Mikael Persson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3628046 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mikael Persson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mikael |
| FAMILY NAME | Persson |
| SIGNATURE | PERSSON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Gothenburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5377-2173 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 954 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Are the Politically Active Better Represented
Political participation is considered an important path for people to influence politics. However, whether those who participate actually see more of their preferred policies implemented remains an open question. We address this question by analyzing cross-national data connecting opinions to subsequent policy implementation on multiple policy issues. Based on an analysis of data on more than 270,000 survey respondents in 40 countries from 1996 t…
What matters more to politicians: The Quantity or Quality of Public Opinion Signals
Ideological bias in policy implementation: Public Opinion and Policy Outcomes in 43 Democracies
Blocking the Poor: Status Quo Bias in Policy Congruence
Research on unequal responsiveness has shown that policies tend to align more closely with the preferences of high‐income citizens than low‐income citizens. Using comparative data on opinions and policies, we suggest that this inequality primarily results from status quo bias; asymmetric blocking power drives unequal congruence rather than unequal abilities to achieve policy change. Drawing on data from 43 countries and more than 130 policy issue…
Poor choices? Examining the electoral connection behind unequal policy representation
Research on representation consistently shows that high‐income voters see more of their preferred policies implemented than less affluent citizens. However, the mechanisms behind this unequal policy representation remain unclear. This paper examines how voter behaviour, particularly the alignment between vote choices and policy outcomes, contributes to this disparity. Using a large dataset that spans close to 300,000 respondents across 32 Europea…
The economic and cultural dimensions of unequal policy representation
Many scholars have argued that policymaking in Western democracies is biased toward high-income citizens, thereby violating fundamental ideals of political equality. However, studies have paid less attention to other potential sources of unequal representation besides income. In this study, we compare the role of income with that of education. Using an original data set of policy changes and public preferences spanning 43 countries, we find that …
Politicians' Theories of Voting Behavior
While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians' positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians' theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one…
Lacking Incentives, Not Information. Why Politicians tend to be Less Responsive to Lower‐Income Citizens
The principle that democracies give all citizens an equal voice is challenged by scholarly work showing that policies tend to be biased in favor of the more wealthy citizenry. One reason for such unequal representation lies in representatives being less responsive to the preferences of lower compared to higher‐income citizens in their policy actions. Drawing on surveys with local elected representatives in Belgium and Sweden, this study zooms in …
A Man’s World? The Policy Representation of Women and Men in a Comparative Perspective
Are the preferences of women and men unequally represented in public policies? This simple yet fundamental question has remained largely unexplored in the fast-growing fields of women’s representation and inequality in the opinion-policy link. Our study analyzes gender biases in policy representation using an original dataset covering 43 countries and four decades, with citizens’ preferences regarding more than 4,000 country-year policies linked …
Who got what they wanted? Investigating the role of institutional agenda setting, costly policies, and status quo bias as explanations to income based unequal responsiveness
Previous research has shown that elected officials are more responsive to the opinions of high-income citizens than to those of middle and working-class citizens in the United States. This is often explained by the fact that economic elites make campaign contributions to political elites, leading to decision-making that aligns with the preferences of the affluent. This paper examines the opinion-policy link in Swedish politics, where campaign con…
The Rich Have a Slight Edge: Evidence from Comparative Data on Income-Based Inequality in Policy Congruence
Several recent studies have found unequal policy responsiveness, meaning that the policy preferences of high-income citizens are better reflected in implemented policies than the policy preferences of low-income citizens. This has been found mainly in a few studies from the US and a small number of single-country studies from Western Europe. However, there is a lack of comparative studies that stake out the terrain across a broader group of count…
Is opinion-policy congruence rewarded at the ballot box
Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that fo…
Issue Voting and Government Responsiveness to Policy Preferences
Does citizens’ voting behavior influence government policy? Conventional models of democratic representation assume that issue voting by citizens induces government responsiveness to citizens’ preferences. However, existing research has not tested whether voting behavior makes any difference to responsiveness. We present a theoretical model of issue voting and policy responsiveness. We leverage Swedish election study panels and a corresponding da…
