Olle Folke
Biographic Data
| ID | 358622 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Olle Folke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Olle |
| FAMILY NAME | Folke |
| SIGNATURE | FOLKE O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Uppsala University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7670-4424 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 404 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The seniority ceiling: Why some immigrants struggle to rise in political office
First-generation immigrants face a seniority ceiling that limits their political incorporation as candidates and officeholders. Career ladders that require qualification time in lower positions create structural barriers for this group. We use linked data from Swedish electoral ballots andadministrative records to examine this idea. A novel identification strategy isolates the effect of seniority-based promotion structures from immigrant-specific…
Politicians’ Labor Market Experiences Across Party Families
The Class Ceiling in Politics
Prior studies have documented that working-class individuals rarely become parliamentarians. We know less about when in the career pipeline to parliament workers disappear, and why. We study these questions using detailed data on the universe of Swedish politicians' careers over a 50-year period. We find roughly equal-sized declines in the proportion of workers on various rungs of the political career ladder ranging from local to national office.…
Sexual harassment across occupations: New evidence from Swedish Nationally representative data
This paper describes sexual harassment risks from two groups of perpetrators in Swedish nationally representative survey data. We find that both women and men face elevated risks of intraorganizational sexual harassment from colleagues or managers when working in occupations dominated by the opposite sex. In contrast, they face elevated risks of extraorganizational harassment from outside groups like patients, customers, or clients when working i…
Politicians’ Neighborhoods: Where Do They Live, and Does It Matter
Party Nomination Strategies in List Proportional Representation Systems
In list proportional representation (PR) systems, parties shape political selection. We propose a theory of party list choice and elections in list PR systems. Our results describe how a party allocates candidates of heterogeneous quality across list ranks depending on (1) its policy goals and (2) its competitive environment. We test our predictions on the universe of Swedish local politicians from 1991 to 2014. Although parties assign better can…
Gender and Dynastic Political Selection
Throughout history and across countries, women appear more likely than men to enter politics on the heels of a close family relative or spouse. To explain this dynastic bias in women’s representation, we introduce a theory that integrates political selection decisions with informational inequalities across social groups. Candidates with dynastic ties benefit from the established reputations of their predecessors, but these signals of quality are …
Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders
Sexual harassment is more prevalent for women supervisors than for women employees. This pattern holds in the three countries we studied – the United States, Japan, and Sweden – where women supervisors are between 30 to 100 percent more likely to have been sexually harassed in the last twelve months. Among supervisors, the risk is larger in lower- and mid-level positions of leadership and when subordinates are mostly male. We also find that haras…
Who wins preference votes? An analysis of party loyalty, ideology, and accountability to voters
We study the distribution of preference votes across politicians with different behaviors and attitudes. There are two main findings. First, preference votes are concentrated to politicians who are more active in communicating their policy proposals and policy priorities. This suggests that preference voting may incentivize more transparency and communication among politicians, and, hence, be positive for accountability. Second, preference votes …
Who Becomes A Politician?
Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capital, selecting on competence may lead to uneven representation. This article examines patterns of political selection among the universe of municipal politicians and nationa…
Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden
We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in Swedish data. We use a novel approach, based on register data for the earnings of the whole population, to measure the competence of all politicians in 7 parties, 290 municipalities, and 10 electi…
Dynastic Political Rents? Economic Benefits to Relatives of Top Politicians
We exploit close elections in Swedish municipalities to test whether relatives of politicians who become mayors obtain economic benefits. We find no benefits for the siblings of new mayors, but the average earnings of children of newly appointed mayors rise by about 15%. Administrative information on occupational and residence status show that the higher earnings are unlikely reflect an illegitimate allocation of jobs. But the evidence suggests t…
Electoral Competition and Gender Differences in Political Careers
This paper analyzes the role of competition between political parties for the promotion and turnover of social minorities in party organizations. We collect extensive and reliable panel data for the career trajectories of all Swedish politicians in 290 municipal councils over 20 years (N = 35,000). We argue that political competition pushes local parties to promote the best individual, which in turn improves gender equality at the top. This finds…
The Glass Ceiling in Politics: Formalization and Empirical Tests
There is a scarcity of women at the apex of political power, as well as a lack of methods to disentangle the potential sources of this under-representation. This article suggests a four-step method to test for whether women’s under-representation can be explained by the existence of a “glass ceiling.” We emphasize that this concept implies discrimination in promotions within the political organization, that the discriminatory promotions increase …
Mechanical and Psychological Effects of Electoral Reform
To understand how electoral reform affects political outcomes, one needs to assess its total effect, incorporating how the reform affects the outcomes given the political status quo (the mechanical effects) and the additional reactions of political agents (the psychological effects). This article proposes a framework to ascertain the relative magnitude of mechanical and various psychological effects. The empirical approach is based on pairwise co…
The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions
In this analysis of how electoral rules and outcomes shape the internal organization of political parties, we make an analogy to primary elections to argue that parties use preference-vote tallies to identify popular politicians and promote them to positions of power. We document this behavior among parties in Sweden's semi-open-list system and in Brazil's open-list system. To identify a causal impact of preference votes, we exploit a regression …
A Gubernatorial Helping Hand? How Governors Affect Presidential Elections
It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. To address this question, we use a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to estimate the causal effect of gubernatorial party control. We show that a presidential candidate is in fact hurt by having a governor from the same party. On average, this penalt…
Gender Quotas and Ethnic Minority Representation: Swedish Evidence from a Longitudinal Mixed Methods Study
In this paper, we study the ways in which affirmative action for one political minority, gender quotas, impact on intersectional representation. In a quantitative analysis of detailed panel data from 285 Swedish municipal assemblies, the numerical impact of a zipper placement mandate in Sweden's largest political party, the Social Democratic Party, is analyzed. No evidence that this quota helped, or hindered, the intersectional representation of …
Partisan Imbalance in Regression Discontinuity Studies Based on Electoral Thresholds
Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case e…
Shades of Brown and Green: Party Effects in Proportional Election Systems: Shades of Brown and Green
In proportional representation (PR) systems, political power is typically shared across several political parties. Many parties are small and focused on specific policies, such as environmental policy and immigration. Do these small parties matter for policy? I provide the first systematic evidence for this by developing the first regression discontinuity design tailored specifically for PR systems. With this method, which can be applied in all c…
Elections and reform: The adoption of civil service systems in the U.S. states
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
Gubernatorial Midterm Slumps
This article studies gubernatorial midterm slumps in U.S. state legislative elections. We employ a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to rule out the hypothesis that the midterm slump simply reflects a type of “reversion to the mean” generated by simple partisan swings or the withdrawal of gubernatorial coattails or “anticipatory balancing.” Our results show that the party of the governor experiences an average seat‐share loss of ab…
Patronage and Elections in U.S. States
Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and stat…
The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions
In this analysis of how electoral rules and outcomes shape the internal organization of political parties, we make an analogy to primary elections to argue that parties use preference-vote tallies to identify popular politicians and promote them to positions of power. We document this behavior among parties in Sweden's semi-open-list system and in Brazil's open-list system. To identify a causal impact of preference votes, we exploit a regression …
