Benny Geys
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 339930 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Benny Geys |
| PRENOMES | Benny |
| SOBRENOME | Geys |
| ASSINATURA | GEYS B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | BI Norwegian Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4524-1820 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 91 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 967 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 91 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2003 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
Civil Servants and Democratic Backsliding
Political efforts to weaken democratic institutions place civil servants in a dilemma between political responsiveness and protecting democratic values. As civil servants are embedded in the political-administrative hierarchy, we argue that signals from their direct hierarchical superiors are critical to understand how civil servants address this dilemma. Using a randomized survey experiment among Norwegian national-level civil servants (N = 1,44…
When are politicians incentivized to vote? Evidence from individual-level panel data (2015–2023)
When are politicians incentivized to vote? To answer this question, we examine politicians’ electoral participation before, during and after their political career. Our dataset combines individual-level register data for all candidates in the 2015, 2019, and 2023 Norwegian local elections with population-wide turnout data. We show that politicians are significantly more likely to vote when they are running for office (relative to pre- and post-of…
Scenic tourism routes and local economic conditions
How do public investments in scenic tourism routes affect local socio-economic conditions? Using an event study methodology, we address this question exploiting variation over time and space in the opening of attractions along 18 scenic tourist routes across the Norwegian territory (2003-2019). Our main findings indicate that opening a tourist route attraction shifts the employment structure within a municipality towards the hospitality sector, w…
Transitory Income Windfalls and Charitable Giving
This paper studies the impact of unearned, transitory income shocks on charitable giving using Norwegian administrative data. We exploit the random timing and size of lottery wins and our long time period (1993–2021) to estimate both short- and longer-term impacts. We find no meaningful effect of small windfalls. Yet, windfalls exceeding $10,000 induce a long-lasting increase in the likelihood to donate, the absolute level of donations and the sh…
Time tactics in public administration
The Causal Effect of Affluence on Voter Turnout
Affluent citizens commonly record higher election turnout than less affluent citizens. Yet, the causal effect of affluence on voter turnout remains poorly understood. In this article, we rely on Norwegian administrative data to estimate the impact of random, exogenous shocks in (unearned) income on individual-level voter turnout. Exploiting the random timing and size of lottery wins for identification, our main findings suggest that a lottery win…
I'm a Survivor
This article challenges the common assumption that the partisan identification of bureaucratic elites is fixed over time. Building on principal-agent and organization theory, we hypothesize that bureaucratic elites may respond to political turnover by adjusting their partisan identification toward that of their (new) elected principals. We test this prediction using data from the American State Administrators Project (ASAP) over the 1964-2008 per…
A post‐politics earnings penalty? Evidence from politicians' lifetime income trajectories (1970–2019)
Politicians are commonly believed to gain financially from holding and/or having held office. We argue that there may often also be economic downsides to pursuing a political career and investigate whether and when politicians can (not) capitalize on their political experience. We thereby study both entry into and exit from political office and directly compare the returns to politics across government levels and types of politicians. Empirically…
Intraorganizational mobility and employees’ work-related contact patterns
Programs to encourage staff to move within public-sector organizations have become increasingly widespread in recent decades. Yet, although there are some anecdotal accounts, the effects of such intraorganizational mobility remain largely unexplored. Building on insights from organization theory and social psychology, we argue that intraorganizational mobility entails an important trade-off: it undermines movers’ depth of work-related contacts wi…
Public Employees as Elected Politicians
In many countries, public sector employees are eligible to hold political offices during their employment as civil servants. This often triggers conflict-of-interest concerns that elected public employees might sway policies to their professional benefit. In this article, we build on representation scholarship in political science and public administration to assess such substantive effects of public employees' political representation using deta…
The politics of distributing blame and credit
How do politicians attribute responsibility for good and poor policy outcomes across multiple stakeholders in a policy field where they themselves can affect service provision? Such ‘diffusion’ decisions are crucial to understand the political calculations underlying the allocation of blame and credit by office‐holders. We study this issue using a between‐subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway (N = 1073). We find tha…
Partisanship, blame avoidance behaviours and voter reactions to allegations of political misconduct
Politicians often engage in blame avoidance behaviours in order to evade electoral punishment following allegations of misconduct. A key question concerns the (in)effectiveness of such behaviours in mitigating voter opinions about the alleged misconduct and the appropriate punishment. In this article, we examine how this (in)effectiveness may be shaped by: (1) the characteristics of blame avoidance behaviours, and (2) voters' partisan (mis)alignm…