From opinions to policies: Examining the links between citizens, representatives, and policy change
Recent studies show that policy changes appear to correspond primarily to the preferences of citizens with high socio-economic status. However, the mechanisms explaining this trend remain largely unexplored. In this paper, I look closer at the role of political representatives as the critical factor connecting citizens' opinions and policy changes. While the link between public opinion and elite opinion as well as the link between public opinion …
Does Deliberative Education Increase Civic Competence? Results from a Field Experiment
How should education be structured to most effectively increase civic outcomes such as political knowledge and democratic values? We present results from a field experiment in which we compare the effects of deliberative education and traditional teacher-centered education. The study is the largest field experiment on deliberative education to date and involved more than 1,200 students in 59 classrooms. We test the effects on four forms of civic …
Reconsidering the Role of Procedures for Decision Acceptance
Procedural fairness theory posits that the way in which authoritative decisions are made strongly impacts people’s willingness to accept them. This article challenges this claim by contending that democratic governments can achieve little in terms of acceptance of policy decisions by the procedural means at their disposal. Instead, outcome favorability is the dominant determinant of decision acceptance. The article explicates that while central p…
Enhancing Electoral Equality: Can Education Compensate for Family Background Differences in Voting Participation
It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. This paper examines whether reforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establish causality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform of Swedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gave rise to exogenous variation in educational attainment between…
Patrimonial Economic Voting and Asset Value – New Evidence from Taxation Register Data
Recent research on economic voting has moved beyond the traditional reward–punishment hypothesis, according to which the economy is merely considered a valence issue. Instead, patrimonial economic voting research looks at voters as property owners within the economic system. These studies have relied on survey items that measure whether individuals own different kinds of property to test the patrimonial dimension. This study emphasizes the import…
Responsiveness Beyond Policy Satisfaction: Does It Matter to Citizens
Can politicians facilitate citizen acceptance of unwelcome policy decisions by acting responsively during the decision-making process? We suggest a framework to analyze the responsiveness–acceptance connection and report findings from two studies designed for that purpose. First, we ran a survey experiment to examine how exogenously induced responsiveness actions affect reactions to a policy decision. Second, we conducted a case study to see how …
Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey
To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their persona…
Classroom Climate and Political Learning: Findings from a Swedish Panel Study and Comparative Data
Numerous studies have shown that an open classroom climate for discussion increases students' civic knowledge. However, most previous studies draw on cross‐sectional data and have not been able to show that the effect is causal. This article presents results from a Swedish panel survey following students during the first year in the gymnasium (upper secondary level). Using this study, we are better equipped to evaluate the link between an open cl…
Personality traits and party identification over time
Why do some people stably identify with a party while others do not? This study tests whether and how the direction, stability and strength of party identification are associated with big five personality traits, using panel data from a representative sample of German citizens. First, the study confirms that personality traits are related to identification with different political parties. Second, it moves beyond previous research by showing that…
Education and Political Participation
What affects who participates in politics? In most studies of political behaviour it is found that individuals with higher education participate to a larger extent in political activities than individuals with lower education. According to conventional wisdom, education is supposed to increases civic skills and political knowledge that functions as the causal mechanisms triggering participation. However, recently a number of studies have started …
Does Survey Participation Increase Voter Turnout? Re-examining the Hawthorne Effect in the Swedish National Election Studies
A Hawthorne effect found in election studies is that pre-election survey participation increases voter turnout. Using the Swedish National Election Studies, Granberg and Holmberg (1992) showed evidence in support of this effect. However, their findings have been criticized and more recent studies have failed to find any treatment effect of pre-election survey participation (cf. Mann 2005). This study re-examines an updated version of Granberg and…
Education and Political Participation
What affects who participates in politics? In most studies of political behaviour it is found that individuals with higher education participate to a larger extent in political activities than individuals with lower education. According to conventional wisdom, education is supposed to increases civic skills and political knowledge that functions as the causal mechanisms triggering participation. However, recently a number of studies have started …