The Glass Ceiling in Politics: Formalization and Empirical Tests
There is a scarcity of women at the apex of political power, as well as a lack of methods to disentangle the potential sources of this under-representation. This article suggests a four-step method to test for whether women’s under-representation can be explained by the existence of a “glass ceiling.” We emphasize that this concept implies discrimination in promotions within the political organization, that the discriminatory promotions increase …
Patronage and Elections in U.S. States
Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and stat…
Elections and reform: The adoption of civil service systems in the U.S. states
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
Gender and Dynastic Political Selection
Throughout history and across countries, women appear more likely than men to enter politics on the heels of a close family relative or spouse. To explain this dynastic bias in women’s representation, we introduce a theory that integrates political selection decisions with informational inequalities across social groups. Candidates with dynastic ties benefit from the established reputations of their predecessors, but these signals of quality are …
Gubernatorial Midterm Slumps
This article studies gubernatorial midterm slumps in U.S. state legislative elections. We employ a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to rule out the hypothesis that the midterm slump simply reflects a type of “reversion to the mean” generated by simple partisan swings or the withdrawal of gubernatorial coattails or “anticipatory balancing.” Our results show that the party of the governor experiences an average seat‐share loss of ab…
Gender Quotas and Ethnic Minority Representation: Swedish Evidence from a Longitudinal Mixed Methods Study
In this paper, we study the ways in which affirmative action for one political minority, gender quotas, impact on intersectional representation. In a quantitative analysis of detailed panel data from 285 Swedish municipal assemblies, the numerical impact of a zipper placement mandate in Sweden's largest political party, the Social Democratic Party, is analyzed. No evidence that this quota helped, or hindered, the intersectional representation of …
Mechanical and Psychological Effects of Electoral Reform
To understand how electoral reform affects political outcomes, one needs to assess its total effect, incorporating how the reform affects the outcomes given the political status quo (the mechanical effects) and the additional reactions of political agents (the psychological effects). This article proposes a framework to ascertain the relative magnitude of mechanical and various psychological effects. The empirical approach is based on pairwise co…
Who wins preference votes? An analysis of party loyalty, ideology, and accountability to voters
We study the distribution of preference votes across politicians with different behaviors and attitudes. There are two main findings. First, preference votes are concentrated to politicians who are more active in communicating their policy proposals and policy priorities. This suggests that preference voting may incentivize more transparency and communication among politicians, and, hence, be positive for accountability. Second, preference votes …
A Gubernatorial Helping Hand? How Governors Affect Presidential Elections
It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. To address this question, we use a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to estimate the causal effect of gubernatorial party control. We show that a presidential candidate is in fact hurt by having a governor from the same party. On average, this penalt…
Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders
Sexual harassment is more prevalent for women supervisors than for women employees. This pattern holds in the three countries we studied – the United States, Japan, and Sweden – where women supervisors are between 30 to 100 percent more likely to have been sexually harassed in the last twelve months. Among supervisors, the risk is larger in lower- and mid-level positions of leadership and when subordinates are mostly male. We also find that haras…
Party Nomination Strategies in List Proportional Representation Systems
In list proportional representation (PR) systems, parties shape political selection. We propose a theory of party list choice and elections in list PR systems. Our results describe how a party allocates candidates of heterogeneous quality across list ranks depending on (1) its policy goals and (2) its competitive environment. We test our predictions on the universe of Swedish local politicians from 1991 to 2014. Although parties assign better can…
Dynastic Political Rents? Economic Benefits to Relatives of Top Politicians
We exploit close elections in Swedish municipalities to test whether relatives of politicians who become mayors obtain economic benefits. We find no benefits for the siblings of new mayors, but the average earnings of children of newly appointed mayors rise by about 15%. Administrative information on occupational and residence status show that the higher earnings are unlikely reflect an illegitimate allocation of jobs. But the evidence suggests t…
Electoral Competition and Gender Differences in Political Careers
This paper analyzes the role of competition between political parties for the promotion and turnover of social minorities in party organizations. We collect extensive and reliable panel data for the career trajectories of all Swedish politicians in 290 municipal councils over 20 years (N = 35,000). We argue that political competition pushes local parties to promote the best individual, which in turn improves gender equality at the top. This finds…
Partisan Imbalance in Regression Discontinuity Studies Based on Electoral Thresholds
Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case e…
The Class Ceiling in Politics
Prior studies have documented that working-class individuals rarely become parliamentarians. We know less about when in the career pipeline to parliament workers disappear, and why. We study these questions using detailed data on the universe of Swedish politicians' careers over a 50-year period. We find roughly equal-sized declines in the proportion of workers on various rungs of the political career ladder ranging from local to national office.…
Politicians’ Neighborhoods: Where Do They Live, and Does It Matter
Politicians’ Labor Market Experiences Across Party Families
Patronage and Elections in U.S. States
Does control of patronage jobs significantly increase a political party's chances of winning elections in U.S. states? We employ a differences-in-differences design, exploiting the considerable variation in the dates that different states adopted civil service reforms. Our evidence suggests that political parties in U.S. states were able to use state-level patronage to increase the probability of maintaining control of state legislatures and stat…
Elections and reform: The adoption of civil service systems in the U.S. states
Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to “politicize” the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to vo…
Gubernatorial Midterm Slumps
This article studies gubernatorial midterm slumps in U.S. state legislative elections. We employ a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to rule out the hypothesis that the midterm slump simply reflects a type of “reversion to the mean” generated by simple partisan swings or the withdrawal of gubernatorial coattails or “anticipatory balancing.” Our results show that the party of the governor experiences an average seat‐share loss of ab…
Shades of Brown and Green: Party Effects in Proportional Election Systems: Shades of Brown and Green
In proportional representation (PR) systems, political power is typically shared across several political parties. Many parties are small and focused on specific policies, such as environmental policy and immigration. Do these small parties matter for policy? I provide the first systematic evidence for this by developing the first regression discontinuity design tailored specifically for PR systems. With this method, which can be applied in all c…
A Gubernatorial Helping Hand? How Governors Affect Presidential Elections
It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. To address this question, we use a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to estimate the causal effect of gubernatorial party control. We show that a presidential candidate is in fact hurt by having a governor from the same party. On average, this penalt…
Gender Quotas and Ethnic Minority Representation: Swedish Evidence from a Longitudinal Mixed Methods Study
In this paper, we study the ways in which affirmative action for one political minority, gender quotas, impact on intersectional representation. In a quantitative analysis of detailed panel data from 285 Swedish municipal assemblies, the numerical impact of a zipper placement mandate in Sweden's largest political party, the Social Democratic Party, is analyzed. No evidence that this quota helped, or hindered, the intersectional representation of …
Partisan Imbalance in Regression Discontinuity Studies Based on Electoral Thresholds
Many articles use regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) that exploit the discontinuity in “close” election outcomes to identify various political and economic outcomes of interest. One of the most important types of diagnostic tests in an RDD is checking for balance in observable variables within the window on either side of the threshold. Finding an imbalance raises concerns that an unobservable variable may exist that affects whether a case e…
Electoral Competition and Gender Differences in Political Careers
This paper analyzes the role of competition between political parties for the promotion and turnover of social minorities in party organizations. We collect extensive and reliable panel data for the career trajectories of all Swedish politicians in 290 municipal councils over 20 years (N = 35,000). We argue that political competition pushes local parties to promote the best individual, which in turn improves gender equality at the top. This finds…
The Glass Ceiling in Politics: Formalization and Empirical Tests
There is a scarcity of women at the apex of political power, as well as a lack of methods to disentangle the potential sources of this under-representation. This article suggests a four-step method to test for whether women’s under-representation can be explained by the existence of a “glass ceiling.” We emphasize that this concept implies discrimination in promotions within the political organization, that the discriminatory promotions increase …
Mechanical and Psychological Effects of Electoral Reform
To understand how electoral reform affects political outcomes, one needs to assess its total effect, incorporating how the reform affects the outcomes given the political status quo (the mechanical effects) and the additional reactions of political agents (the psychological effects). This article proposes a framework to ascertain the relative magnitude of mechanical and various psychological effects. The empirical approach is based on pairwise co…
The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions
In this analysis of how electoral rules and outcomes shape the internal organization of political parties, we make an analogy to primary elections to argue that parties use preference-vote tallies to identify popular politicians and promote them to positions of power. We document this behavior among parties in Sweden's semi-open-list system and in Brazil's open-list system. To identify a causal impact of preference votes, we exploit a regression …
Who Becomes A Politician?
Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capital, selecting on competence may lead to uneven representation. This article examines patterns of political selection among the universe of municipal politicians and nationa…
Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden
We develop a model where party leaders choose the competence of politicians on the ballot to trade off electoral success against their own survival. The predicted correlation between the competence of party leaders and followers is strongly supported in Swedish data. We use a novel approach, based on register data for the earnings of the whole population, to measure the competence of all politicians in 7 parties, 290 municipalities, and 10 electi…
Dynastic Political Rents? Economic Benefits to Relatives of Top Politicians
We exploit close elections in Swedish municipalities to test whether relatives of politicians who become mayors obtain economic benefits. We find no benefits for the siblings of new mayors, but the average earnings of children of newly appointed mayors rise by about 15%. Administrative information on occupational and residence status show that the higher earnings are unlikely reflect an illegitimate allocation of jobs. But the evidence suggests t…
Sexual Harassment of Women Leaders
Sexual harassment is more prevalent for women supervisors than for women employees. This pattern holds in the three countries we studied – the United States, Japan, and Sweden – where women supervisors are between 30 to 100 percent more likely to have been sexually harassed in the last twelve months. Among supervisors, the risk is larger in lower- and mid-level positions of leadership and when subordinates are mostly male. We also find that haras…
Who wins preference votes? An analysis of party loyalty, ideology, and accountability to voters
We study the distribution of preference votes across politicians with different behaviors and attitudes. There are two main findings. First, preference votes are concentrated to politicians who are more active in communicating their policy proposals and policy priorities. This suggests that preference voting may incentivize more transparency and communication among politicians, and, hence, be positive for accountability. Second, preference votes …
Gender and Dynastic Political Selection
Throughout history and across countries, women appear more likely than men to enter politics on the heels of a close family relative or spouse. To explain this dynastic bias in women’s representation, we introduce a theory that integrates political selection decisions with informational inequalities across social groups. Candidates with dynastic ties benefit from the established reputations of their predecessors, but these signals of quality are …
Party Nomination Strategies in List Proportional Representation Systems
In list proportional representation (PR) systems, parties shape political selection. We propose a theory of party list choice and elections in list PR systems. Our results describe how a party allocates candidates of heterogeneous quality across list ranks depending on (1) its policy goals and (2) its competitive environment. We test our predictions on the universe of Swedish local politicians from 1991 to 2014. Although parties assign better can…
Politicians’ Neighborhoods: Where Do They Live, and Does It Matter
Politicians’ Labor Market Experiences Across Party Families
The Class Ceiling in Politics
Prior studies have documented that working-class individuals rarely become parliamentarians. We know less about when in the career pipeline to parliament workers disappear, and why. We study these questions using detailed data on the universe of Swedish politicians' careers over a 50-year period. We find roughly equal-sized declines in the proportion of workers on various rungs of the political career ladder ranging from local to national office.…
Sexual harassment across occupations: New evidence from Swedish Nationally representative data
This paper describes sexual harassment risks from two groups of perpetrators in Swedish nationally representative survey data. We find that both women and men face elevated risks of intraorganizational sexual harassment from colleagues or managers when working in occupations dominated by the opposite sex. In contrast, they face elevated risks of extraorganizational harassment from outside groups like patients, customers, or clients when working i…
The seniority ceiling: Why some immigrants struggle to rise in political office
First-generation immigrants face a seniority ceiling that limits their political incorporation as candidates and officeholders. Career ladders that require qualification time in lower positions create structural barriers for this group. We use linked data from Swedish electoral ballots andadministrative records to examine this idea. A novel identification strategy isolates the effect of seniority-based promotion structures from immigrant-specific…
Economics (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Demographic economics (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (8 works)