A reply to Marie Demker on Swedish, European and international political science arguing that while Demker's analysis points towards potential real problems, these issues are not as pronounced as one might believe. It is problematic and innovation threatening that theories and models in political science are driven by social scientists in the United States. However, it is not true that Sweden in this case would merely become a case study; instead Swedish political scientists are experts in the political relations of Sweden and this information can directly benefit the political scientists in other countries and thus advancing the science. While English is clearly the linuga franca of our time, Swedish is still the most popular dissertation language and Sweden is by far the most common research subject in Sweden. L. Pitkaniemi
Project Hybrid regimes has democratization and non-democratic regimes as its focus. In recent years, research has shown how a number of authoritarian regimes have adopted a blend of democracy and authoritarianism rather than converting outright to full democracy. A country might for instance hold free elections but show little regard for the political and human rights of citizens. Project collaborators are operating on the premise that this type of blended or hybrid regime constitutes a distinct regime type alongside democracies, full authoritarian regimes, or totalitarian governments. They seek to explore the question of whether outside aid from full democracies can aid hybrid regimes in converting into full democracies. While the number of democratic governments around the world has increased in recent years, researchers have noted that hybrid regimes often resist efforts on the part of foreign democratic organizations to aid them toward a process of greater democratization. Citing the case of post-Soviet countries, and the Ukraine, the authors question the widely held perception by researchers that countries possessing a blend of democratic and authoritarian elements are at a transition point on the way to full democratization and that non-democratic elements of their governments merely constitute temporary setbacks. The authors, noting that heads of such regimes resist full democracy because they aren't prepared to accept challenges to their political power, argue for a new for the recognition of a new, lasting hybrid type of government characterized by elements of both democracy and authoritarianism. Adapted from the source document.
Staged talk: On relations between politics and journalism. This article focuses on political talkin the media. Taking the point of departure in discourse and conversation analysis the aim is to study relations and methods on a micro level in two forms of staged talk; the interaction in live interviews and the practices of quoting in edited news reports. The study of live interviews is based on programs broadcasted during the Swedish election campaigns 2002 and 2006. The study shows how relations of power are negotiated in interaction. Methods used by the politicians to deal with delicate situations created by the questions asked are analysed. The analysis of edited news reports shows how techniques of quoting have been part of a process moving the stage of the political debate more and more into the media. Quoting is a flexible resource frequently used by journalists in the dramatization of news stories and the recontextualization of others voices.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is primarily an existential threat to the Ukrainian society and its institutions, and furthermore an enormous challenge for neighboring countries, the EU and NATO. Yet beyond the European continent, one can also discern the contours of an alternative world order, in that today’s rule-based system anchored in international legal principles of national sovereignty, formal equality and territorial integrity are less respected. The article examines how the international community, and especially the most resourceful actors, have responded to the war in Ukraine as an indication of levels of support for a rules-based world order with or without “liberal characteristics”, or for a system where regional great powers wield greater impact in their immediate neighborhood. To arrive at a nuanced analysis, a range of concepts and methods from the study of international relations and foreign policy decision-making are employed.
This article discusses the relationship between political representation and cartelization. Proponents of the cartel party theory argue as if cartelization and political representation were opposites: insofar as political parties empirically approximate the cartel party type, they will also, so the argument goes, distance themselves from normatively entrenched ideas and ideals about representation. The article questions and critiques this view. Drawing on Hanna Pitkin’s view of political representation as acting in the interests of the represented in a responsive manner, I discuss the difficulties in teasing out what it means to represent and be represented according to the cartel party theory. The article concludes that the proponents of the cartel party theory have not provided any convincing reasons for assuming that representation and cartelization are necessarily opposites, but also that our entrenched understanding of political representation offers little guidance as to the nature of this relationship.
