMO S |
| AFFILIATIONS | European University Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3162-8741 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 394 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Preferences for honesty can support cooperation
Many collective action problems are inherently linked to honesty. By deciding to behave honestly, people contribute to solving the collective action problem. We use a laboratory experiment from two sites ( n = 331 and n = 319) to test whether honest preferences can drive cooperation and whether these preferences can be differentially activated by framing. Subjects participate in an asymmetric information variant of the public goods game in one of…
Do experienced subjects bias experimental results? Evidence from 16 laboratories in six countries
This paper addresses an area of growing concerns for laboratory researchers: is subjects’ behaviour affected by prior experiences in laboratory experiments? We address the question with a large and highly diverse international dataset and an operationalisation strategy that allows our findings to cohere with previous work while shedding new light on future research. The findings presented in this article are drawn from original data gathered as p…
Do Citizens Want Something for Nothing? Mass Attitudes and the Federal Budget
Prior research has shown that citizens demand more public spending for government services but are unwilling to support tax increases to cover the increased costs. Yet the basis for this observed inconsistency in fiscal preferences remains unclear. Some scholars propose that the desire “something for nothing” could be the result of citizens lacking knowledge about taxation, public spending, and the inherent trade‐offs between the two sides of the…
Assessing the stability of fiscal attitudes: Evidence from a survey experiment
The literature on attitudes toward government budgets has been dominated by two distinct approaches, jointly studying both sides of the ledger (holistic approaches) and studying attitudes over spending and revenue separately (singular approaches). Despite both approaches being widely adopted, scholars have given limited attention to testing empirically how methodological differences in the approaches may affect measures of fiscal attitudes and th…
Trust in institutions: Narrowing the ideological gap over the federal budget
Do liberals and conservatives who trust the government have more similar preferences regarding the federal budget than liberals and conservatives who do not? Prior research has shown that the ideological gap over spending increases and tax cuts narrows at high levels of trust in government. We extend this literature by examining whether the dampening effect of trust operates when more difficult budgetary decisions (spending cuts and tax increases…
How Institutions and Attitudes Shape Tax Compliance: A Cross-National Experiment and Survey
Tax evasion is a problem everywhere, but it is a much bigger policy problem in some countries than it is in others. The Italian government estimates that it loses more than 27 percent of total tax revenue to evasion, whereas the Swedish government estimates their “tax gap” to be less than 9 percent. What explains this variation? We test for the importance of culturally based attitudes and institutionally structured rules for taxes and benefits th…
Willing to share? Tax compliance and gender in Europe and America
Studies examining the effects of gender on honesty, deceptive behavior, pro-sociality, and risk aversion, often find significant differences between men and women. The present study contributes to the debate by exploiting one of the largest tax compliance experiments to date in a highly controlled environment conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Italy. Our expectation was that the differences between men’s and women’s b…
Wendt’s Challenge to Social Science: Quantum Physics, Consciousness, and Society
Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science challenges social scientists to replace contemporary understandings of the individual and society with concepts better suited to quantum reality. This would mean replacing reductionist materialism with notions of consciousness as probabilistic, not strictly determined; and substituting, for individualistic models of society, new ones that acknowledged our connectedness to each other “at a distance…
Institutionalism
The Bumble Bee and the Chrysanthemum: Comparing Sweden and Japan's Responses to Financial Crisis
Reinhart and Rogoff's influential book, This Time is Different (2009), argues that financial crises over the past eight centuries have had similar causes and consequences across diverse societies. The authors make an important empirical contribution to our knowledge of financial crises by showing that excessive borrowing, debt-fuelled asset values, and exuberance about ever-increasing prices are central elements in all of them. They also remind u…
How Institutions Evolve: Evolutionary Theory and Institutional Change
This paper is also the product of the insightful contributions of numerous participants in the workshop “Do Institutions Evolve?” held in May 2009 at the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute
The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan, and the United States