Reconsidering the Role of Procedures for Decision Acceptance
Procedural fairness theory posits that the way in which authoritative decisions are made strongly impacts people’s willingness to accept them. This article challenges this claim by contending that democratic governments can achieve little in terms of acceptance of policy decisions by the procedural means at their disposal. Instead, outcome favorability is the dominant determinant of decision acceptance. The article explicates that while central p…
Responsiveness Beyond Policy Satisfaction: Does It Matter to Citizens
Can politicians facilitate citizen acceptance of unwelcome policy decisions by acting responsively during the decision-making process? We suggest a framework to analyze the responsiveness–acceptance connection and report findings from two studies designed for that purpose. First, we ran a survey experiment to examine how exogenously induced responsiveness actions affect reactions to a policy decision. Second, we conducted a case study to see how …
Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey
To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their persona…
Which decision‐making arrangements generate the strongest legitimacy beliefs? Evidence from a randomised field experiment
How can democracies satisfy citizens' demands for legitimate decision making? This article reports findings from a randomised field experiment designed to mimic decision making in large‐scale democracies. Natural collectives of individuals with a shared history and future (high school classes) were studied. They were asked to make a decision about how to spend a sum of money under arrangements imposed by the researchers and distributed randomly a…
Testing the Relationship Between Education and Political Participation Using the 1970 British Cohort Study
Enhancing Electoral Equality: Can Education Compensate for Family Background Differences in Voting Participation
It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. This paper examines whether reforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establish causality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform of Swedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gave rise to exogenous variation in educational attainment between…
Does Type of Education Affect Political Participation? Results from a Panel Survey of Swedish Adolescents
In several countries it is apparent that individuals with academic gymnasium (upper‐secondary) education show significantly higher levels of political participation than individuals with vocational education. However, previous research on this issue draws exclusively on one‐shot cross‐sectional data. This article utilizes a Swedish panel survey to gauge whether there is a direct causal link between type of education and political participation. R…
The effects of direct voting and deliberation on legitimacy beliefs: An Experimental Study of Small Group Decision-Making
In democratic theory, two frequently occurring ideas are that deliberation and direct voting in referendums can increase perceived legitimacy of democratic procedures. To evaluate this claim, we conducted a controlled field experiment in which 215 high school students participated by being subject to a decision on a collective issue. The decision was made either by direct voting or as a non-voting procedure (decision made by the teacher). Additio…
Measuring Political Participation—Testing Social Desirability Bias in a Web-Survey Experiment
Journal Article Measuring Political Participation—Testing Social Desirability Bias in a Web-Survey Experiment Get access Mikael Persson, Mikael Persson Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Mikael Persson is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His main research interests are political behavior and public opinion. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google …
The Rich Have a Slight Edge: Evidence from Comparative Data on Income-Based Inequality in Policy Congruence
Several recent studies have found unequal policy responsiveness, meaning that the policy preferences of high-income citizens are better reflected in implemented policies than the policy preferences of low-income citizens. This has been found mainly in a few studies from the US and a small number of single-country studies from Western Europe. However, there is a lack of comparative studies that stake out the terrain across a broader group of count…
Personality traits and party identification over time
Why do some people stably identify with a party while others do not? This study tests whether and how the direction, stability and strength of party identification are associated with big five personality traits, using panel data from a representative sample of German citizens. First, the study confirms that personality traits are related to identification with different political parties. Second, it moves beyond previous research by showing that…
The Swedish Pirate Party and the 2009 European Parliament Election: Protest or Issue Voting
In the 2009 Swedish European Parliament election, the Pirate Party gained 7.1 per cent of the votes. We evaluate the sudden and unexpected success of the Pirate Party by testing two competing explanations: did voters cast their votes for the party as a protest against the established parties, or can the result be explained by voters' opinions regarding the party's main political issues? Contrary to popular beliefs, empirical evidence indicates th…
An Empirical Test of the Relative Education Model in Sweden
Did the Egalitarian Reforms of the Swedish Educational System Equalise Levels of Democratic Citizenship
