Johanna Rickne
Biographic Data
| ID | 358623 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Johanna Rickne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Johanna |
| FAMILY NAME | Rickne |
| SIGNATURE | RICKNE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3733-7606 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 385 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
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…
The Swedish historical municipal council database
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
Working Mothers and Political Daughters: Intergenerational Dynamics of Women's Political Officeholding
We study a new driving factor of women's inclusion in politics: the economic empowerment of their mothers. We evaluate Swedish microdata on politicians and their parents over fifty years. The results demonstrate a strong intergenerational dynamic from mothers to daughters. Female politicians come from households where their mother is more likely to be employed, earns more in the labour market, and earns a larger share of household earnings. This …
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…
Inequality in Social Insurance Participation and Generosity: Do Firm Characteristics Matter
Income inequality in China has been much documented and debated. However, one important aspect of income inequality – social insurance inequality – has been largely understudied. We use a large national panel of firm data to examine the possible influence of various firm characteristics on the inequalities in social insurance participation and generosity in the period 2004–07. Our findings reveal substantial ownership sector and regional gaps in …
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 …
Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership
Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment-a 50-50 quota imposed by the national board of the Swedish Social Democratic Party on 290 municipal branches-to examine quotas' influence on women's selection to, and survival in, top political posts. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became…
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 …
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 …
Firm Ownership and Social Insurance Inequality in Transitional China: Evidence from a Large Panel of Firm-Level Data
In dramatic reforms during the past 15 years, China has aimed to create a unified social insurance system across state, collective, and private ownership sectors in urban areas. Despite this nominal equality, a large panel of firm-level data from 2004 to 2007 provides empirical evidence of large disparities between firm ownership sectors in social insurance participation and generosity. We examine three types of social insurance programme: pensio…
When Does Intimate Partner Violence Continue After Separation
Over their lifetime, approximately 10% of all women become victims of postseparation stalking or assault. We use a nationally representative survey of separated Swedish women to examine whether men who strive to control their partners during their relationships are more likely to stalk or assault their ex-partners after separation. The empirical analysis shows that basic measures of control behaviors explain 18% of the variance in stalking victim…
Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership
Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment-a 50-50 quota imposed by the national board of the Swedish Social Democratic Party on 290 municipal branches-to examine quotas' influence on women's selection to, and survival in, top political posts. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became…
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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…
Firm Ownership and Social Insurance Inequality in Transitional China: Evidence from a Large Panel of Firm-Level Data
In dramatic reforms during the past 15 years, China has aimed to create a unified social insurance system across state, collective, and private ownership sectors in urban areas. Despite this nominal equality, a large panel of firm-level data from 2004 to 2007 provides empirical evidence of large disparities between firm ownership sectors in social insurance participation and generosity. We examine three types of social insurance programme: pensio…
When Does Intimate Partner Violence Continue After Separation
Over their lifetime, approximately 10% of all women become victims of postseparation stalking or assault. We use a nationally representative survey of separated Swedish women to examine whether men who strive to control their partners during their relationships are more likely to stalk or assault their ex-partners after separation. The empirical analysis shows that basic measures of control behaviors explain 18% of the variance in stalking victim…
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
Inequality in Social Insurance Participation and Generosity: Do Firm Characteristics Matter
Income inequality in China has been much documented and debated. However, one important aspect of income inequality – social insurance inequality – has been largely understudied. We use a large national panel of firm data to examine the possible influence of various firm characteristics on the inequalities in social insurance participation and generosity in the period 2004–07. Our findings reveal substantial ownership sector and regional gaps in …
Politicians’ Labor Market Experiences Across Party Families
When Does Intimate Partner Violence Continue After Separation
Over their lifetime, approximately 10% of all women become victims of postseparation stalking or assault. We use a nationally representative survey of separated Swedish women to examine whether men who strive to control their partners during their relationships are more likely to stalk or assault their ex-partners after separation. The empirical analysis shows that basic measures of control behaviors explain 18% of the variance in stalking victim…
Firm Ownership and Social Insurance Inequality in Transitional China: Evidence from a Large Panel of Firm-Level Data
In dramatic reforms during the past 15 years, China has aimed to create a unified social insurance system across state, collective, and private ownership sectors in urban areas. Despite this nominal equality, a large panel of firm-level data from 2004 to 2007 provides empirical evidence of large disparities between firm ownership sectors in social insurance participation and generosity. We examine three types of social insurance programme: pensio…
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 …
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 …
Gender Quotas and Women's Political Leadership
Though more than 100 countries have adopted gender quotas, the effects of these reforms on women's political leadership are largely unknown. We exploit a natural experiment-a 50-50 quota imposed by the national board of the Swedish Social Democratic Party on 290 municipal branches-to examine quotas' influence on women's selection to, and survival in, top political posts. We find that those municipalities where the quota had a larger impact became…
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…
Inequality in Social Insurance Participation and Generosity: Do Firm Characteristics Matter
Income inequality in China has been much documented and debated. However, one important aspect of income inequality – social insurance inequality – has been largely understudied. We use a large national panel of firm data to examine the possible influence of various firm characteristics on the inequalities in social insurance participation and generosity in the period 2004–07. Our findings reveal substantial ownership sector and regional gaps in …
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
Working Mothers and Political Daughters: Intergenerational Dynamics of Women's Political Officeholding
We study a new driving factor of women's inclusion in politics: the economic empowerment of their mothers. We evaluate Swedish microdata on politicians and their parents over fifty years. The results demonstrate a strong intergenerational dynamic from mothers to daughters. Female politicians come from households where their mother is more likely to be employed, earns more in the labour market, and earns a larger share of household earnings. This …
The Swedish historical municipal council database
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…
Political science (18 works) · Economics (16 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Demographic economics (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (10 works) · Sociology (9 works)