The Evolution of Modern States, first published in 2010, is a significant contribution to the literatures on political economy, globalization, historical institutionalism, and social science methodology. The book begins with a simple question: why do rich capitalist democracies respond so differently to the common pressures they face in the early twenty-first century? Drawing on insights from evolutionary theory, Sven Steinmo challenges the commo…
Growing Apart?: America and Europe in the 21st Century
The evolution of modern states: Sweden, Japan, and the United States
The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan, and the United States examines the politics, history, and public policy of three countries in three different continents. Written from an evolutionary perspective, it shows how these countries' economic systems, social welfare policies, and political institutions have co-evolved over time to give these countries remarkably different abilities to adapt to the pressures they face in the twenty-first ce…
The End of the Strong State?: On the Evolution of Japanese Tax Policy
Japan has long been held up as a model of fiscal discipline and budget restraint. Indeed, Japan has held the remarkable distinction of being the country with the lowest budget deficits and the lowest levels of public spending of any of the rich Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations almost the entire postwar period. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, when most other advanced capitalist democracies were buildi…
Historical institutionalism
Historical institutionalism is neither a particular theory nor a specific method. It is best understood as an approach to studying politics and social change. This approach is distinguished from other social science approaches by its attention to real-world empirical questions, its historical orientation and its attention to the ways in which institutions structure and shape behaviour and outcomes. Although the term ‘historical institutionalism’ …
Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences: A Pluralist Perspective
A revolutionary new textbook introducing masters and doctoral students to the major research approaches and methodologies in the social sciences. Written by an outstanding set of scholars, and derived from successful course teaching, this volume will empower students to choose their own approach to research, to justify this approach, and to situate it within the discipline. It addresses questions of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of social…
Growing Apart: America and Europe in the 21st Century
The Evolution of the Swedish Model
Sweden provides an excellent case to study the effects of globalization on advanced welfare states for several reasons. Indeed, this case study provides a particularly interesting example of how a specific country has coped, adapted to and internalized the pressures imposed by global competition in recent years (Chapter 1, this volume) precisely because it is the country that many analysts have predicted would be forced to succumb to the supposed…
The Evolution of Policy Ideas: Tax Policy in the 20 th Century
This analysis traces the evolution of ideas about one of the most important policies facing any state: taxation. The article will demonstrate that elite ideas about tax policy have changed dramatically over the past century and that these ideas have had enormous consequences for the development of the modern state. This article argues that there is an iterative, interdependent and dynamic relationship between policy makers' ideas, political insti…
Bucking the Trend? The Welfare State and the Global Economy: The Swedish Case Up Close
This article was downloaded by: [Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen]On: 3 March 2009Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 907435713]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Restructuring Politics: Institutional Analysis and the Challenges of Modern Welfare States
This volume pursues two basic themes—the first empirical, the second theoretical. Substantively, we are interested in exploring the ways in which modern welfare states have dealt with the challenges offered them at the end of the twentieth century There are a number of forces that appear to impinge upon and challenge some of the fundamental assumptions and institutions that have been central to the welfare state for at least the last half of the …
Restructuring the Welfare State: Political Institutions and Policy Change
The modern welfare state is under threat from a variety of fronts. Changing demographic patterns, declining public trust, interest group demands and growing international competition for capital and l
The Political Economy of Taxes and Redistribution in Japan
The past decade has seen a highly polarized debate concerning the Japanese fiscal system, particularly the role of income tax. Several authors argue that Japanese income tax is grossly unfair to low‐ and middle‐income taxpayers, while others depict it as the most progressive in the industrialized world. Indeed, many critics claim that it is too progressive, and some even denounce it as ‘socialist’. What is sorely lacking is an account that places…
Globalization and Taxation: Challenges to the Swedish Welfare State
