Search

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]

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]

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]

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.