Staff reallocations and employee attitudes towards organizational aims
Organizational reforms often involve substantial staff reallocations, creating both winners and losers within the same organization. We argue that allocating less (more) staff to a department signals a decrease (increase) in organizational support towards that department and its employees. We hypothesize that staff members respond to this signal by adjusting their support for key organizational aims and their plans to stay in the organization. We…
Fancy seeing you here…again
Many theories in Public Administration and Public Management explicitly relate to changes over time in the attitudes, values, perceptions, and/or motivations of public‐sector employees. Examining such theories using (repeated) cross‐sectional datasets may lead to biased inferences and an inability to expose credible causal relationships. As developing individual‐level panel datasets is costly and time‐consuming, this article presents a method to …
Information, perceptions, and electoral behaviour of young voters
The way people absorb and process politically relevant information is central to their subsequent political behaviour (in terms of turnout and vote choice). Nonetheless, little is known about how young voters – who might be more impressionable than more experienced voters – respond to the provision of such information. In this article, we design a between-subject randomised controlled trial that exposes a sample of university students to positive…
Organizational stability and resocialization in public administrations
The organizational theory approach to public administration emphasizes that organizational features of public bureaucracies shape civil servants' role perceptions and opinions. This study brings forward a novel refinement of this theoretical framework by arguing that such processes of organizational resocialization require intertemporal consistency of the organizational environment. We empirically test this proposition by combining individual‐lev…
The impact of terrorism on civil servants
Building on a growing literature assessing the societal impact of terrorism, this article analyzes whether and how a terror attack targeting public institutions affects civil servants in their day‐to‐day work. This is an important question to enhance our understanding of how terrorism can (or cannot) affect the operation of core government functions. Theoretically, the study contributes to a broader account of the political consequences of terror…
It's about time! Temporal dynamics and longitudinal research designs in public administration
Many of the fundamental research questions in public administration relate to individual‐ or organization‐level temporal dynamics, including the impact of public sector reforms, (in)stability of public policies and organizations, development of public service motivation, or the workplace socialization of public employees. However, theoretical, methodological, and empirical public administration scholarship continues to take time and temporal dyna…
Politicians and Scandals that Damage the Party Brand
Scandals can cause serious damage to political parties’ brand name and reputation, which may taint all members of the party—even those not implicated in the scandal. In this article, we therefore explore how (uninvolved) politicians are likely to react to the eruption of such events. Building on a survey among UK local councilors (N = 2133), we first document the prevalence of distinct response strategies (such as distancing oneself from the scan…
Partisan bias in politicians’ perception of scandals
Do politicians perceive scandals differently when they implicate members of their own party rather than another party? We address this question using a between-subject survey experiment, whereby we randomly assign UK local councillors (N = 2133) to vignettes describing a major national-level scandal in their own party versus another party. Our results show that local politicians perceive a significantly larger impact of this national scandal on t…
Political (Over)Representation of Public Sector Employees and the Double-Motive Hypothesis
Countries have widely diverging regulations regarding the eligibility of public sector employees for political office, and the stringency of such regulations remains fiercely debated. Building on a demand and supply model of political selection, this article contributes to such debates by studying whether and how the incentives of public employees as both consumers and producers of public services (their “double motive”) affects their descriptive…
Legitimacy crises and the temporal dynamics of bureaucratic representation
The representation of specific groups and social interests within (or by) the civil service has long been a concern of public administration scholarship. Yet, much of this literature focuses on representation at a single point in time. In this article, we propose a more dynamic perspective. In terms of theory, we postulate specific temporal relationships between triggering cues (e.g., a crisis event) and the representation decisions of civil serv…
Age and vote choice
Ageing is often believed to induce a movement towards the right of the political spectrum. Yet, empirical evidence remains inconclusive due to a dearth of longitudinal datasets covering multiple cohorts. Using eleven rotating panels of the Norwegian Election Studies (1977–2017) and exploiting first-derivative properties of the vote choice function, our empirical approach identifies non-linear life-cycle effects while controlling for cohort and pe…
Public Sector Employment and Voter Turnout
Does working in the public rather than the private sector have a causal effect on electoral participation? Extant evidence using cross-sectional survey data remains unpersuasive due to data limitations and concerns posed by preference-based job selection. We address these challenges using population-wide individual-level register data on voter turnout covering four Norwegian local and national elections between 2013 and 2019. We identify causal e…
