In the field of political science researchers have shown empirically that the perception of relevant political institutions as fair may produce political (vertical), as well as interpersonal (horizontal) trust. By making use of these overlapping but separate theoretical frameworks, we formulated three hypotheses that we tested on data from a survey conducted in Sweden in 2006. First, we investigated whether the extent to which an employee perceives formal institutions as fair and duly enforced lower the probability that he/she will behave opportunistically. Second, we tested whether an employee's trust in the opposite party had equivalent effects. Third , we examined whether an employee's perception of formal institutions as fair and duly enforced increased his/her trust in the opposite party. All three hypotheses were supported by the data. Our interpretation is that that there is indeed an effect on cooperative behavior and willingness to enter into flexible contracts from perceptions of fair and enforced institutions, but it is indirect. Trust, however, has direct effects and, consequently, mediates the effects of institutions as well. ; Samarbete, konflikt och rättvisa på arbetsmarknaden (Skorpan)
This article focuses on how institutions matter in generating relationships of trust in an environment of unequal power. Trust is seen as the truster's expectation that the trustee will act trustworthily out of moral commitment and/or interest in continuing the relationship. The weight given to self-interest and moral commitment might differ across individuals and institutional settings. Using cross-sectional data from a survey conducted in 2006 on Swedish employment relations the authors show that perceived power asymmetries between an employee and his/her superior have a negative impact on trust. However, perceptions about the enforcement and fairness of institutional constraints – rules for dismissals, conflict resolution, wage setting, and promotion – have conditioning effects. The degree to which the employees perceived the institutional constraints as enforced and fairly implemented is positively related to the expressed trust in their superiors. Furthermore, when the respondents conceived the rules as fairly implemented, trust was less influenced by changes in power relations and the extent to which they perceived the rules for dismissals as enforced. The results have important implications. By designing institutions that are considered fair, distrust may be mitigated even in situations characterized by extensive power asymmetries. ; Samarbete, konflikt och rättvisa på arbetsmarknaden (Skorpan)
As environmental problems today are understood as being problems of collective action, they also depend on the broad engagement of individual citizens for their successful solution. Policymakers are thereby faced with the challenge of designing policy and constructing policy tools, which contribute to an increase in individual environmental responsibility and voluntarily behavioural change. Here, this challenge is approached from the point of departure of policy legitimacy, concluding that the problem of legitimacy facing public policy is threefold: affecting the performance (in terms of effectiveness and efficiency) of political programs and policy tools; the boundaries of the policymaking process itself (through the legitimacy/effectiveness dilemma) as well as the democratic standing and future overall performance of political government. As such, the thesis aims both at exploring the level of legitimacy for contemporary Swedish environmental public policy as well as at analysing the prospects and prerequisites for designing future environmental policy that holds a high(er) level of legitimacy. In order to fulfil these aims, a further objective is to discuss the meaning and function of policy (as opposed to political-) legitimacy as well as to suggest methods and approaches to its study.By reviewing and synthesising key concepts and theories from legitimacy theory, public opinion research, and policy analysis, as well as from social and environmental psychology, the first part of the thesis constructs a framework for studying policy legitimacy, focusing content rather than process or actors, and systems of belief rather than opinion. The level of policy legitimacy is seen as the extent to which values and beliefs underpinning public policy content corresponds to those established among the public. This suggests that the evaluation of policy legitimacy is a three-step process, requiring an exploration of policy belief-systems; a mapping of public belief-systems and a subsequent comparison of the two.In the second part of the thesis, the analytical framework is put to the test in an empirical exploration of the legitimacy for Swedish environmental public policy during the period 1994-2006. By examining and comparing data from a qualitative text analysis of national policy documents with the results of two mass-surveys conducted in the years of 2004 and 2006, important insights are reached in terms of how both policymakers and the public understand and frame the environmental problem in terms of causes, seriousness and possible solutions; how they assign costs and responsibilities in amending the problem; as well as their preference for overall goals in the environmental policy domain. The thesis concludes that although public policy and public values align on several instances, belief-system divergences potentially affecting policy performance might nevertheless be identified. These findings deepen our understanding of the character of those legitimacy issues facing Swedish environmental public policy, providing relevant insights into how the level of legitimacy, and thereby policy performance, might be furthered. Lastly, it is possible to conclude that through the elaboration of an analytical framework, contributions are made to the scientific study of policy legitimacy, also beyond the environmental policy domain. ; Godkänd; 2009; 20090813 (simon_m); DISPUTATION Ämnesområde: Statsvetenskap/Political Science Opponent: Professor Neil Carter, University of York, United Kingdom Ordförande: Professor Torbjörn Bergman, Luleå tekniska universitet Tid: Fredag den 18 september 2009, kl 10.00 Plats: A 109, Luleå tekniska universitet
How is a hybrid state maintained? Today, several countries undergoing democratic reforms are also backsliding towards greater authoritarianism. This article draws on election data from Macedonia and Albania to show how a country can display elements of democratic improvement and democratic deterioration within the same policy field. The Albanian case shows how the political parties, with an anchoring in legislation, work to make the electoral administration politically dependent. This enables the political parties to exert control over central aspects of the distribution of power. By contrast, the case of Macedonia shows how undemocratic behaviors can become institutionalized and gradually accepted, even as other features of the electoral process undergo improvement. Common to both countries are patterns of patronage that serve to maintain a unique organization of power: the democratic façade is improved, but the undemocratic behavior remains.
