Yosef Bhatti
Biographic Data
| ID | 648362 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yosef Bhatti |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yosef |
| FAMILY NAME | Bhatti |
| SIGNATURE | BHATTI Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8112-486X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 530 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Competition, Ownership, and the Impact of Government Outsourcing on Employees
Government outsourcing to third-party vendors is widespread and intended to strengthen the organizational incentive to deliver public services more efficiently. However, it is unclear how outsourcing influences the public workforce, and little is known about the effect on employees who change from working for the government to working for the vendor receiving the outsourcing contract. In this article, we theoretically argue that the introduction …
Living Together, Voting Together: Voters Moving in Together Before an Election Have Higher Turnout
Scholars have long noted that couples are more likely to vote compared to individuals who live alone, and that partners' turnout behavior is strongly correlated. This study examines a large administrative dataset containing detailed information about validated turnout and the timing of individuals moving in together, and finds evidence of a substantial and robust increase in turnout after cohabitation. The study exploits the fact that two-voter h…
It’s a Group Thing: How Voters go to the Polls Together
Across European Parliament, local and general elections in Denmark between half and three quarters of voters in households with multiple voters cast their vote within a minute of another household member. This finding, revealed using data from a time-stamped voter panel covering more than two million Danish voters, establishes that many families visit the polling station together. The result are replicated using survey data from Denmark, the UK a…
Is Door-to-Door Canvassing Effective in Europe? Evidence from a Meta-study across Six European Countries
A vast amount of experimental evidence suggests that get-out-the-vote encouragements delivered through door-to-door canvassing have large effects on turnout. Most of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States, and are inspiring European mobilization campaigns. This article explores the empirical question of whether the American findings are applicable to Europe. It combines existing European studies and presents two new Danish …
Bias in Self-reported Voting and How it Distorts Turnout Models: Disentangling Nonresponse Bias and Overreporting Among Danish Voters
Most nonexperimental studies of voter turnout rely on survey data. However, surveys overestimate turnout because of (1) nonresponse bias and (2) overreporting. We investigate this possibility using a rich dataset of Danish voters, which includes validated turnout indicators from administrative data for both respondents and nonrespondents, as well as respondents’ self-reported voting from the Danish National Election Studies. We show that both non…
Core and Peripheral Voters: Predictors of Turnout Across Three Types of Elections
Citizens who abstain from voting in consecutive elections and inequality in turnout in democratic elections constitute a challenge to the legitimacy of democracy. Applying the law of dispersion, which stipulates higher levels of turnout and higher levels of equality in turnout are positively related, we study turnout patterns across different types of elections in Denmark, a high-turnout European context. Across three different elections with tur…
Voter turnout and municipal amalgamations—evidence from Denmark
The study utilizes evidence from the Danish 2007 municipal reform to inquire into the relationship between municipal amalgamations and voter turnout, that is, the classical discussion on size and democracy. The Danish municipal reform is particularly suited for investigating the relationship as a large number of units were merged due to reasons thought to be unrelated with the democratic performance while others were left unchanged. This allows u…
When less is more: On politicians’ attitudes to remuneration
While politicians’ remuneration is a key issue in the relationship between citizens and politicians, there is still limited knowledge about the politicians’ own views on this issue. This article investigates how politicians’ attitudes regarding pay are affected by their motivation, political ideology and party position as well as institutional position. Using data from a survey among municipal politicians in Denmark ( n = 838), our analyses sugge…
What does the minister do? On the working conditions of political leaders
This article contributes insight into the working conditions of political leaders based on rarely accessible high‐quality data that include unique surveys of Danish ministers, mayors, and permanent secretaries supplemented by in‐depth interviews. The results show that the classical metaphor of the leader as a puppet master being pulled by an endless number of strings also fits the ministers. Their work life is fragmented in time and space, and th…