Many have argued that the increased international mobility of both capital and labor witnessed in recent years will force advanced capitalist democracies to cut taxes and, thus, ultimately roll back their welfare states. This analysis tests this hypothesis through an examination of policy developments in Sweden, the country with the world's heaviest tax burden and largest social welfare state. The analysis focuses on the history and structure of …
The New Political Economy of Taxation in Advanced Capitalist Democracies
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1-5, Atlanta, GA, and the 2000 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 27-30, Chicago, IL. The authors thank Steffen Ganghof, Philip Genschel, Mark Hallerberg, Alex Hicks, William Keech, Dennis Quinn, and the anonymous reviewers and editor of this journal for many helpful comments and Dennis …
Political Institutions and Tax Policy in the United States, Sweden, and Britain
This essay addresses the question, “Why do different democracies pursue different public policies?” through an examination of taxation policy in the United States, Sweden, and Britain. The essay demonstrates how the different decision-making structures found in these three democracies (characterized as pluralist, corporatist, and party government systems, respectively) bias each polity toward different types of policy outcomes. The key argument i…
The Evolution of Policy Ideas: Tax Policy in the 20 th Century
This analysis traces the evolution of ideas about one of the most important policies facing any state: taxation. The article will demonstrate that elite ideas about tax policy have changed dramatically over the past century and that these ideas have had enormous consequences for the development of the modern state. This article argues that there is an iterative, interdependent and dynamic relationship between policy makers' ideas, political insti…
How Institutions Evolve: Evolutionary Theory and Institutional Change
This paper is also the product of the insightful contributions of numerous participants in the workshop “Do Institutions Evolve?” held in May 2009 at the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute
The New Institutionalism in Political Science and Sociology
Whenever a concept is packaged as new, social scientists are apt to be wary, and for good reason. Fads come and go. The enormous number of dissertations, schools of thought, books, and articles based upon prefixes such as post, neo, and which enjoyed a brief stint in the bright sunshine of glory at various conventions only to disappear a few months later serves as a reminder of social science's tendency to reinvent the wheel. Nelson Polsby's ques…
Do Institutions Really Matter: Taxation in Industrialized Democracies
New institutionalism has emerged as one of the most prominent research agendas in the field of comparative politics, political economy, and public policy. This article examines the role of institutional variation in political/economic regimes in shaping tax burdens in industrialized democracies. An institutionalist model for tax policy variation is tested across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) democracies. Countri…
Globalization and Taxation: Challenges to the Swedish Welfare State
Many have argued that the increased international mobility of both capital and labor witnessed in recent years will force advanced capitalist democracies to cut taxes and, thus, ultimately roll back their welfare states. This analysis tests this hypothesis through an examination of policy developments in Sweden, the country with the world's heaviest tax burden and largest social welfare state. The analysis focuses on the history and structure of …
Social Democracy vs. Socialism: Goal Adaptation in Social Democratic Sweden
Bucking the Trend? The Welfare State and the Global Economy: The Swedish Case Up Close
This article was downloaded by: [Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen]On: 3 March 2009Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 907435713]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Why is Government So Small in America
The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act, in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling, with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved in their pocket (James Madison, Federalist 10
Do Citizens Want Something for Nothing? Mass Attitudes and the Federal Budget
Prior research has shown that citizens demand more public spending for government services but are unwilling to support tax increases to cover the increased costs. Yet the basis for this observed inconsistency in fiscal preferences remains unclear. Some scholars propose that the desire “something for nothing” could be the result of citizens lacking knowledge about taxation, public spending, and the inherent trade‐offs between the two sides of the…
Willing to share? Tax compliance and gender in Europe and America
Studies examining the effects of gender on honesty, deceptive behavior, pro-sociality, and risk aversion, often find significant differences between men and women. The present study contributes to the debate by exploiting one of the largest tax compliance experiments to date in a highly controlled environment conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Italy. Our expectation was that the differences between men’s and women’s b…
The Influence of Party Competition on Post-War UK Tax Rates
