Magnus Bergli Rasmussen

Magnus Bergli Rasmussen
University of South-Eastern Norway | USN · Department of Business, Strategy and Political Sciences

Ph.d

About

50
Publications
46,396
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312
Citations

Publications

Publications (50)
Article
Full-text available
We propose that one key to understanding welfare state development is the extent to which national parties are institutionalized. Institutionalized parties enhance the ability of politicians to overcome coordination problems and avoid capture by special interests, and help create stable linkages between parties and broad social groups. These featur...
Article
In this article, we argue that autocratic regimes are no less likely than democracies to adopt old-age pensions, although autocratic programs are less universal in their coverage. Our theoretical argument focuses on the strong incentives that autocratic regimes have for enacting and maintaining such programs to ensure regime survival. Autocratic pe...
Article
Full-text available
We develop a perspective of locally embedded welfare state development to explain how relatively weak national political actors can nonetheless shape national policy over time by pursuing local reforms. Empirically, we assess our argument by using municipality-level vote shares, data on non-contributory pension reforms, roll-call votes from parliam...
Chapter
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This chapter summarizes our current knowledge of the relationship between political regimes and the development of welfare states in developing countries. It highlights the disconnect between high demand for welfare programmes in poor countries and the variation in welfare provision across different regimes. It reviews the standard model of politic...
Article
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All regimes require supporters to govern and survive. Yet, the nature and composition of coalitions of regime supporters are rarely conceptualized explicitly or measured empirically. We discuss the concept of “regime support group” and present and validate measures from an extensive dataset recording different features of such groups. This Regime S...
Article
Full-text available
To what extent do strike threats lead investors to adopt capital-intensive methods to deter strikes or labor-intensive approaches to enhance flexibility during work stoppages? We introduce a theoretical model that demonstrates how threats of industrial action influence capital investments through relative factor prices and the power dynamics betwee...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
It's commonly argued that decentralization facilitates the retrenchment of social protection. We contend that decentralization permits groups to counteract national retrenchment efforts, potentially even reversing reforms. For employment protection this outcome is contingent upon the strength of what we term a 'security-seeking coalition,' which re...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
To what extent were elites successful in mitigating the perceived redistributive threat posed by socialist and worker representation following democratization? This paper investigates how elites in decentralized democratic states countered local socialist representation by centralizing tax-authority, thereby hindering municipal socialism. This anal...
Preprint
Full-text available
To what extent is elite preferences for universal suffrage determined by the possible redistributive threat of democratization? If these preferences are influenced by redistributive concerns, how do elites agree on suffrage reforms that risk redistribution? I argue that while elites might diverge on the desirability of universal suffrage, they gene...
Article
Full-text available
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, leisure was reserved for the few. By the end of the twentieth century, however, most workers had a regulated normal working time of 40 or fewer hours per week, annual paid leave, and overtime compensation. In this paper, I investigate which political parties brought forth these changes—which party constell...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this study, we examine the standardization of working hours across diverse European world empires, tracing the genesis of the modern, global convergence in working hours to the 1920s. We scrutinize the paradox of colonial powers mitigating exploitation within their territories and present five cogent explanations, distinguishing between imperial...
Conference Paper
Does the relationship between the government ideology and the welfare state vary over time? While a burgeoning research field that have proposed important insights, we argue that existing research has largely failed to accurately study temporal heterogeneity in partisan social policy making. In this paper, we lay out problems of approaches commonly...
Conference Paper
This study documents for the first time the rise and stabilization of election misconduct during the initial formation of the Norwegian political system, 1860 to 1900. Using a complete database over all published newspapers, we manually code accusations of electoral misconduct. The final dataset includes rich information on 153 unique accusations,...
Article
What is the value of holding mayoral office for parties’ and politicians’ subsequent electoral fortunes and ability to enact policy reforms? In proportional representation systems, the indirect election of mayors typically muddles the possibility to separate the effect of holding the mayoral office from the seat share in the local legislature. We e...
Article
The development of political competition and conflict between individuals or loosely organized groups into competition between parties, is one of the hallmarks of modern democracies. A remaining puzzle is how national parties came to penetrate and later dominate local politics—what we label “partiaization”. We argue that controlling local politics...
Article
Full-text available
Studies of early social policy development highlight the progressive role of farmers, especially in Scandinavian countries. I argue that this notion does not match with the role played by farmer’s representatives or the party in parliament. Being ideologically committed to more market-oriented solutions, less exposed to labor market risks, and fear...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper introduces a novel dataset on working-time regulation for 197 territories between 1789 and 2010 to document how working hours have become globally standardised through public policy. Descriptive analysis shows that working-time reforms are global in scope, rare events, sizable once undertaken, and tend to reduce hours. Democracies were h...
Article
Full-text available
Following the landmark essay of T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and the Social Class (1949), it has conventionally been assumed that the introduction and expansion of social rights in Europe happened as the final stage of a long process of democratization that included the granting of first civil and then political rights. We present a radically differ...
Article
We present a systemic threat theory to explain the introduction of Proportional Representation (PR). If facing a revolutionary threat, incumbents agree to enact electoral reforms such as PR to secure the stability of the system, even if this could imply their own personal electoral loss. We argue that the theory can help explain the largest wave of...