In the mid-1990s an extensive reform of the Swedish educational system was initiated in order to create a 'school for everyone' intended to function like a 'social equaliser'. The new unified gymnasium initiated longer educational programmes with an extended curriculum of social science courses. This article examines whether the well documented gap in levels of democratic citizenship indicators between students in theoretical and vocational gymna…
Classroom Climate and Political Learning: Findings from a Swedish Panel Study and Comparative Data
Numerous studies have shown that an open classroom climate for discussion increases students' civic knowledge. However, most previous studies draw on cross‐sectional data and have not been able to show that the effect is causal. This article presents results from a Swedish panel survey following students during the first year in the gymnasium (upper secondary level). Using this study, we are better equipped to evaluate the link between an open cl…
Does Election Day weather affect voter turnout? Evidence from Swedish elections
Voter Turnout and Political Equality: Testing the ‘Law of Dispersion’ in a Swedish Natural Experiment
According to the ‘law of dispersion’, the level of inequality in political participation is higher when voter turnout is low. We empirically test this hypothesis by evaluating levels of voter turnout in the 2010 Swedish election to the Västra Götaland county council and in the 2011 re-election for the same county council. The re-election voter turnout was reduced by almost half, from 80.6 per cent to 44.1 per cent. Our results support the law of …
Patrimonial Economic Voting and Asset Value – New Evidence from Taxation Register Data
Recent research on economic voting has moved beyond the traditional reward–punishment hypothesis, according to which the economy is merely considered a valence issue. Instead, patrimonial economic voting research looks at voters as property owners within the economic system. These studies have relied on survey items that measure whether individuals own different kinds of property to test the patrimonial dimension. This study emphasizes the import…
The Generational Effect in Turnout in the Swedish General Elections, 1960–2010
Recent analyses have reported a generational pattern in electoral participation both in national and the European Parliament elections which suggests that a lower voting propensity among the younger cohorts remains relatively stable over time. Based on the Swedish national election studies 1960–2010, this article examines the magnitude of generational differences in a high‐turnout context. It contributes to earlier studies by using multilevel mod…
From opinions to policies: Examining the links between citizens, representatives, and policy change
Recent studies show that policy changes appear to correspond primarily to the preferences of citizens with high socio-economic status. However, the mechanisms explaining this trend remain largely unexplored. In this paper, I look closer at the role of political representatives as the critical factor connecting citizens' opinions and policy changes. While the link between public opinion and elite opinion as well as the link between public opinion …
Representatives' Attitudes Toward Citizen Protests in Sweden: The Impact of Ideology, Parliamentary Position, and Experiences
What affects political representatives' attitudes toward citizen protests? We test the impact of political representatives' left‐right ideology, parliamentary position, and earlier experience of citizen protests. Using data from a pioneering survey covering all local political representatives in Sweden (n = 9,101, response rate 70%), we examine attitudes toward controversial noninstitutionalized forms of citizen protests. The results show that re…
Who got what they wanted? Investigating the role of institutional agenda setting, costly policies, and status quo bias as explanations to income based unequal responsiveness
Previous research has shown that elected officials are more responsive to the opinions of high-income citizens than to those of middle and working-class citizens in the United States. This is often explained by the fact that economic elites make campaign contributions to political elites, leading to decision-making that aligns with the preferences of the affluent. This paper examines the opinion-policy link in Swedish politics, where campaign con…
Social network position mediates the effect of education on active political party membership
Research has shown that education is positively correlated with political party membership at the individual level. It is thus puzzling that increased education at the aggregated level in most Western countries has not resulted in an aggregate increase in levels of party membership. One explanation for this paradox is provided by the sorting model of education, according to which there is no direct effect of education on political participation; …
A Man’s World? The Policy Representation of Women and Men in a Comparative Perspective
Are the preferences of women and men unequally represented in public policies? This simple yet fundamental question has remained largely unexplored in the fast-growing fields of women’s representation and inequality in the opinion-policy link. Our study analyzes gender biases in policy representation using an original dataset covering 43 countries and four decades, with citizens’ preferences regarding more than 4,000 country-year policies linked …
Did the Egalitarian Reforms of the Swedish Educational System Equalise Levels of Democratic Citizenship