Political donations, public procurement and government efficiency
Public procurement markets are worth 10–15% of global GDP. Recent empirical evidence suggests that firms’ political donations can induce important distortions in the allocation of public procurement contracts. In this article, we employ a non-parametric efficiency model to study the implications of such distortions for the regional governments’ efficiency. Using a unique dataset covering the Czech regions over the 2007–2017 period, we find that t…
Explaining voter turnout
Public support for European fiscal integration in times of crisis
The current economic crisis has triggered fierce debates among policy-makers and the media across and within European countries about the need for a closer European fiscal union. Using a novel dataset derived from the Eurobarometer surveys, this article investigates European citizens' opinions towards such fiscal integration. We find that both country-level variables (such as expected country-level costs/benefits) and individual-level variables (…
Institutional Performance and Social Capital
A large and growing body of research is devoted to the effects of social capital on institutional performance. This literature reveals that societies characterized by higher levels of social capital tend to achieve superior performance. Still, enquiries to date predominantly concentrate on country-level data or large sub-national units. The primary purpose of this article is to extend the empirical work to the local government level, while retain…
Community Heterogeneity
Objective. This study examines the relationship between community heterogeneity and social capital on the local government level. Method. We apply both OLS and interval regression techniques to objective macro data of 307 Flemish municipalities for the year 2000. Results. Our results show that, after controlling for various socioeconomic characteristics of the municipality, income inequality is not significantly correlated with the municipality's…
Influence of ‘Cognitive Sophistication’ on Ballot Layout Effects
Moonlighting Politicians
www.wzb.eu Copyright remains with the author(s). Discussion papers of the WZB serve to disseminate the research results of work in progress prior to publication to encourage the exchange of ideas and academic debate. Inclusion of a paper in the discussion paper series does not constitute publication and should not limit publication in any other venue. The discussion papers published by the WZB represent the views of the respective author(s) and n…
Success and failure in electoral competition
Wars, Presidents, and Popularity
Journal Article Wars, Presidents, and Popularity: The Political Cost(s) of War Re-Examined Get access Benny Geys Benny Geys Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 2, Summer 2010, Pages 357–374, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfq001 Published: 29 March 2010
Participation in Bridging and Bonding Associations and Civic Attitudes
Current scientific research and recent policy initiatives reveal an intense interest in the effect of social capital on a broad range of socioeconomic outcomes both at the individual level (e.g., civic attitudes) and the societal level (e.g., democratic or economic performance). Despite persistent argumentation in this debate that voluntary associations are of crucial importance in this process, empirical research usually reveals but a weak relat…
Explaining the formation of minimal coalitions
Recent theoretical arguments hold that the institutional setting of a political system influences coalition formation. Empirical analyses that confront these hypotheses have, however, been slow to emerge. We provide a first test of the relation between coalition formation and one element within this institutional setting: the existence of commitments not to join forces with certain ‘pariah’ parties (i.e., anti‐pact rules). Specifically, we study …
Revenue Scarcity and Government Outsourcing
It is often said that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. In this article, we assess whether this also applies to the design of public authorities' service provision. In particular, we evaluate whether revenue scarcity – as an indicator of fiscal stress – induces government outsourcing. In contrast to previous studies, we exploit arguably exogenous variation in local government revenue across time and space to derive stronger inferences on th…
District Magnitude, Social Heterogeneity and Local Party System Fragmentation
Scholars analysing party system structures have generally followed two approaches. The ‘institutional’ approach emphasizes the role of electoral laws, while the ‘sociological’ approach highlights the effect of socioeconomic heterogeneity. Recently, evidence based on cross-country data indicated that a high level of fragmentation requires both a permissive electoral system and substantial socio-economic heterogeneity. As electoral rules have their…
Will you still trust me tomorrow? The causal effect of terrorism on social trust
Political Dynasties in Democracies
Kinship often continues to play an important role in determining the ruling class even under modern democratic elections in a wide range of countries. In recent years, academic interest in the causes and consequences of such dynasties has been rapidly expanding. In this introduction to the Feature, we review existing work on political dynasties’ formation and potential implications for socio‐economic outcomes (such as economic growth, distributiv…
Age and vote choice
Ageing is often believed to induce a movement towards the right of the political spectrum. Yet, empirical evidence remains inconclusive due to a dearth of longitudinal datasets covering multiple cohorts. Using eleven rotating panels of the Norwegian Election Studies (1977–2017) and exploiting first-derivative properties of the vote choice function, our empirical approach identifies non-linear life-cycle effects while controlling for cohort and pe…
Ballot Layout Effects in the 1995 Elections of the Brussels' Government