Policyskapande sker i dynamiska processer där idéer och aktörer interagerar. I det forskningsfält som intresserar sig för hur policy skapas har flera viktiga bidrag gjorts, som uppmärksammar relationen mellan å ena sidan en frågas språkliga och idémässiga formulering och å andra sidan aktörernas handlande. Artikeln argumenterar för att en återstående utmaning är att analytiskt precisera angreppsätt som hjälper oss att fånga interaktioner i politiska processer; alltså hur aktörer både skapar och formulerar idéer men också påverkas av dem. Syftet med artikeln är att bidra till forskningen om hur politiska reformer skapas genom att utveckla ett ramverk för en dynamisk frameanalys. Frameanalysen har tidigare använts för att analysera innehåll och debatter i politiken men inte för att förstå politiska processer. En empirisk studie av svensk prostitutionspolicy kommer att användas för att visa på ramverkets fruktbarhet.
How is outer space perceived in contemporary Russian politics and popular cul-ture? This question is addressed through an analysis of post-Soviet Russian space policy and Russian popular culture, the latter concerning e.g. space museums, movies and literature. By looking both at Russian space policy (operated mainly through the Russian state corporation Roscosmos) and at expressions in popular culture, a wide plethora of ideas and visions of cosmos and Russia’s place in space is observed. Patterns of continuity and change are observed in both realms, and link-ages between politics and popular culture are noted. Expressions of Soviet nostal-gia exists, but there is also a widespread perception of Russia as a weakened space power, seeking to maintain space exploration capacity rather than to take a global lead. In contemporary popular culture, there is also a new diversity of space visions, ranging from postcolonial critique of Soviet and contemporary Russian space policy to global liberal notions and new imperial visions.
The Future of Local Government: Four Realistic Pathways. Two main arguments are presented in this article. First, when alternatives for the future of local government is debated, two questions need to be addressed simultaneously: (a) how many and how big municipalities ought we have?, and (b) how strong and well secured ought the principle of local self government be in the constitution?. Second, by using these questions as guides for the analysis, we argue that there are instrumental reasons to guarantee a strong local self government in the constitution. However, such a reform needs to be complemented by a politically neutral body of regulations that, under given conditions, secures geographically concentrated minorities a right to secede.
Helping dilemmas occur when it is impossible to help everyone in need, and when one must decide how to allocate resources across multiple beneficiaries. Deciding which patient that should be connected to the only available respirator, or deciding which charitable organization to donate to, are both examples of real-life helping dilemmas. This paper examines the meaning of moral dilemmas and especially helping dilemmas, discusses different normative perspectives of helping dilemmas as well as the influential effective altruism movement, and summarizes findings from my own and other’s empirical research related to how people behave when faced with helping dilemmas.
Washing one’s hands, maintaining physical distance, not meeting elderly, or avoid-ing eating out, were up until recently not perceived to be characteristically moral behaviors. For known reasons, this changed in early 2020, and these behaviors are now perceived as good examples of human prosociality because they reduce the risk of spreading the Coronavirus. This chapter zooms in on how the Covid-19 pan-demic changed human prosociality. I begin by defining and operationalizing the term “infection-reducing prosociality” and compare this novel type of prosocial-ity against traditional prosociality (donating money and volunteering) and against another modern type of prosociality (climate-friendly behavior). I then review recent Covid-related research that have investigated: (A) which individual-level and cultural-level factors that predict infection-reducing prosociality, or (B) how social norms and different types of persuasion messages influence infection-reducing prosociality. In the final part, I discuss some of the many heuristics and biases that can influence human judgment and decision making when communicating risk, and conclude that disagreements about national policies occur not only because of uncertainty regarding consequences, but also because different people value dif-ferent things in life.
The professional communicators inside the Swedish Government Offices are today 140 (compared to a single one 40 years ago and just twenty 15 years ago), giving support to the idea that the media now has a major impact on everyday business inside the Government. This article shows that this partly true, as the media mainly have an effect on the politicians, the partisan ministerial staff and the communicators. But the relationship between the Government Offices and the media could also be turned around. The Government have resources for external communication no lesser than an international news agency’s, and does on a daily basis deliver an impressive amount of press releases and conferences – and information leaks – that the media has to handle. This article examines and analyses how the Swedish Government Offices, trough new posts, units and strategies, has institutionalised and centralised its’ media contacts during the last 40 years, as well as the reasons and the internal consequences of this development.