In the mid-1990s an extensive reform of the Swedish educational system was initiated in order to create a 'school for everyone' intended to function like a 'social equaliser'. The new unified gymnasium initiated longer educational programmes with an extended curriculum of social science courses. This article examines whether the well documented gap in levels of democratic citizenship indicators between students in theoretical and vocational gymna…
The Swedish Pirate Party and the 2009 European Parliament Election: Protest or Issue Voting
In the 2009 Swedish European Parliament election, the Pirate Party gained 7.1 per cent of the votes. We evaluate the sudden and unexpected success of the Pirate Party by testing two competing explanations: did voters cast their votes for the party as a protest against the established parties, or can the result be explained by voters' opinions regarding the party's main political issues? Contrary to popular beliefs, empirical evidence indicates th…
An Empirical Test of the Relative Education Model in Sweden
Does Type of Education Affect Political Participation? Results from a Panel Survey of Swedish Adolescents
In several countries it is apparent that individuals with academic gymnasium (upper‐secondary) education show significantly higher levels of political participation than individuals with vocational education. However, previous research on this issue draws exclusively on one‐shot cross‐sectional data. This article utilizes a Swedish panel survey to gauge whether there is a direct causal link between type of education and political participation. R…
Representatives' Attitudes Toward Citizen Protests in Sweden: The Impact of Ideology, Parliamentary Position, and Experiences
What affects political representatives' attitudes toward citizen protests? We test the impact of political representatives' left‐right ideology, parliamentary position, and earlier experience of citizen protests. Using data from a pioneering survey covering all local political representatives in Sweden (n = 9,101, response rate 70%), we examine attitudes toward controversial noninstitutionalized forms of citizen protests. The results show that re…
Which decision‐making arrangements generate the strongest legitimacy beliefs? Evidence from a randomised field experiment
How can democracies satisfy citizens' demands for legitimate decision making? This article reports findings from a randomised field experiment designed to mimic decision making in large‐scale democracies. Natural collectives of individuals with a shared history and future (high school classes) were studied. They were asked to make a decision about how to spend a sum of money under arrangements imposed by the researchers and distributed randomly a…
Measuring Political Participation—Testing Social Desirability Bias in a Web-Survey Experiment
Journal Article Measuring Political Participation—Testing Social Desirability Bias in a Web-Survey Experiment Get access Mikael Persson, Mikael Persson Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Mikael Persson is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His main research interests are political behavior and public opinion. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google …
Different Surveys, Different Results? A Comparison of Two Surveys on the 2009 European Parliamentary Election
The European Election Survey (EES) is carried out in all member states at the time of each European Parliament election. The mode of data collection (mainly telephone interviews) and the sampling procedure (achieving 1,000 interviews in each country) raise doubts about the data quality. Until now knowledge has been lacking about the extent to which the mode of data collection and the sampling procedure bias the results. In one European country an…
The Generational Effect in Turnout in the Swedish General Elections, 1960–2010
Recent analyses have reported a generational pattern in electoral participation both in national and the European Parliament elections which suggests that a lower voting propensity among the younger cohorts remains relatively stable over time. Based on the Swedish national election studies 1960–2010, this article examines the magnitude of generational differences in a high‐turnout context. It contributes to earlier studies by using multilevel mod…
Voter Turnout and Political Equality: Testing the ‘Law of Dispersion’ in a Swedish Natural Experiment
According to the ‘law of dispersion’, the level of inequality in political participation is higher when voter turnout is low. We empirically test this hypothesis by evaluating levels of voter turnout in the 2010 Swedish election to the Västra Götaland county council and in the 2011 re-election for the same county council. The re-election voter turnout was reduced by almost half, from 80.6 per cent to 44.1 per cent. Our results support the law of …
The effects of direct voting and deliberation on legitimacy beliefs: An Experimental Study of Small Group Decision-Making
In democratic theory, two frequently occurring ideas are that deliberation and direct voting in referendums can increase perceived legitimacy of democratic procedures. To evaluate this claim, we conducted a controlled field experiment in which 215 high school students participated by being subject to a decision on a collective issue. The decision was made either by direct voting or as a non-voting procedure (decision made by the teacher). Additio…
Does Survey Participation Increase Voter Turnout? Re-examining the Hawthorne Effect in the Swedish National Election Studies
A Hawthorne effect found in election studies is that pre-election survey participation increases voter turnout. Using the Swedish National Election Studies, Granberg and Holmberg (1992) showed evidence in support of this effect. However, their findings have been criticized and more recent studies have failed to find any treatment effect of pre-election survey participation (cf. Mann 2005). This study re-examines an updated version of Granberg and…