Political Dynasties, Electoral Institutions and Politicians’ Human Capital
This article focuses on political dynasties’ potential consequences, and particularly investigates whether and when they lead to the selection of dynastic politicians with relatively lower education levels. I exploit the different electoral constraints faced by distinct subsets of Italian local politicians to identify whether weaker constraints on political selection processes induce the selection of dynastic politicians with lower education leve…
Everyone likes a winner
The impact of women above the political glass ceiling
Women have historically been underrepresented in democratic assemblies, particularly in top positions with executive powers. Most gender quota reforms address this by mandating a more equal gender representation on election lists. In contrast, a 1992 legislative reform in Norway required parties' candidate lists for the local executive board to comprise at least 40% politicians of each gender. This legal change was not only exogenously imposed by…
Organised Crime, Institutions and Political Quality
Journal Article Organised Crime, Institutions and Political Quality: Empirical Evidence from Italian Municipalities Get access Gianmarco Daniele, Gianmarco Daniele Vrije Universiteit Brussel Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Benny Geys Benny Geys Norwegian Business School BI Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 125, Issue 586, August 2015, Page…
How to make head or tail of 'bridging' and 'bonding
A distinction has recently been proposed between bridging (or encompassing) and bonding (or inward-looking) social networks. However, existing theoretical contributions remain vague as to the fundamental meaning of both concepts. As a consequence, two distinct interpretations have developed alongside each other. In the present paper, we employ data on voluntary association membership in Flanders to empirically illustrate that both approaches can …
Do international institutions matter? Socialization and international bureaucrats
A key component of (neo-)functionalist and constructivist approaches to the study of international organizations concerns staff socialization. Existing analyses of how, or indeed whether, staff develop more pro-internationalist attitudes over time draw predominantly on cross-sectional data. Yet, such data cannot address (self-)selection issues or capture the inherently temporal nature of attitude change. This article proposes an innovative approa…
Representative bureaucracy and seconded national government officials in the E uropean C ommission
The bureaucratic arms of modern international organizations increasingly consist of staff with ambiguous organizational affiliations. This article analyses the implications of this trend from the perspective of representative bureaucracy – using seconded national experts ( SNEs ) in the E uropean C ommission ( C ommission) as the empirical laboratory. Using a variety of datasets, we unveil C ommission SNE s' profiles (to assess their passive repr…
Election Cycles in MPs' outside Interests? The UK House of Commons, 2005–2010
Politicians often implement popular changes in public policies prior to elections, with the aim of improving their Election Day outcome. This research note evaluates whether such ‘electioneering’ carries over also into politicians' extra-parliamentary activities. Evidence from the UK House of Commons over the period 2005–10 suggests that adjustments do occur in MPs' outside activities over the election cycle. The safety of the politician's seat a…
Are Female Legislators Different? Exploring Sex Differences in German MPs' Outside Interests
This article examines whether sex matters with respect to a type of legislator behaviour that has thus far been neglected in the literature analysing the distinctive nature of female and male legislators: parliamentarians' outside interests. Using data for 614 German Members of Parliament (MPs), our analysis confirms that female MPs on average hold fewer outside jobs than men—especially in private-sector functions. We also find that individual ch…
Ballot Layout Effects in the 1995 Elections of the Brussels' Government
Influence of ‘Cognitive Sophistication’ on Ballot Layout Effects
Government Weakness and Local Public Debt Development in Flemish Municipalities
Institutional Performance and Social Capital
A large and growing body of research is devoted to the effects of social capital on institutional performance. This literature reveals that societies characterized by higher levels of social capital tend to achieve superior performance. Still, enquiries to date predominantly concentrate on country-level data or large sub-national units. The primary purpose of this article is to extend the empirical work to the local government level, while retain…
Rational’ Theories of Voter Turnout
The paradox between an individual's decisions to head to the polls and the absence of strictly rational arguments for this action has intrigued – and troubled – many scholars. The present article surveys various theoretical contributions to resolve this paradox of (not) voting. We assess these approaches based on their ability to explain a number of ‘stylised facts’ with respect to voter turnout. The main conclusion is that straying away from the…
Explaining voter turnout
Looking across borders
Everyone likes a winner
Community Heterogeneity
Objective. This study examines the relationship between community heterogeneity and social capital on the local government level. Method. We apply both OLS and interval regression techniques to objective macro data of 307 Flemish municipalities for the year 2000. Results. Our results show that, after controlling for various socioeconomic characteristics of the municipality, income inequality is not significantly correlated with the municipality's…
District Magnitude, Social Heterogeneity and Local Party System Fragmentation