Two main arguments are presented in this article. First, when alternatives for the future of local government is debated, two questions need to be addressed simultaneously: (a) ”how many and how big municipalities ought we have?”, and (b) “how strong and well secured ought the principle of local self government be in the constitution?”. Second, by using these questions as guides for the analysis, we argue that there are instrumental reasons to guarantee a strong local self government in the constitution. However, such a reform needs to be complemented by a politically neutral body of regulations that, under given conditions, secures geographically concentrated minorities a right to secede.
Intermunicipal cooperation – is it worth it?As the case has been in several other countries, in Sweden, intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) has increased dramatically throughout the past three decades. Actors within the state as well as local government have had high expectations about what IMC may accomplish, ranging from increasing quality of services to lowering costs and facilitating recruitment of expertise. However, there is a dearth of evaluations done on whether IMC actually fulfills such promises in the Swedish context. Against this backdrop, we have conducted a survey directed to municipal managers in those 61 municipalities that have formalized cooperation in the area of planning, environment and supervision. Overall, positive experiences are reported: a vast majority perceive that quality of services increase and recruitment is facilitated. However, generally, they do generally not report that costs decrease, but do state that steering becomes more cumbersome with IMC. Considering that we employ a most likely-design, the relatively negative findings on costs, as well the observation that host municipalities report more positive experiences than non-host municipalities, our results are intriguing and highlight the need for deepened studies on these particular issues.
For quite some time, the governance of municipal corporations has been criticized on the grounds of its lack of transparency and its weak mechanisms of account-ability. However, despite the fact that municipal ownership of corporations has become an increasingly controversial issue, the number of municipal corporations has grown, as has also the extent to which they are perceived as a source of unfair competition with private corporations on open markets. This article poses crit-ical questions concerning municipalities as corporate owners and addresses the prerequisites of accountability. Empirically grounded in an explorative case study, four policy-recommendations are generated for the municipal sector as a whole: 1) municipalities should continuously oversee the sector’s corporate structure; 2) an ongoing process towards greater transparency and accessibility is desirable; 3) municipalities must establish a transparent process for appointing the boards of their corporations, and politicians joining them must be offered appropriate brief-ing and training; and lastly, 4) a critical awareness about the potential democratic dilemmas associated with the public ownership of corporations must be estab-lished among senior politicians. If these recommendations are neglected, there is a risk that the democratic legitimacy of the activities associated with municipal corporations will be eroded.
Five parties held (almost) all seats in the Swedish Riksdag between 1921 and 1988. Althoughcontenders have been around since the mid 60’s, it took until the elections of1988 and 1991 for three newcomers to make a breakthrough: Miljöpartiet (1988), Kristdemokraternaand Ny Demokrati (1991). This article examines the serious challengersthat emerged in the early 2000s, i.e. Junilistan, Piratpartiet, Sverigedemokraterna and Feministisktinitativ. How did they emerge, what issues and ideas do they represent, andwhat characterizes the voters that are attracted by them? The articles’ main focus is onthe last question. We conclude that although there are variations between the supportersof the four different parties, they share some common properties. The typical contender-voter is a young man that is uninterested in politics, has a low education and ispoorly integrated into the labour market.
Why become a party member and a local councillor?
What are the causes for political party membership? And why do some members take a further step and candidate for political parties in local parliament elections? We evaluate these questions using a Swedish survey of local politicians. The article reports three main findings. First, the results do not support that social status, career ambitions and material rewards are causes behind participation in political parties. Rather, sense of civic duty has a strong impact. Second, many representatives refer to the fact that they were recruited as a main factor influencing their participation. Third, our results show that active local party members describe themselves as ‘reluctantly active altruists’, driven by civic duty and recruited by others. A minority became active by their own initiative, and a majority got involved in party politics after being recruited.
This paper is about voters’ perceptions of voting secrecy in the 2022 Swedish elec-tions. In collaboration with the local election authorities in Gothenburg, we have asked a large number of advance voters (n = 12901) about perceived voting secrecy under three types of voting arrangements. In the high secrecy arrangement, voters completed voting behind a single closed screen. In two medium secrecy arrange-ments, voters selected ballot papers behind a closed screen and walked a few meters with ballot papers in hand to another closed screen to complete the vote. Results show that perceived voting secrecy is high in all three arrangements, but also that the high secrecy arrangement makes a statistically significant contribu-tion to perceived voting secrecy. The findings illustrate that voters are sensitive to small changes in the voting environment, and that details matter for the experi-ence of voting secretly.