This paper is concerned with the influence of the British system of ‘party government’ on tax policy outputs. It has been argued that parties make little difference (Rose, 1984) and have only a minimal influence on the trends in tax revenues (Karran, 1985). This paper examines the post-war trends in the rates of income tax, corporation tax and consumption taxes in the UK. It is argued that there is a relationship between the trend in tax rates an…
Assessing the stability of fiscal attitudes: Evidence from a survey experiment
The literature on attitudes toward government budgets has been dominated by two distinct approaches, jointly studying both sides of the ledger (holistic approaches) and studying attitudes over spending and revenue separately (singular approaches). Despite both approaches being widely adopted, scholars have given limited attention to testing empirically how methodological differences in the approaches may affect measures of fiscal attitudes and th…
Wendt’s Challenge to Social Science: Quantum Physics, Consciousness, and Society
Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science challenges social scientists to replace contemporary understandings of the individual and society with concepts better suited to quantum reality. This would mean replacing reductionist materialism with notions of consciousness as probabilistic, not strictly determined; and substituting, for individualistic models of society, new ones that acknowledged our connectedness to each other “at a distance…
The Influence of Party Competition on Post-War UK Tax Rates
This paper is concerned with the influence of the British system of ‘party government’ on tax policy outputs. It has been argued that parties make little difference (Rose, 1984) and have only a minimal influence on the trends in tax revenues (Karran, 1985). This paper examines the post-war trends in the rates of income tax, corporation tax and consumption taxes in the UK. It is argued that there is a relationship between the trend in tax rates an…
Social Democracy vs. Socialism: Goal Adaptation in Social Democratic Sweden
Political Institutions and Tax Policy in the United States, Sweden, and Britain
This essay addresses the question, “Why do different democracies pursue different public policies?” through an examination of taxation policy in the United States, Sweden, and Britain. The essay demonstrates how the different decision-making structures found in these three democracies (characterized as pluralist, corporatist, and party government systems, respectively) bias each polity toward different types of policy outcomes. The key argument i…
Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis
This volume brings together original essays by scholars working on a diverse range of empirical issues, but whose work is in each case informed by a 'historical institutional' approach to the study of politics. By bringing these pieces together, the volume highlights the methodological and theoretical foundations of this approach and illustrates the general contributions it has made to comparative politics. The essays demonstrate the potential of…
Historical institutionalism in comparative politics
The "rediscovery" of institutions has opened up an exciting research agenda in comparative politics and comparative political economy. Scholars working in different disciplines and writing on subjects as diverse as the political economy of advanced capitalism and policy-making during China's Great Leap Forward have all focused on the significance of institutional variables for explaining outcomes in their respective fields. Within comparative pol…
Taxation and democracy: Swedish, British, and American approaches to financing the modern state
Beyond State versus Society
It's the Institutions, Stupid! Why Comprehensive National Health Insurance Always Fails in America
We argue that the United States does not have comprehensive national health insurance (NHI) because American political institutions are biased against this type of reform. The original design of a fragmented and federated national political system serving an increasingly large and diverse polity has been further fragmented by a series of political reforms beginning with the Progressive era and culminating with the congressional reforms of the mid…
Why is Government So Small in America
The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act, in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling, with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved in their pocket (James Madison, Federalist 10
The New Institutionalism in Political Science and Sociology
Whenever a concept is packaged as new, social scientists are apt to be wary, and for good reason. Fads come and go. The enormous number of dissertations, schools of thought, books, and articles based upon prefixes such as post, neo, and which enjoyed a brief stint in the bright sunshine of glory at various conventions only to disappear a few months later serves as a reminder of social science's tendency to reinvent the wheel. Nelson Polsby's ques…
Estructurando la política. El papel de las instituciones
Do Institutions Really Matter: Taxation in Industrialized Democracies
New institutionalism has emerged as one of the most prominent research agendas in the field of comparative politics, political economy, and public policy. This article examines the role of institutional variation in political/economic regimes in shaping tax burdens in industrialized democracies. An institutionalist model for tax policy variation is tested across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) democracies. Countri…