It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. This paper examines whether reforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establish causality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform of Swedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gave rise to exogenous variation in educational attainment between individuals living in different municipalities or born in different years. Similar to recent studies employing credible identification strategies, we fail to find a statistically significant average effect of education on political participation. We move past previous studies, however, and show that the reform nevertheless contributed to narrowing the voting gap between individuals of different social backgrounds by raising turnout among those from low socioeconomic status households. The results thus square well with other recent studies arguing that education is particularly important for uplifting politically marginalized groups.
Studies of how actors collaborate across organizational boundaries to prepare for and respond to extreme events have traditionally focused on describing network structure whereas fewer studies empirically investigate how network relationships influence crisis management capacities. Using survey data on crisis management work in Swedish municipalities, this study considers how the number of collaboration partners and venues for collaboration (networking) influence organizational goal attainment. Given managerial costs associated with increasingly complex collaboration networks, the study explores the diminishing returns hypothesis, which predicts a positive relationship between networking and goal attainment up to a certain point when payoffs do not increase. Results support a nonlinear relationship; networking at low levels had a positive effect on goal attainment whereas no relationship was found at moderate or high levels. To identify characteristics of collaboration conducive to performance, the study undertakes a comparative case study of two low-residual cases where the relationship between networking and performance follow the predicted nonlinear curve and one deviant case where high levels of networking had a positive effect on performance. The cases show that stable interpersonal relationships, clarification of the terms of collaboration, shared problem perceptions, and coordination of joint decision making constitute important assembly mechanisms for overcoming collective action problems.
This article investigates whether two different measures of democracy generate the same empirical results. The Freedom House and Polity IV measures are used as the dependent variables. The result shows that statistical significance and explanatory power for different independent variables differ greatly, depending on which democracy index is used as the dependent variable. The results also indicate that Freedom House and Polity IV rate many countries' levels of democracy differently. It is worrying and problematic for comparative studies of democracy that empirical results differ so much according to which measure of democracy is used.
The Centre for Regional Science at Umeå University (CERUM) and the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm has initiated a joint research effort concerning sustainable development. The general purpose of that comparative research program, which includes scientists from Sweden, Norway, the United States, Singapore, Taiwan, China, South Korea and Japan, is to analyze conditions for sustainable development in the rapidly developing economies of East Asia compared with the situation in Northern Europe. In this effort, sustainable development is analyzed as a complex interaction between economic growth, democratization and environmental concerns.This working paper is written in the context of this project by Jeanette Edblad at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University and is also her master thesis.
This dissertation deals with the "Fall of the Shah" in 1978 from the perspective of intelligence concerning Regime Change. It compares the US and Israeli intelligence effort using intelligence failure theories in combination with intelligence success. The dissertation builds on released documents from the US National Security Archives as well as a variety of secondary sources. It argues that the US failure was caused by mistakes on multiple levels, the lion's share within policy making and analysis, but also that comprehensive understanding of the case requires an intermixture of theories. Further, several relevant lessons learned can be drawn and the intertwinement of intelligence and Covert Action is highlighted. ; Uppsats vid Brunel University London. ; Dissertation at Master of Intelligence and Security Studies (MAISS)
This article explores the processes that lead to different types of civil war outbreak in postconflict societies, combining quantitative analysis with case studies of Myanmar and Sierra Leone to disaggregate situations in which former rebels resume fighting from those when new rebels emerge in the postconflict environment. The analysis, based in principal–agent theory, illuminates how relations between the government and ex‐rebel elites, group cohesion among rebels, and the relationship between the government and the ex‐combatants all can lead to resumed civil war. Its findings suggest that victories and settled conflicts are the most important outcome for preventing conflict recurrence by former rebels, but do not prevent the rise of new insurgencies. Moreover, the absence of government repression emerges as the factor most likely to reduce the risk of new rebellion.