Public/private ownership and quality of care: Evidence from Danish nursing homes
Type of education and voter turnout – Evidence from a register-based panel
Can governments use Get Out The Vote letters to solve Europe’s turnout crisis? Evidence from a field experiment
Declining levels of turnout are a problem in European elections. Are Get Out The Vote campaigns the solution to the problem? While many studies have investigated such campaigns in the US, little is known about their effect in Europe. The article presents a field experiment in which encouragement to vote in an upcoming Danish election is delivered to more than 60,000 first-time voters using direct personal letters. Eight different letters are desi…
How voter mobilization from short text messages travels within households and families: Evidence from two nationwide field experiments
The Context of Voting: Does Neighborhood Ethnic Diversity Affect Turnout
With continuing immigration to Western countries, an important question concerns how these demographic changes impact natives’ propensity to vote. In particular, the literature debates whether exposure to ethnic others in local contexts generates conflict that mobilizes individuals to vote (mobilization theory), diminishes social cohesion that in turn makes voters likely to withdraw from voting (marginalization theory), or does not impact turnout…
The Effect of Residential Concentration on Voter Turnout among Ethnic Minorities
Utilizing a large and unique dataset composed of government records, we study the widely contested effect of co-ethnic residential concentrations on voter turnout. Non-Western immigrants are moderately affected by the concentration of co-ethnic voters in their neighborhoods. As the local concentration of same-ethnicity voters increases, so does the individual's propensity to turn out for the election. In general, the concentration of non-Western …
First-time boost beats experience: The effect of past eligibility on turnout
Getting Out the Vote With Evaluative Thinking
Democratic institutions often do not evaluate their instruments. By working closely with authorities, we developed a field experiment to examine an initiative to increase voter turnout among 18-year-olds that had not previously been evaluated. Particular attention was paid to developing an appropriate program theory and to designing the evaluation in a manner that was consistent with legal and ethical requirements. The program distributed differe…
News Reporting of Opinion Polls: Journalism and Statistical Noise
In this article, we add to the literature by taking a closer look at the key issue of statistical uncertainty in poll coverage. In line with previous studies, we first investigate whether news media coverage of polls includes explicit methodological information on statistical uncertainty. Second, we investigate a question that until now has received scant attention, namely, the extent to which the media’s own interpretations of poll results take …
The Causal Effect of Profound Organizational Change When Job Insecurity Is Low—A Quasi-experiment Analyzing Municipal Mergers
The present article finds that the causal effect of profound organizational change on employee health can be very low, if job insecurity is mitigated. We demonstrate this by investigating a rare case of a large-scale radical public sector reform with low job insecurity, in which a large number of municipalities are merged into larger local governments, whereas other municipalities are not merged. This adds to previous research, which documents th…
Public employees lining up at the polls—the conditional effect of living and working in the same municipality
Political hypocrisy: The effect of political scandals on candidate evaluations
Leaving the Nest and the Social Act of Voting: Turnout among First-Time Voters
Recent studies have indicated that, contrary to common belief, the relationship between age and turnout among the youngest eligible individuals is not monotonically positive, but rather strongly negative – at least for the first few years of adulthood. With a unique dataset from government records for more than 145,000 young adults, we offer a possible explanation for this intriguing pattern – changing social influences as the young adult leaves …
Retiring from Voting: Turnout among Senior Voters
The Western population is growing older. Nevertheless, few studies examine the manner in which seniors are gradually demobilized from voting, partly because they are difficult to reach with surveys. Using a unique government records dataset of the actual turnout from the 2009 Danish municipal elections, we show how turnout for seniors falls more than 30 percentage points between ages 60 and 90. Though declining health matters, it is far from the …
The effect of generation and age on turnout to the European Parliament – How turnout will continue to decline in the future
Distance and Voting: Evidence from Danish Municipalities