This paper reveals that Swedish game management policy is often ignored by local landowners who instead use alternative, legitimate, but often illegal informal rules: proxy policy. In consequence, a number of game management policy goals still remain unattained since their introduction in 1981. This circumstance adds weight to the premise that implementing natural resource management policies that lack legitimacy trigger permanent and costly conflicts between stakeholders. Ironically, the corporative state, via its judicial process, can only enforce policy if conflicts of interest come to its attention. Therefore, it is argued that if natural resource management is to be effectiveas well as efficient a more collaborative and legitimate Swedish policy making process is imperative.
Against a background of decades of spatial class segregation in Sweden and elsewhere, and with the Swedish city as our empirical base, we demonst rate how classposition effects residents’ life chances defined here as health, security, participation, and education. By comparing the circumstances of affluent neighbourhoodsin both cities with those of disadvantaged neighbourhoods we elucidate important changes in a modern city’s class hierarchy like increased social polarization.We conclude, firstly, that those neighbourhoods that change class position do soslowly and are becoming predominantly middle class. Secondly, we show that thesituation in both cities’ low income neighbourhood category varies dramatically.Finally, and in contradiction with mainstream urban theory, we infer that growingsocial inequality is not always detrimental to the lives of residents in disadvantagedneighbourhoods
Against a background of decades of spatial class segregation in Sweden and else-where, and with the Swedish city as our empirical base, we demonst rate how class position effects residents’ life chances defined here as health, security, participation, and education. By comparing the circumstances of affluent neighbourhoods in both cities with those of disadvantaged neighbourhoods we elucidate impor-tant changes in a modern city’s class hierarchy like increased social polarization. We conclude, firstly, that those neighbourhoods that change class position do so slowly and are becoming predominantly middle class. Secondly, we show that the situation in both cities’ low income neighbourhood category varies dramatically. Finally, and in contradiction with mainstream urban theory, we infer that growing social inequality is not always detrimental to the lives of residents in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
This article aims to examine participation and influence of pensioners’ organizations in a context of marketization within local elderly care. The literature on New Public Management (NPM) points out different views on the effects of marketization on the participation of organized interests within the decision-making process. One view states marketization implies less of participation by organized interests since this stands in conflict with inherent values of NPM, such as efficiency and the citizen as customer on a market. An opposite view states that marketization does not cause this effect, i.e., organized interests participate in the same manner as before. The empirical investigation consists of interviews and official documents from four Swedish municipalities with a marketized elderly care. The result is that marketization does not cause any major crowding out effect on organized interests from the decision-making process. However, concerns can be raised about the extent and quality of participation since procedures of contracting out are not always compatible with democratic values such as transparency and participation.
In the public and academic debate, the liberalization of Swedish school policy is often equated with privatization and - to a lesser degree - differentiation. The first is associated with the rapid growth of a semi-private free school sector, driven by slogans such as freedom of choice, cost-efficiency, parental influence and market competition. The second is associated with the decentralization of power and goaloriented governance, aiming to achieve a variegated and flexible school system that is better equipped to meet individual needs, interests and preferences. The article examines this widespread conception of the liberalization of Swedish school policy. More precisely, the objective is to position central school policy developments over the last two decades in the liberal field through a tripartite typology. I argue that the mainstream conception exaggerates the privatization type of liberalization, while neglecting another, less visible but very influential type—namely universalization.
Modern society is increasingly dependent on digital services, making their dependability a top priority. But while there is a consensus that cybersecurity is important, there is no corresponding agreement on the true extent of the problem, the most effective countermeasures, or the proper division of labor and responsibilities. This makes cybersecurity policy very difficult. This article addresses this issue based on observations and experiences from a period of guest research at the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finansinspektionen), which made it possible to study how cybersecurity policy is developed and implemented in the Swedish financial sector. Observations include policy implementation challenges related to squaring different roles and perspectives mandated by different laws, and to collaboration between independent government authorities, but also policy development challenges: How can the full range of perspectives and tools be included in cybersecurity policy development? As Sweden now revises its cybersecurity policy, this is a key issue.