Article
Full-text available
To what extent organized employers and trade unions support social policies is contested. We study the case of work-family policies (WFPs), such as parental leave, which have surged to become a central part of the welfare state. In this expansion, the joint role of employers and unions has hitherto been largely disregarded in the comparative politi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We argue and test whether education promotes democratization, by focusing on how university education influences elites’ role in proposing and supporting suffrage reforms. We examine this with novel data from the suffrage extensions in Norway between 1879-1913. We discuss how university education, especially when it promotes enlightenment ideas and...
Conference Paper
In the age of COVID, the ability of voters to resort to absentee voting has come to the forefront of the minds of politicians and voters alike. However, this question is as old as democracy itself. With the extension of suffrage, the right to vote by mail would follow from the need to give all citizens the right to vote, even those that were unable...
Book
Full-text available
We detail how elites provide policy concessions when they face credible threats of revolution. Specifically, we discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent formation of Comintern enhanced elites’ perceptions of revolutionary threat by affecting the capacity and motivation of labor movements as well as the nature and elites’ inte...
Article
Trade union membership is an indicator of social integration. In this paper, we study the gap in unionization rates between immigrants and natives using high‐quality population‐wide administrative data from Norway. We document that the average unionization rate among immigrants increases strongly with time since arrival, but it never catches up ful...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Why do some welfare states protect most or all social groups, while others are much more restrictive? The classic welfare state literature points to different social groups as key agents of welfare state expansion, including family farmers, peasants, urban middle classes, and industrial workers. Despite numerous in-depth case studies, arguments per...
Data
The “Hours we Work” dataset provides information on regulated Normal Hours of Work as specified by national level legislation for 203 countries from 1789 to 2014 – first law for adult males is in 1848. More specifically, the regulated normal hours of work per week of men in manufacturing or in general industrial work. Normal hours of work refer to...
Conference Paper
Why did Labor parties embrace either a parliamentary or a revolutionary line? While being one the most important questions in political science, we have few answers. Empirical advance has been hampered by the fact that previous studies has tended to focus on country-level comparisons, encountering problems of too many variables and too few cases. I...
Article
Full-text available
We argue that the extent to which political parties are institutionalized shapes welfare state development. Institutionalized parties allow politicians to overcome coordination problems, avoid capture by special interests, and form stable linkages with broad social groups. These features both enable and incentivize politicians to pursue extensive w...
Research
Full-text available
A detailed comparison of the system of income transfers available for people in the economically active age groups in seven North European countries.
Article
Full-text available
While some scholars suggest that rural groups contribute to welfare state expansion, we highlight their incentives to restrain it. The ability of rural groups to achieve this preference hinges on their power resources, but also the electoral system. We propose that in majoritarian systems, rural groups can often veto welfare legislation. In proport...
Article
Two distinct literatures have studied the macroeconomic effects of electoral systems and of labor market structures, respectively. Results include a positive association between proportional representation (PR) electoral systems and growth, but also between PR and inflation, as well as negative or hump‐shaped relationships between labor market coor...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
What is the impact of international organizations on social policy? Existing studies have examined the role of the International Labor Organization (ILO) by arguing that ratifications of labor conventions affect social expenditure. In contrast, I argue that link between ratifications and policy development is driven by states becoming ILO members a...
Article
Full-text available
Although some scholars suggest that rural groups contribute to welfare state expansion, we highlight their strong incentives to restrain it. Nonetheless, rural groups’ ability to achieve this policy preference hinges on their power resources, but also the electoral system. In majoritarian systems, agrarian groups can win majorities when electorally...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We propose that the extent to which political parties are institutionalized shapes welfare state development. Institutionalized parties allow politicians to overcome coordination problems, avoid capture by special interests, and form stable linkages with broad social groups. These features both enable and incentivize politicians to pursue generous...
Article
Full-text available
Many studies have found that countries with union-administered unemployment insurance have higher rates of unionization than countries with state-administered unemployment insurance. With data going further back in history, this article demonstrates that the introduction of so-called “Ghent systems” had no effect on unionization rates. We argue tha...
Data
Full-text available
This dataset provides summary information about social policy for a total of 154 countries in all regions of the world starting with the first major welfare state legislation. UPDATE: PLEASE SE https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316285341_SPaW_2016_major_laws_data for the first part of these data
Data
Please see SPaW codebook. Any comments and or corrections is greatly welcomed.
Conference Paper
Segmented welfare states grant access to benefits by membership in occupational, ethnic or social groups, instead of as a result of a need or right. I investigate their origins. Contrary to the prevalent class-theory of unionism, I argue that unions prefer segmented policies, as they can be targeted to union groups, reducing free-rider problems. On...
Research
Full-text available
This paper presents a novel argument on how governments under majoritarian electoral rules are more sensitive to interest group pressure, allowing trade unions to influence social policy to a greater degree than under proportional representation. Social policy development is therefore linked to pro-welfare groups’ organizational capacity under majo...
Article
We investigate the adoption and characteristics of social welfare policies in autocracies. If one considers social policies merely as a tool for progressive redistribution to those in need, one might not expect autocratic regimes to spend resources on them. Empirically, however, several autocracies do have extensive welfare programs covering differ...

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