Living far from the assigned polling station possibly renders voting less convenient than if the polls are right around the corner. Using a cross‐sectional dataset of about 2.3 million potential voters, including the distances between each household and the assigned polling station, a substantial impact of distance on the propensity to vote is found. An individual living five kilometers from the polling station has a ten percentage‐point lower pr…
The relationship between age and turnout: A roller-coaster ride
The effect of generation and age on turnout to the European Parliament – How turnout will continue to decline in the future
Bias in Self-reported Voting and How it Distorts Turnout Models: Disentangling Nonresponse Bias and Overreporting Among Danish Voters
Most nonexperimental studies of voter turnout rely on survey data. However, surveys overestimate turnout because of (1) nonresponse bias and (2) overreporting. We investigate this possibility using a rich dataset of Danish voters, which includes validated turnout indicators from administrative data for both respondents and nonrespondents, as well as respondents’ self-reported voting from the Danish National Election Studies. We show that both non…
Political hypocrisy: The effect of political scandals on candidate evaluations
The Effects of Administrative Professionals on Contracting Out
An often‐debated subject in the public administration literature concerns why some units contract out more than others. The present article decomposes the influence of public employees on municipal contracting as different types of employees have different skills and incentives and must be treated accordingly. First, the analysis shows that the apparent negative relationship between public employees in general and municipal contracting is partly …
First-time boost beats experience: The effect of past eligibility on turnout
Voter turnout and municipal amalgamations—evidence from Denmark
The study utilizes evidence from the Danish 2007 municipal reform to inquire into the relationship between municipal amalgamations and voter turnout, that is, the classical discussion on size and democracy. The Danish municipal reform is particularly suited for investigating the relationship as a large number of units were merged due to reasons thought to be unrelated with the democratic performance while others were left unchanged. This allows u…
Who ‘marries’ whom? The influence of societal connectedness, economic and political homogeneity, and population size on jurisdictional consolidations: Who‘marries’whom
For decades, political scientists have been asking how political jurisdictions are formed and reshaped. Nevertheless, studies of local government jurisdictional formation are few and often plagued with endogeneity since the formation of jurisdictions cannot be separated from sorting effects. In this article, the unique case of the Danish structural reform is utilised to overcome endogeneity due to migration-related sorting by studying patterns of…
Administrative Professionals and the Diffusion of Innovations: The Case of Citizen Service Centres
This article examines how administrative professionals affect the diffusion of one‐stop shops in the form of integrated citizen service centres (CSC) in a Danish local government setting. CSCs are an example of a new organizational form: functionally integrated small units (FISUs). The diffusion of the CSCs among municipalities is used to analyse how administrative professionals act as drivers in the process of organizational level innovation. Fu…
Is Door-to-Door Canvassing Effective in Europe? Evidence from a Meta-study across Six European Countries
A vast amount of experimental evidence suggests that get-out-the-vote encouragements delivered through door-to-door canvassing have large effects on turnout. Most of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States, and are inspiring European mobilization campaigns. This article explores the empirical question of whether the American findings are applicable to Europe. It combines existing European studies and presents two new Danish …
Core and Peripheral Voters: Predictors of Turnout Across Three Types of Elections
Citizens who abstain from voting in consecutive elections and inequality in turnout in democratic elections constitute a challenge to the legitimacy of democracy. Applying the law of dispersion, which stipulates higher levels of turnout and higher levels of equality in turnout are positively related, we study turnout patterns across different types of elections in Denmark, a high-turnout European context. Across three different elections with tur…
Distance and Voting: Evidence from Danish Municipalities
Living far from the assigned polling station possibly renders voting less convenient than if the polls are right around the corner. Using a cross‐sectional dataset of about 2.3 million potential voters, including the distances between each household and the assigned polling station, a substantial impact of distance on the propensity to vote is found. An individual living five kilometers from the polling station has a ten percentage‐point lower pr…
It’s a Group Thing: How Voters go to the Polls Together