Gazette
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Restructuring Politics: Institutional Analysis and the Challenges of Modern Welfare States
This volume pursues two basic themes—the first empirical, the second theoretical. Substantively, we are interested in exploring the ways in which modern welfare states have dealt with the challenges offered them at the end of the twentieth century There are a number of forces that appear to impinge upon and challenge some of the fundamental assumptions and institutions that have been central to the welfare state for at least the last half of the …
Restructuring the Welfare State: Political Institutions and Policy Change
The modern welfare state is under threat from a variety of fronts. Changing demographic patterns, declining public trust, interest group demands and growing international competition for capital and l
The Political Economy of Taxes and Redistribution in Japan
The past decade has seen a highly polarized debate concerning the Japanese fiscal system, particularly the role of income tax. Several authors argue that Japanese income tax is grossly unfair to low‐ and middle‐income taxpayers, while others depict it as the most progressive in the industrialized world. Indeed, many critics claim that it is too progressive, and some even denounce it as ‘socialist’. What is sorely lacking is an account that places…
Globalization and Taxation: Challenges to the Swedish Welfare State
Many have argued that the increased international mobility of both capital and labor witnessed in recent years will force advanced capitalist democracies to cut taxes and, thus, ultimately roll back their welfare states. This analysis tests this hypothesis through an examination of policy developments in Sweden, the country with the world's heaviest tax burden and largest social welfare state. The analysis focuses on the history and structure of …
The New Political Economy of Taxation in Advanced Capitalist Democracies
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1-5, Atlanta, GA, and the 2000 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 27-30, Chicago, IL. The authors thank Steffen Ganghof, Philip Genschel, Mark Hallerberg, Alex Hicks, William Keech, Dennis Quinn, and the anonymous reviewers and editor of this journal for many helpful comments and Dennis …
The Evolution of Policy Ideas: Tax Policy in the 20 th Century
This analysis traces the evolution of ideas about one of the most important policies facing any state: taxation. The article will demonstrate that elite ideas about tax policy have changed dramatically over the past century and that these ideas have had enormous consequences for the development of the modern state. This article argues that there is an iterative, interdependent and dynamic relationship between policy makers' ideas, political insti…
Bucking the Trend? The Welfare State and the Global Economy: The Swedish Case Up Close
This article was downloaded by: [Universitetsbiblioteket i Bergen]On: 3 March 2009Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 907435713]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
The Evolution of the Swedish Model
Sweden provides an excellent case to study the effects of globalization on advanced welfare states for several reasons. Indeed, this case study provides a particularly interesting example of how a specific country has coped, adapted to and internalized the pressures imposed by global competition in recent years (Chapter 1, this volume) precisely because it is the country that many analysts have predicted would be forced to succumb to the supposed…
Growing Apart: America and Europe in the 21st Century
Historical institutionalism
Historical institutionalism is neither a particular theory nor a specific method. It is best understood as an approach to studying politics and social change. This approach is distinguished from other social science approaches by its attention to real-world empirical questions, its historical orientation and its attention to the ways in which institutions structure and shape behaviour and outcomes. Although the term ‘historical institutionalism’ …
Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences: A Pluralist Perspective
A revolutionary new textbook introducing masters and doctoral students to the major research approaches and methodologies in the social sciences. Written by an outstanding set of scholars, and derived from successful course teaching, this volume will empower students to choose their own approach to research, to justify this approach, and to situate it within the discipline. It addresses questions of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of social…
The End of the Strong State?: On the Evolution of Japanese Tax Policy
Japan has long been held up as a model of fiscal discipline and budget restraint. Indeed, Japan has held the remarkable distinction of being the country with the lowest budget deficits and the lowest levels of public spending of any of the rich Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations almost the entire postwar period. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, when most other advanced capitalist democracies were buildi…
Political science (31 works) · Economics (27 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (13 works) · Economic system (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (8 works)