Testing the Relationship Between Education and Political Participation Using the 1970 British Cohort Study
Social network position mediates the effect of education on active political party membership
Research has shown that education is positively correlated with political party membership at the individual level. It is thus puzzling that increased education at the aggregated level in most Western countries has not resulted in an aggregate increase in levels of party membership. One explanation for this paradox is provided by the sorting model of education, according to which there is no direct effect of education on political participation; …
Does Election Day weather affect voter turnout? Evidence from Swedish elections
Classroom Climate and Political Learning: Findings from a Swedish Panel Study and Comparative Data
Numerous studies have shown that an open classroom climate for discussion increases students' civic knowledge. However, most previous studies draw on cross‐sectional data and have not been able to show that the effect is causal. This article presents results from a Swedish panel survey following students during the first year in the gymnasium (upper secondary level). Using this study, we are better equipped to evaluate the link between an open cl…
Personality traits and party identification over time
Why do some people stably identify with a party while others do not? This study tests whether and how the direction, stability and strength of party identification are associated with big five personality traits, using panel data from a representative sample of German citizens. First, the study confirms that personality traits are related to identification with different political parties. Second, it moves beyond previous research by showing that…
Education and Political Participation
What affects who participates in politics? In most studies of political behaviour it is found that individuals with higher education participate to a larger extent in political activities than individuals with lower education. According to conventional wisdom, education is supposed to increases civic skills and political knowledge that functions as the causal mechanisms triggering participation. However, recently a number of studies have started …
Responsiveness Beyond Policy Satisfaction: Does It Matter to Citizens
Can politicians facilitate citizen acceptance of unwelcome policy decisions by acting responsively during the decision-making process? We suggest a framework to analyze the responsiveness–acceptance connection and report findings from two studies designed for that purpose. First, we ran a survey experiment to examine how exogenously induced responsiveness actions affect reactions to a policy decision. Second, we conducted a case study to see how …
Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey
To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their persona…
Patrimonial Economic Voting and Asset Value – New Evidence from Taxation Register Data
Recent research on economic voting has moved beyond the traditional reward–punishment hypothesis, according to which the economy is merely considered a valence issue. Instead, patrimonial economic voting research looks at voters as property owners within the economic system. These studies have relied on survey items that measure whether individuals own different kinds of property to test the patrimonial dimension. This study emphasizes the import…
Does Deliberative Education Increase Civic Competence? Results from a Field Experiment
How should education be structured to most effectively increase civic outcomes such as political knowledge and democratic values? We present results from a field experiment in which we compare the effects of deliberative education and traditional teacher-centered education. The study is the largest field experiment on deliberative education to date and involved more than 1,200 students in 59 classrooms. We test the effects on four forms of civic …
Reconsidering the Role of Procedures for Decision Acceptance
Procedural fairness theory posits that the way in which authoritative decisions are made strongly impacts people’s willingness to accept them. This article challenges this claim by contending that democratic governments can achieve little in terms of acceptance of policy decisions by the procedural means at their disposal. Instead, outcome favorability is the dominant determinant of decision acceptance. The article explicates that while central p…
Enhancing Electoral Equality: Can Education Compensate for Family Background Differences in Voting Participation
It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. This paper examines whether reforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establish causality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform of Swedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gave rise to exogenous variation in educational attainment between…
From opinions to policies: Examining the links between citizens, representatives, and policy change
Recent studies show that policy changes appear to correspond primarily to the preferences of citizens with high socio-economic status. However, the mechanisms explaining this trend remain largely unexplored. In this paper, I look closer at the role of political representatives as the critical factor connecting citizens' opinions and policy changes. While the link between public opinion and elite opinion as well as the link between public opinion …
Political science (34 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (33 works) · Politics (33 works) · Economics (26 works) · Law (22 works) · Law (22 works) · Social Media and Politics (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Voting (15 works) · Psychology (14 works)