Across European Parliament, local and general elections in Denmark between half and three quarters of voters in households with multiple voters cast their vote within a minute of another household member. This finding, revealed using data from a time-stamped voter panel covering more than two million Danish voters, establishes that many families visit the polling station together. The result are replicated using survey data from Denmark, the UK a…
News Reporting of Opinion Polls: Journalism and Statistical Noise
In this article, we add to the literature by taking a closer look at the key issue of statistical uncertainty in poll coverage. In line with previous studies, we first investigate whether news media coverage of polls includes explicit methodological information on statistical uncertainty. Second, we investigate a question that until now has received scant attention, namely, the extent to which the media’s own interpretations of poll results take …
How voter mobilization from short text messages travels within households and families: Evidence from two nationwide field experiments
The Effect of Residential Concentration on Voter Turnout among Ethnic Minorities
Utilizing a large and unique dataset composed of government records, we study the widely contested effect of co-ethnic residential concentrations on voter turnout. Non-Western immigrants are moderately affected by the concentration of co-ethnic voters in their neighborhoods. As the local concentration of same-ethnicity voters increases, so does the individual's propensity to turn out for the election. In general, the concentration of non-Western …
What Would Happen if We Were Better Informed? Simulating Increased Knowledge in European Parliament (Ep) Elections
What would happen if the public in a multiparty system became better or worse informed? This article examines the consequences of political knowledge on turnout and vote choices in three recent Nordic European Parliament (EP) elections. Only a moderate increase in political knowledge would result in more than 3 percentage point higher turnout. The relative support for the parties would also be affected if knowledge increased significantly, though…
Competition, Ownership, and the Impact of Government Outsourcing on Employees
Government outsourcing to third-party vendors is widespread and intended to strengthen the organizational incentive to deliver public services more efficiently. However, it is unclear how outsourcing influences the public workforce, and little is known about the effect on employees who change from working for the government to working for the vendor receiving the outsourcing contract. In this article, we theoretically argue that the introduction …
Getting Out the Vote With Evaluative Thinking
Democratic institutions often do not evaluate their instruments. By working closely with authorities, we developed a field experiment to examine an initiative to increase voter turnout among 18-year-olds that had not previously been evaluated. Particular attention was paid to developing an appropriate program theory and to designing the evaluation in a manner that was consistent with legal and ethical requirements. The program distributed differe…
Public employees lining up at the polls—the conditional effect of living and working in the same municipality
Living Together, Voting Together: Voters Moving in Together Before an Election Have Higher Turnout
Scholars have long noted that couples are more likely to vote compared to individuals who live alone, and that partners' turnout behavior is strongly correlated. This study examines a large administrative dataset containing detailed information about validated turnout and the timing of individuals moving in together, and finds evidence of a substantial and robust increase in turnout after cohabitation. The study exploits the fact that two-voter h…
Can governments use Get Out The Vote letters to solve Europe’s turnout crisis? Evidence from a field experiment
Declining levels of turnout are a problem in European elections. Are Get Out The Vote campaigns the solution to the problem? While many studies have investigated such campaigns in the US, little is known about their effect in Europe. The article presents a field experiment in which encouragement to vote in an upcoming Danish election is delivered to more than 60,000 first-time voters using direct personal letters. Eight different letters are desi…
Public/private ownership and quality of care: Evidence from Danish nursing homes
What does the minister do? On the working conditions of political leaders
This article contributes insight into the working conditions of political leaders based on rarely accessible high‐quality data that include unique surveys of Danish ministers, mayors, and permanent secretaries supplemented by in‐depth interviews. The results show that the classical metaphor of the leader as a puppet master being pulled by an endless number of strings also fits the ministers. Their work life is fragmented in time and space, and th…
When less is more: On politicians’ attitudes to remuneration
