Richard Öhrvall

Linköping University | LiU · Centre for Local Government Studies

Runt om i världen har en ökad polarisering mellan stad och land, mellan centrum och periferi, observerats. I många länder tycks det som om invånare i mer rurala landsdelar rest sig mot storstädernas ekonomiska, politiska och kulturella eliter och givit antietablissemangspartier och populistiska rörelser sitt stöd. Samtidigt har vi under flera decen...

Previous studies have stressed the role of a child's family environment for future political participation. This field of research has, however, overlooked that children within the same family have different experiences depending on their birth order. First-borns spend their first years of life without having to compete over their parents' attentio...

Internationell forskning har i stigande grad intresserat sig för polarisering mellan stad och land. I ena ringhörnan: växande storstadsregioner där ekonomisk, politisk och kulturell elit samlas. I den andra: krympande glesbygd där globaliseringens förlorare blivit kvar. Forskare har funnit att i glesbygden ökar missnöjet, vilket i sin tur har skapa...

Student mock elections are conducted in schools around the world in an effort to increase political interest and efficacy among students. There is, however, a lack of research on whether mock elections in schools enhance voter turnout in real elections. In this article, we examine whether the propensity to vote in Swedish elections is higher among...

Social trust is linked to many desirable economic and social outcomes. Using new data from a representative sample of 2668 Swedish expatriates, we examine the robustness of high social trust in countries with different levels of institutional quality. The results suggest that individual trust decreases with length of stay in countries with high cor...

In this paper we study the effects of a radical right party entering a national parliament, on the parliament discourse. We follow the classification developed by Meguid (2008) and use a probabilistic topic model approach to analyze the 300,000 speeches delivered in the Swedish parliament between 1994 and 2017. Our results indicate that immigration...

In the literature on political economy and public choice, it is typically assumed that government size correlates positively with public corruption. The empirical literature, however, is inconclusive, owing to both measurement problems and endogeneity. This paper creates a corruption index based on original data from a survey covering top politicia...

Participatory theorists maintain that participation is beneficial, and may foster for example political efficacy and satisfaction with democracy. Our purpose here is to examine if this assumption is valid for individuals who, for the first time, are elected to a formal political commission in local government. We do this by employing a panel design...

Participatory theorists maintain that participation is beneficial, and may foster for example political efficacy and satisfaction with democracy. Our purpose here is to examine if this assumption is valid for individuals who, for the first time, are elected to a formal political commission in local government. We do this by employing a panel design...

Why do individuals join political parties, and why do some take a step further to stand as candidates for political parties in local elections? Especially in Sweden, in light of dwindling party membership – now half that of what they were in the early 1990s – and the difficulties some party organisations experience in filling their ballots with can...

According to virtually all international corruption rankings, Sweden is one of the top performing countries with very few exposed incidents of corruption. But does this automatically imply that it can be declared a perfectly ‘healthy patient’? By extensively reviewing existing research and adding empirical sets of data, the authors of A Clean House...

Throughout the past three decades, the local government sector in OECD countries has undergone several reform initiatives involving different types of externalization of public services, i.e. corporatization, contracting-out, and public-private partnerships. Despite several controversies, in Sweden in particular, it has been increasingly common to...

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century Iceland was ranked as the least corrupt country in the world by Transparency International and enjoyed top positions in most comparative indices of governance and development. In 2008 the banking system collapsed and the country found itself in a serious financial crisis, a crisis which...

The governance of municipal corporations has been criticized on the grounds of its lack of transparency and its weak mechanisms of accountability. 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...

When commenting on the European radical right, the term ‘single-issue party’ is frequently bandied about. We survey the various conceptualizations of the term and then apply them to the Sweden Democrats (SD), a party with roots in extremist subcultures that gained parliamentary representation in the 2010 elections. In the empirical analysis, we dra...

The Nordic countries are known for their well-functioning public administrations. In indices measuring control of corruption and the quality of the rule of law, they frequently occupy top positions. However, as we demonstrate in this article, a country's top position in comparative indices does not automatically imply that citizens view the state o...

Det har blivit vanligare att kommuner organiserar sin verksamhet i kommunala bolag. Syftet med denna rapport är att undersöka vilka verktyg en kommun har för att styra sina bolag och säkra att bolagen gör det de är ämnade att göra. I rapporten analyserar och diskuterar författarna bestämda områden där kom-muner kan stärka sitt arbete med styrningen...

According to the ‘law of dispersion’, the level of inequality in political participation is higher when voter turnout is low. We empirically test this hypothesis by evaluating levels of voter turnout in the 2010 Swedish election to the Västra Götaland county council and in the 2011 re‐election for the same county council. The re‐election voter turn...

Does rainfall during the Election Day reduce voter turnout? Previous research shows that in the US one inch of rain reduces turnout with about one percentage point. We turn to the Swedish context in order to test whether rainfall on Election Day have the same impact in a high turnout context. We move beyond previous research by testing the impact o...

Does the local organisational presence of anti-immigrant parties affect their chances for electoral success? In order to answer this question, the article explores the potential of a supply-oriented explanation to anti-immigrant party success by examining the electoral advancements the Sweden Democrats (SD) made in the 2006 and 2010 elections. Our...

In this paper, we use data from a corruption survey conducted among top politicians and high level civil servants in 290 Swedish municipalities in 2007 to investigate the effects of government size on corruption. We construct several measures of corruption based on the survey, and combine these corruption measures with detailed administrative munic...

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 n...

http://nationalekonomi.se/filer/pdf/41-3-gero.pdf I juni 2012 redogjorde Södermanlands Nyheter (2012) för misstankar om en rad oegentligheter i en sörmländsk kommun. Bland annat hade en kommunanställd drivit en städfirma vid sidan av sin ordinarie anställning. Firman utförde städtjänster åt samma förvaltning som den anställde arbetade inom. Den an...

In Sweden, one out of six councillors leave council before their term ends, which is often claimed to signal a crisis for democracy. We critically scrutinize this by surveying the motives behind dropping out. The claim may be right if political motives dominate, but if private motives dominate, dropouts do not signal a crisis for democracy. Questio...

The Swedish party system has been one of the world’s most stable, and anti-immigrant parties have been largely absent from the centre-stage of Swedish politics. It is thus peculiar that an anti-immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), made a dramatic breakthrough in the 2006 local elections, gaining representation in 144 out of 290 municipalitie...