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In recent years, scholars of migration have created several new immigration policy indexes, but most existing databases have limited temporal scope. They also focus, to a large extent, on the Global North. In this research note, we introduce the Historical Immigration Policy dataset (HIP), which begins to fill these gaps. We first provide an overview of the data and then describe how they offer new insights into immigration policy. We make three empirical observations. (1) On average, democracies are less open to immigration than authoritarian states but grant resident migrants more rights. (2) European states were open to immigration earlier than standard accounts of global migration assume. (3) Historically, openness to immigration and inclusive rights for resident migrants have often been complements, not substitutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, many parliamentary democracies have experienced bargaining delays when forming governments. The previous literature has attributed protracted government formation processes to a high degree of preference uncertainty among the political parties and a high level of bargaining complexity. The article draws on such theories, but also adds a third theoretical mechanism, commitment problems, and highlights two explanatory variables that have not received much attention so far. The first is pre-electoral coalitions, which are declarations by parties stating that they intend to collaborate with each other after the election. The second is familiarity, which is the mutual trust between parties that comes from having worked together in the past. By combining a large-N study of government formation processes in 17 West European parliamentary democracies (1945–2019) with an in-depth case study of the prolonged Swedish government formation process in 2018–2019, it is shown that pre-electoral coalitions that fail to win a majority can sometimes delay, not speed up, government formation. In addition, a lack of familiarity may sometimes lead to a breakdown of negotiations and drawn-out government formation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to identify the most vaccine-hesitant groups in a contemporary democratic state, Sweden. We rely on two representative surveys that were conducted in 2020 and that asked Swedish citizens how likely they were to accept immunization with a Covid-19 vaccine if one were offered to them. Using clustering methods, we find a wide variety of vaccine-hesitant groups, with the highest levels of vaccine hesitancy among individuals who combine low personal health risks with political orientations and ideological convictions that are associated with antivaccinationist attitudes. The paper's findings have important implications for public-health policy and, more broadly, for theories of how governments can convince individual citizens to play their part in achieving important social goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the changing nature of the English and Swedish states between 1800 and 2020 from the perspective of ordinary citizens. We identify 13 typical life situations and then describe the types of citizens who interacted with the state, the number and types of public officials with whom they interacted, and where those interactions took place. We distinguish among three typical social groups: the poor, the middle, and the rich. We find, among other things, that the poor became objects of government policy much earlier than other groups, but they also remained in a world of parochial poor relief even as the middle and the rich began to interact with a more functionally differentiated, professional bureaucracy. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates on when the state began to interact directly with the civilian masses and the unevenness of state activities and capacities within countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of corporatism in Sweden from the 1970s onwards is described. The Swedish case differs a great deal from other small European countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden's neighbor Denmark where corporatism is alive and well often credited with providing for economic success.

This paper examines the relationship between the coming of the railroads, the expansion of primary education, and the introduction of national school curricula. Using fine-grained data on local education outcomes in Sweden in the nineteenth century, the paper tests the idea that the development of the railroad network enabled national school inspectors to monitor remote schools more effectively. In localities to which school inspectors could travel by rail, a larger share of children attended permanent public schools and took classes in nation-building subjects such as geography and history. By contrast, the parochial interests of local and religious authorities continued to dominate in remote areas school inspectors could not reach by train. The paper argues for a causal interpretation of these findings, which are robust for the share of children in permanent schools and suggestive for the content of the curriculum. The paper therefore concludes that the railroad, the defining innovation of the First Industrial Revolution, mattered directly for the state's ability to implement public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Did the different public-health policies that Sweden and Denmark pursued in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic result in different levels of public trust in governments' and health authorities' ability to guide the two countries safely through the pandemic? How did the level of trust change as the pandemic unfolded? And were there any cross-country differences in the correlates of trust? Using three original representative surveys conducted in Sweden and Denmark between late March and late June, 2020, this article answers these questions. It finds that Danes consistently trusted their government and health authorities more than the Swedes did. While Swedish trust was politicized and shaped by ideology from the onset of the pandemic, this only later became the case in Denmark. The findings provide insights into popular evaluations of different public-health policies in two otherwise similar countries, with implications for future policy making. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1909964. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use historical data on union density and new historical data on policies toward migrants to study the long-run relationship between the strength of trade unions and the social and economic rights of migrants in the Global North. In countries with strong trade unions, there was, for a long time, a widening distance between the rights of migrants and the rights of citizens, probably because the rights of citizens expanded sooner and more quickly than the rights of migrants. Over time, however, the differences between countries with strong and weak unions have diminished, and in more recent years, the 'rights gap' between citizens and migrants has in fact been smaller in countries with strong unions than in countries with weak unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses how Swedish parliamentary democracy works today, almost one hundred years into its history. Our main research question is whether the transformation of the Swedish party system since the 1980s—and especially since 2010, when the populist-radical-right Sweden Democrats entered parliament—has altered the way parliamentary democracy works. We provide new evidence on Sweden's changing party system, the formation and duration of cabinets, decision-making in parliament and the relationship between what parties say in election campaigns and what they do in government. Our main conclusion is that at least by the election of 2018, surprisingly little had changed. Cabinets have formed quickly, and once formed, they have survived until the next election. The bills governments have sent to parliament have usually passed, often getting the support of one or more opposition parties. Governing parties have managed to implement approximately 80 per cent of the promises they have made in their election manifestos. That said, the relationship between the executive and the legislature was contested in the 2010–2014 and 2014–2018 parliaments, and after the election of 2018, it took a very long time to form a new government. The concluding section discusses what the future might hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new evidence on the efforts of states to collect and process information about themselves, their territories, and their populations. We compile data on five institutions and policies: the regular implementation of a reliable census, the regular release of statistical yearbooks, the introduction of civil and population registers, and the establishment of a government agency tasked with processing statistical information. Using item response theory methods, we generate an index of "information capacity" for 85 states from 1789 to the present. We then ask how political regime changes have influenced the development of information capacity over time. In contrast with the literature on democracy and fiscal capacity, we find that suffrage expansions are associated with higher information capacity, but increases in the level of political competition are not. These findings demonstrate the value of our new measure, because they suggest that different elements of state capacity are shaped by different historical processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts contemporary debates about the relationship between immigration policy and the welfare state in historical perspective. Relying on new historical data, the article examines the relationship between immigration policy and social policy in Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the modern welfare state emerged. Germany already had comparably strict immigration policies when the German Empire introduced the world's first national social insurances in the 1880s. Denmark, another early social-policy adopter, also pursued restrictive immigration policies early on. Almost all other countries in Western Europe started out with more liberal immigration policies than Germany's and Denmark's, but then adopted more restrictive immigration policies and more generous social policies concurrently. There are two exceptions, Belgium and Italy, which are discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a game-theoretic model, this paper argues that governments typically manage crises more effectively in systems where political power is concentrated in a single party, but they are more likely to make investments in future welfare in systems where political power is shared among several parties. The paper makes two contributions. First of all, it shows that both crisis-management failures and investment failures can be explained by a common mechanism: an inter-temporal commitment problem that arises from the inability of political agents to commit to future policy choices. Second, it shows that power-sharing institutions are often associated with more effective government than power-concentration institutions, in contrast to much of the normative literature in comparative politics, in which power-sharing institutions are often justified on other grounds, such as representativeness, responsiveness, or social cohesion. In a world where crises dominate, power-concentration institutions typically perform better; in a world where investment problems dominate, power-sharing institutions typically perform better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between conscription (the compulsory enlistment of civilians for military service) and democracy. Using the best available cross-country comparable data on the history of conscription and democracy, we demonstrate that there is an empirical relationship between conscription and democratization, but the relationship is more complicated than commonly believed. Specifically, we find that conscription increases the likelihood of male suffrage extensions, but only in wartime (when the conscript army is mobilized). We find no relationship between conscription and democratization apart from extensions of suffrage. Nor do we find support for the hypothesis that conscription shelters democracies from coups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines unemployment benefit reforms in twenty-five advanced democracies between the middle of the 1980s and the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. The paper’s main argument is that the type of government – coalition or single-party – has an effect on whether cutbacks in social benefits are combined with compensating measures that mitigate the negative effects of the cuts. We show empirically that when cuts in unemployment benefit duration were made by coalition governments, spending on training programs tended to increase, but when cuts in duration were made by single-party governments, training spending tended to