Outcome Isn’t Everything: Electoral Consequences of Implementing or Withdrawing Unpopular Policies
Published in Political Behavior, 2024
With: Elena Leuschner
Incumbents often make unpopular policy decisions. But can they remedy their negative electoral consequences? We extend the wide literature concerning retrospective voting to the case of unpopular policies and examine whether voters reward a responsive withdrawal of an unpopular policy proposal or punish the disclosed policy intention despite the withdrawal. To test this, we use granular data on Swedish local election results from 2002 to 2018 and the case of widely unpopular school closure proposals, some of which were implemented and others not. We exploit within municipality variation in voting over time to causally estimate the consequences for incumbents in the neighborhood surrounding the schools. Our results confirm that even if a school remains open, voters punish the incumbent and consider the initial proposal as informative for their vote. Our findings have implications for the understanding of democratic accountability and which information voters take into account when casting their vote.
Political Expectations and Electoral Responses to Wind Farm Development in Sweden
Published in Energy Policy, 2024
With: Zeth Isaksson
Wind energy expansion has influenced electoral behavior by decreasing support for incumbents, primarily explained by not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) arguments. However, how does the establishment of wind farms shape electoral behavior when municipal politicians can veto such establishments? Analyzing Sweden, this study shows that voters respond not only by retrospectively evaluating past constructions but also by evaluating parties differently based on their expectations. Our results indicate that parties more likely to approve turbine constructions are punished more than those less expected to do so. Additionally, we find no evidence that the construction of wind turbines influences support for either Green or radical right-wing parties. In conclusion, this study show that the political repercussions of wind farm expansion are multifaceted, influenced by a combination of past actions, future expectations, and the ideological stances of political parties.
Does Deliberative Education Increase Civic Competence? Results from a Field Experiment
Published in Journal of Experimental Political Science, 2020
With: Mikael Persson, Klas Andersson, Pär Zetterberg & Pär Ekman
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 competence: political knowledge, political interest, democratic values, and political discussion. In contrast to previous research, we find little evidence that deliberative education significantly increases civic competence.
Work in progress:
School Ownership and Government Accountability
Status: In preperation
This study examines the impact of the marketization of the educational sector on citizens’ voting behavior, particularly in response to increased accessibility to education. While it is rational for constituents to reward politicians for investing in public schools it is less clear if politicians also gain support when publicly funded but private entities does the same. Focusing on Sweden, where markatization of education has been far-reaching, the study investigates local electoral shift following the establishment of both new public and non-public schools. By merging comprehensive register data on Swedish schools with electoral data at the precinct level, I am able to study the effect on a neighborhood level and exploit within municipality variation in voting. Surprisingly, in contrast to standard accountability theory constituents seem to neither reward the incumbent politicians for new public schools nor for new non-puublic ones.
Is Private Provision Better? Assessing Educational Outcomes at the Individual and Market level
Status: In preperation
How should the provision of education be organized, and does the type of school ownership—public, private for-profit, or private not-for-profit—matter? This paper addresses the question using 30 years of comprehensive register data from Sweden, matched with ownership information on private schools operating within the country’s publicly funded universal voucher system, to make two key contributions. First, it evaluates the individual effects of attending schools with different ownership types using a sibling comparison design. Second, it examines the market-level consequences of increased private provision by exploiting variation in private school growth across municipalities. The findings show that attending private schools—both for-profit and not-for-profit—leads to improvements in grades and test scores during compulsory education, with somewhat larger effects for for-profit schools. However, these benefits do not extend to longer-term outcomes, such as SAT scores, university attendance, or labor market incomes. At the market level, competition from private schools raises overall grades and university attendance in both public and private schools but also increases segregation, particularly between students with immigrant and non-immigrant backgrounds, while leaving education costs largely unchanged. These results are relevant as countries worldwide increasingly consider school choice and privatization policies and Sweden offers a unique context to compare ownership types while holding funding conditions constant.