Scholars analysing party system structures have generally followed two approaches. The ‘institutional’ approach emphasizes the role of electoral laws, while the ‘sociological’ approach highlights the effect of socioeconomic heterogeneity. Recently, evidence based on cross-country data indicated that a high level of fragmentation requires both a permissive electoral system and substantial socio-economic heterogeneity. As electoral rules have their…
Explaining the formation of minimal coalitions
Recent theoretical arguments hold that the institutional setting of a political system influences coalition formation. Empirical analyses that confront these hypotheses have, however, been slow to emerge. We provide a first test of the relation between coalition formation and one element within this institutional setting: the existence of commitments not to join forces with certain ‘pariah’ parties (i.e., anti‐pact rules). Specifically, we study …
Toward an Empirical Characterization of Bridging and Bonding Social Capital
Though a vast amount of empirical work stresses the beneficial effects of social capital, the recent literature has explicitly recognized the importance of distinguishing different types of social capital. Particularly, a distinction has been made between homogeneous (or bonding ) and heterogeneous (or bridging ) networks under the argument that the latter are more likely to generate positive externalities than the former. The empirical operation…
Participation in Bridging and Bonding Associations and Civic Attitudes
Current scientific research and recent policy initiatives reveal an intense interest in the effect of social capital on a broad range of socioeconomic outcomes both at the individual level (e.g., civic attitudes) and the societal level (e.g., democratic or economic performance). Despite persistent argumentation in this debate that voluntary associations are of crucial importance in this process, empirical research usually reveals but a weak relat…
Government weakness and electoral cycles in local public debt
Empirical research on Political Business (and Budget) Cycles is more supportive for electoral cycles in policies than in macro-economic outcomes. But even pre-electoral policy cycles receive no unanimous confirmation. In the present paper, we give credence to recent arguments that this may be due to the disregard for the political, economic and institutional context in which politicians make policy decisions. Specifically, we argue that the level…
Local Governments in the Wake of Demographic Change
German municipalities are expected to suffer from intense demographic changes in the upcoming decades, not only in the form of population losses, but also through a changing demographic structure. We assess local governments' vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of these demographic transformations (using a sample of 1021 German municipalities) by determining the elasticity of local government cost functions to municipalities' demographic cha…
The impact of ‘central places’ on spatial spending patterns
Taxation and presidential approval
How to make head or tail of 'bridging' and 'bonding
A distinction has recently been proposed between bridging (or encompassing) and bonding (or inward-looking) social networks. However, existing theoretical contributions remain vague as to the fundamental meaning of both concepts. As a consequence, two distinct interpretations have developed alongside each other. In the present paper, we employ data on voluntary association membership in Flanders to empirically illustrate that both approaches can …
The political cost of taxation
Measuring the Bridging Nature of Voluntary Organizations
Recently, a distinction between bridging and bonding networks has been made in the social capital literature. Bridging groups are often expected to have greater effects on democratic norm development and to generate more positive externalities on society than bonding networks. To allow application of these theoretical constructs in practice, however, an adequate measurement of bridging versus bonding networks is crucial. One approach builds on co…
Wars, Presidents, and Popularity
Journal Article Wars, Presidents, and Popularity: The Political Cost(s) of War Re-Examined Get access Benny Geys Benny Geys Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 2, Summer 2010, Pages 357–374, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfq001 Published: 29 March 2010
Measuring the 'Bridging' versus 'Bonding' Nature of Social Networks
Recent research illustrates that two distinct interpretations and operationalizations of 'bridging' and 'bonding' social networks co-exist in the literature (based on links between diverse networks or between socio-economic groups within a given network, respectively), and that these do not coincide in empirical applications. The present contribution first confirms this conclusion using data from the United Kingdom. Then, we suggest a simple way …
Civic Engagement and Corruption in 20 European Democracies
This paper analyzes the relation between different forms of civic engagement and corruption. This first of all extends earlier analyses linking generalized trust to corruption by incorporating another element from the social capital complex (namely formal forms of civic engagement). Second, based on the idea that social networks’ beneficial or harmful impact may depend on their characteristics, it investigates how the structure of social networks…
Evaluating efficient public good provision
Association Membership and Generalized Trust
Research linking civic engagement to citizens' democratic values, generalized trust, cooperative norms, and so on often implicitly assumes such connections are stable over time. This article argues that, due to changes in the broader institutional environment, the engagement-values relation is likely to generally lack temporal stability. We investigate this empirically by analysing the engagement-trust relation using World Values Survey (WVS) dat…
Political science (83 obras) · Economics (67 obras) · Politics (57 obras) · Law (55 obras) · Law (48 obras) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (43 obras) · Sociology (37 obras) · Public Administration (29 obras) · Public Administration (28 obras) · Psychology (27 obras)