decrease. This pattern suggests that coalition governments, but not single-party governments, use compensation mechanisms to build political support for labor market reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Who benefits from deep economic crises: the left, the right or neither? On the basis of evidence from elections in 1929-1933 and 2008-2013 in all states that were democracies in both periods, it is argued in this article that the electoral consequences of the Great Depression and the Great Recession were surprisingly similar: in both periods, right-wing parties were at first more successful than left-wing parties, although this effect only lasted for a few years. The manner in which a crisis develops over time should be taken into account when examining the effects of deep economic downturns on the electoral fortunes of the left and the right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that bureaucratic capacity - the competence and reliability of the national bureaucracy - matters to the allocation of public spending among welfare state programmes since it is difficult for governments to justify high levels of spending on programmes that require bureaucrats to make case-by-case decisions, on a discretionary basis, if the bureaucracy is incompetent, corrupt or both. We expect bureaucratic capacity to have a positive effect on programmes that involve bureaucratic discretion, but weak or no effects on programmes that are more straightforward to implement. In order to test these hypotheses, we analyse public spending on active labour market programmes (which involve a lot of discretion) and parental leave benefits (which involve less discretion). Relying on data for twenty advanced democracies from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, we find that high bureaucratic capacity does have a positive effect on active labour market policy spending, but not on parental leave benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's opinion that the political consequences resulting from the 2008 global financial crisis and 1929 depression are similar. The discussion notes two of the author's research papers which support the argument that during an economic crisis right-wing political parties fare better than left-wing parties in elections.

This article argues that the high level of protest activity in France is, at least partly, the result of distrust between the government and the trade unions, and that such distrust is inevitable in a society where unions are sometimes strong enough to mobilise against the government but not confident in their own future strength. This trust problem can be overcome if governments are willing to make institutional changes that commit them to future policies, but such political engineering is costly and unstable, which explains why governments sometimes prefer open confrontation. The empirical part of the paper analyses four French social and labour market reform initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s, demonstrating that the ideas developed in this article help to explain important features of contemporary French policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of recent studies have documented weakening ties between social democratic parties and trade unions. This article is concerned with the effects of weakening party— union ties on policymaking. In many classic studies of corporatism it has been argued that this mode of policymaking depends on strong ties between social democratic parties and trade unions. In this article, we argue, in contrast, that strong party—union ties are potentially detrimental to corporatism, because in a polarized political environment unions may be tempted to exert political influence via political allies instead of bargaining with their counterparts. In order to evaluate this argument empirically, we present a detailed analysis of two countries with strong corporatist traditions (Denmark and Sweden) from the 1970s to the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I argue that reform capacity, defined as the extent to which political institutions facilitate the adoption of socially efficient reforms, is not primarily determined by the number of veto players in the political system, but by the availability of institutional mechanisms that allow political agents to solve commitment problems associated with bargaining over reform. Specifically, I argue that power sharing is compatible with high reform capacity if policy areas involved in package deals are all controlled by the central government (or whatever level of government makes the reform), and if the 'losers' are confident that they will remain veto players in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a research project on the political consequences of an economic crisis. The project covers the economies of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in the period from 2010 to 2013. It depends on three theoretical literatures, including the literature on domestic policy responses to past economic crises. It also examines the dualization of labor markets. In addition, the project aims to investigate the impact of the economic crisis on election campaigns and mass political behavior.

From the 1930s to the 1980s, Swedish politics was based on the assumption that social change could be accomplished through a specific political and administrative process. National politicians decided the aims of policy, government commissions of inquiry engaged experts who compiled available knowledge, Parliament turned the resulting proposal into law, a civil service agency implemented the policy and local authorities put it into effect. This rationalistic model of social steering can be called ‘the strong state’. This article documents the fall of the strong state. It also argues that these changes to the output side of government have troubling im-plications for the operation of democracy. The reason is that the strong state model provided citizens with a reasonably clear idea of how public policies were – or should be – produced and implemented. As a result of the strong state's decline, the link from elections to policy is partly obscure, partly broken. The question for the future is whether the strong state will be replaced by some new model that provides the necessary focal points for debates on public policy, or whether stable norms will remain absent due to an inherently obscure division of labour within Sweden's policy-making and administrative structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]