The prevailing trend of treating voting-rights as a privilege for citizens has been challenged by a lively debate among democratic theorists. Growing numbers of resident non-citizens and non-resident citizens are likely to make voting-rights regulations more politically salient. Yet, these issues are largely missing in studies of public opinion and little is known about the support for the citizenship-requirement and its more or less democratic alternatives. Informed by normative democratic theory, this article opens the research field by conducting the first comprehensive study of attitudes toward competing requirements for voting-rights, using a conjoint experiment on a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens. The results indicate that considerable proportions of respondents support a residency-requirement and a democratically dubious economic contribution-requirement, restricting voting-rights to taxpayers only. Nevertheless, the current citizenship-requirement is supported by a majority across sociodemographic groups, indicating sociological legitimacy of the current order and some but limited leeway for changes.
Individuals who have a higher education are highly overrepresented in national legislative bodiesworldwide. In spite of an extensive body of literature interested in educational background and itsrelation to political activity, significantly fewer studies have engaged with the qualitative advantagesand drawbacks of legislators'educational background in their legislative work. The aim of this paper isto explore whether higher education functions as a resource for legislators in their political office. Weuse data from a unique elite survey conducted in the Swedish Parliament, which had a response rate of82% (n= 287), to investigate the relation between educational background and the internal efficacyand influence of MPs. The quantitativefindings indicate that there is little or no difference betweenlegislators with and without higher education in terms of internal efficacy and influence. Contextualis-ing thefindings with 33 elite interviews, wefind that while legislators value skills acquired throughhigher education in their work—such as the ability to handle large amounts of text and infor-mation—MPs without higher education display similar skills acquired in alternative ways.
This thesis studies the implementation of the Asylum procedure directive (2005/85/EC) and the Asylum Qualification Directive (2004/83/EC). The implementation is based on the officials examining asylum applications at the Migration Board in Malmö. Ten officials examining asylum applications have been interviewed. The aim is to see if there are any implementation problems regarding these two directives. This will in turn have an effect on the Europeanization of asylum policy. Implementation theory is used to study factors that have an effect on implementation and the theory of street- level bureaucrats is also used to study their discretion. The result is that the Asylum Qualification Directive had a larger impact on the asylum examinations than the Asylum Procedures Directive. Different forms of status categories are now granted together with residence permit. The implementation of this directive has therefore a positive impact on the Europeanization of the asylum policy in Sweden. Key words: Implementation, Common European asylum system, EU- directives, Migration Board
In the past two decades, regional organizations and coalitions of states have deployed more peace operations than the UN. Yet most quantitative studies of peacekeeping effectiveness focus on UN peacekeeping exclusively, a decision owed to data availability more than to theories about the differential impact of UN and non-UN missions. As a result, we know little about the effectiveness of non-UN peacekeeping in mitigating violence. In this paper, we introduce and analyse monthly data on the approximate number of troops, police, and observers in both UN and non-UN peacekeeping operations between 1993 and 2016. Using these data, we show that when accounting for mission size and composition, UN and regional peacekeeping operations are equally effective in mitigating violence against civilians by governments, but only UN troops and police curb civilian targeting by non-state actors. We offer some theoretical reflections on these findings, but the main contribution of the article is the novel dataset on non-UN peacekeeping strength and personnel composition to overcome the near-exclusive focus on UN missions in the scholarship on peacekeeping effectiveness.
Why are some peace processes in communal conflicts more inclusive of civil society actors than others? Inclusion of civil society actors, such as churches and religious leaders, women's organizations, or youth groups, is seen as important for normative reasons, and studies also suggest that civil society inclusion can improve the prospects for durable peace. Yet, we have a very limited understanding of why we observe inclusion in some communal conflicts but not others. We address this gap by theorizing about various forms of civil society inclusion in local peace processes, and examining to what extent involvement by different types of third-party actors—governments, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—may contribute to inclusion. Empirically, we draw on a combination of cross-case and in-depth data covering peace negotiations in communal conflicts in Kenya. The findings show that civil society was less frequently included as facilitators when the government was involved as a third party, while inclusion in the form of direct participation of civil society in negotiations, or via involvement in the implementation phase, was equally common across different types of third-party actors. Our study thus provides important new insights regarding how inclusion plays out in communal conflicts.