While politicians’ remuneration is a key issue in the relationship between citizens and politicians, there is still limited knowledge about the politicians’ own views on this issue. This article investigates how politicians’ attitudes regarding pay are affected by their motivation, political ideology and party position as well as institutional position. Using data from a survey among municipal politicians in Denmark ( n = 838), our analyses sugge…
The Effects of Administrative Professionals on Contracting Out
An often‐debated subject in the public administration literature concerns why some units contract out more than others. The present article decomposes the influence of public employees on municipal contracting as different types of employees have different skills and incentives and must be treated accordingly. First, the analysis shows that the apparent negative relationship between public employees in general and municipal contracting is partly …
Administrative Professionals and the Diffusion of Innovations: The Case of Citizen Service Centres
This article examines how administrative professionals affect the diffusion of one‐stop shops in the form of integrated citizen service centres (CSC) in a Danish local government setting. CSCs are an example of a new organizational form: functionally integrated small units (FISUs). The diffusion of the CSCs among municipalities is used to analyse how administrative professionals act as drivers in the process of organizational level innovation. Fu…
What Would Happen if We Were Better Informed? Simulating Increased Knowledge in European Parliament (Ep) Elections
What would happen if the public in a multiparty system became better or worse informed? This article examines the consequences of political knowledge on turnout and vote choices in three recent Nordic European Parliament (EP) elections. Only a moderate increase in political knowledge would result in more than 3 percentage point higher turnout. The relative support for the parties would also be affected if knowledge increased significantly, though…
Who ‘marries’ whom? The influence of societal connectedness, economic and political homogeneity, and population size on jurisdictional consolidations: Who‘marries’whom
For decades, political scientists have been asking how political jurisdictions are formed and reshaped. Nevertheless, studies of local government jurisdictional formation are few and often plagued with endogeneity since the formation of jurisdictions cannot be separated from sorting effects. In this article, the unique case of the Danish structural reform is utilised to overcome endogeneity due to migration-related sorting by studying patterns of…
Leaving the Nest and the Social Act of Voting: Turnout among First-Time Voters
Recent studies have indicated that, contrary to common belief, the relationship between age and turnout among the youngest eligible individuals is not monotonically positive, but rather strongly negative – at least for the first few years of adulthood. With a unique dataset from government records for more than 145,000 young adults, we offer a possible explanation for this intriguing pattern – changing social influences as the young adult leaves …
Retiring from Voting: Turnout among Senior Voters
The Western population is growing older. Nevertheless, few studies examine the manner in which seniors are gradually demobilized from voting, partly because they are difficult to reach with surveys. Using a unique government records dataset of the actual turnout from the 2009 Danish municipal elections, we show how turnout for seniors falls more than 30 percentage points between ages 60 and 90. Though declining health matters, it is far from the …
The effect of generation and age on turnout to the European Parliament – How turnout will continue to decline in the future
Distance and Voting: Evidence from Danish Municipalities
Living far from the assigned polling station possibly renders voting less convenient than if the polls are right around the corner. Using a cross‐sectional dataset of about 2.3 million potential voters, including the distances between each household and the assigned polling station, a substantial impact of distance on the propensity to vote is found. An individual living five kilometers from the polling station has a ten percentage‐point lower pr…
The relationship between age and turnout: A roller-coaster ride
Public employees lining up at the polls—the conditional effect of living and working in the same municipality
Political hypocrisy: The effect of political scandals on candidate evaluations
Getting Out the Vote With Evaluative Thinking
Democratic institutions often do not evaluate their instruments. By working closely with authorities, we developed a field experiment to examine an initiative to increase voter turnout among 18-year-olds that had not previously been evaluated. Particular attention was paid to developing an appropriate program theory and to designing the evaluation in a manner that was consistent with legal and ethical requirements. The program distributed differe…
News Reporting of Opinion Polls: Journalism and Statistical Noise
In this article, we add to the literature by taking a closer look at the key issue of statistical uncertainty in poll coverage. In line with previous studies, we first investigate whether news media coverage of polls includes explicit methodological information on statistical uncertainty. Second, we investigate a question that until now has received scant attention, namely, the extent to which the media’s own interpretations of poll results take …
The Causal Effect of Profound Organizational Change When Job Insecurity Is Low—A Quasi-experiment Analyzing Municipal Mergers
The present article finds that the causal effect of profound organizational change on employee health can be very low, if job insecurity is mitigated. We demonstrate this by investigating a rare case of a large-scale radical public sector reform with low job insecurity, in which a large number of municipalities are merged into larger local governments, whereas other municipalities are not merged. This adds to previous research, which documents th…
The Context of Voting: Does Neighborhood Ethnic Diversity Affect Turnout
With continuing immigration to Western countries, an important question concerns how these demographic changes impact natives’ propensity to vote. In particular, the literature debates whether exposure to ethnic others in local contexts generates conflict that mobilizes individuals to vote (mobilization theory), diminishes social cohesion that in turn makes voters likely to withdraw from voting (marginalization theory), or does not impact turnout…
The Effect of Residential Concentration on Voter Turnout among Ethnic Minorities
Utilizing a large and unique dataset composed of government records, we study the widely contested effect of co-ethnic residential concentrations on voter turnout. Non-Western immigrants are moderately affected by the concentration of co-ethnic voters in their neighborhoods. As the local concentration of same-ethnicity voters increases, so does the individual's propensity to turn out for the election. In general, the concentration of non-Western …
First-time boost beats experience: The effect of past eligibility on turnout
Type of education and voter turnout – Evidence from a register-based panel
Can governments use Get Out The Vote letters to solve Europe’s turnout crisis? Evidence from a field experiment
Declining levels of turnout are a problem in European elections. Are Get Out The Vote campaigns the solution to the problem? While many studies have investigated such campaigns in the US, little is known about their effect in Europe. The article presents a field experiment in which encouragement to vote in an upcoming Danish election is delivered to more than 60,000 first-time voters using direct personal letters. Eight different letters are desi…
How voter mobilization from short text messages travels within households and families: Evidence from two nationwide field experiments
When less is more: On politicians’ attitudes to remuneration
While politicians’ remuneration is a key issue in the relationship between citizens and politicians, there is still limited knowledge about the politicians’ own views on this issue. This article investigates how politicians’ attitudes regarding pay are affected by their motivation, political ideology and party position as well as institutional position. Using data from a survey among municipal politicians in Denmark ( n = 838), our analyses sugge…
What does the minister do? On the working conditions of political leaders
This article contributes insight into the working conditions of political leaders based on rarely accessible high‐quality data that include unique surveys of Danish ministers, mayors, and permanent secretaries supplemented by in‐depth interviews. The results show that the classical metaphor of the leader as a puppet master being pulled by an endless number of strings also fits the ministers. Their work life is fragmented in time and space, and th…
Public/private ownership and quality of care: Evidence from Danish nursing homes
Is Door-to-Door Canvassing Effective in Europe? Evidence from a Meta-study across Six European Countries
A vast amount of experimental evidence suggests that get-out-the-vote encouragements delivered through door-to-door canvassing have large effects on turnout. Most of the existing studies have been conducted in the United States, and are inspiring European mobilization campaigns. This article explores the empirical question of whether the American findings are applicable to Europe. It combines existing European studies and presents two new Danish …
Bias in Self-reported Voting and How it Distorts Turnout Models: Disentangling Nonresponse Bias and Overreporting Among Danish Voters
Most nonexperimental studies of voter turnout rely on survey data. However, surveys overestimate turnout because of (1) nonresponse bias and (2) overreporting. We investigate this possibility using a rich dataset of Danish voters, which includes validated turnout indicators from administrative data for both respondents and nonrespondents, as well as respondents’ self-reported voting from the Danish National Election Studies. We show that both non…
Political science (27 works) · Economics (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Demographic economics (19 works) · Turnout (18 works) · Voting (16 works) · Sociology (11 works)