Johannes Lindvall’s research while affiliated with University of Gothenburg and other places

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Publications (69)


Historical Immigration Policies: Trends and Lessons
  • Article

July 2024

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42 Reads

International Studies Quarterly

Margaret E Peters

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Adrian J Shin

In recent years, scholars of migration have created several new immigration policy indexes, but most existing databases have limited temporal scope. They also focus, to a large extent, on the Global North. In this research note, we introduce the Historical Immigration Policy dataset (HIP), which begins to fill these gaps. We first provide an overview of the data and then describe how they offer new insights into immigration policy. We make three empirical observations. (1) On average, democracies are less open to immigration than authoritarian states but grant resident migrants more rights. (2) European states were open to immigration earlier than standard accounts of global migration assume. (3) Historically, openness to immigration and inclusive rights for resident migrants have often been complements, not substitutes.


Pre-electoral coalitions, familiarity, and delays in government formation

May 2023

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50 Reads

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7 Citations

During the past decade, many parliamentary democracies have experienced bargaining delays when forming governments. The previous literature has attributed protracted government formation processes to a high degree of preference uncertainty among the political parties and a high level of bargaining complexity. The article draws on such theories, but also adds a third theoretical mechanism, commitment problems, and highlights two explanatory variables that have not received much attention so far. The first is pre-electoral coalitions, which are declarations by parties stating that they intend to collaborate with each other after the election. The second is familiarity, which is the mutual trust between parties that comes from having worked together in the past. By combining a large-N study of government formation processes in 17 West European parliamentary democracies (1945–2019) with an in-depth case study of the prolonged Swedish government formation process in 2018–2019, it is shown that pre-electoral coalitions that fail to win a majority can sometimes delay, not speed up, government formation. In addition, a lack of familiarity may sometimes lead to a breakdown of negotiations and drawn-out government formation processes.


Figure 1. Illustration of the paper's approach to modelling uncertainty. Note: The left panel shows the baseline case with two main parties symmetrically positioned on the left and right of the left-right ideological spectrum and a smaller centrist party located in the middle.
Figure 4. The changing ideological orientation of the platforms of the main parties on the left and the right. Top left: the average left-right position of those parties; top right: the average distances between them; bottom left: the average position of the left parties; bottom right: the average position of the right parties. All four variables are defined over the 0-100 interval. Annual averages (the solid lines) and LOESS smoothed trends (Cleveland 1979) (the dashed lines) with 95-percent confidence intervals around the fitted trend lines (the grey areas). MARPOR data 1965-2018.
Figure 5. The average marginal effect of the previous election's median voter position on current main party average positions, conditional on previous median voter certainty. Confidence interval estimation with heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors clustered by country. The effect estimates are shown as diamonds on solid lines, and their interval estimates are shown as dotted lines. The sample distribution of the conditioning variable, which is the uncertainty around the median voter's position in the previous election, is shown by the histogram in the background. Based on models 3 and 6 in Table 1.
Figure 6. Average marginal effects of the difference between a main party and the median voter's positions in the previous election on the change in the main party's position between the two elections. Estimates for the main left parties are shown in the left panel, and estimates for the main right parties are shown in the right panel. Confidence interval estimation same as in Fig. 5. Point and confidence-interval estimates are shown as dots or triangles on solid lines and grey shaded bands, respectively, and the sample distribution of the moderator is shown by the rugs at the bottom of each panel. Fixed effects estimates only.
When Parties Move to the Middle: The Role of Uncertainty
  • Article
  • Full-text available

April 2023

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131 Reads

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1 Citation

British Journal of Political Science

Political parties face a crucial trade-off between electoral and partisan goals: should they put electoral goals first, pursuing the policies they think will win them the most votes in the next election, or should they put partisan goals first, pursuing the policies their members, activists, and most loyal voters prefer? In this paper we argue that main political parties make different choices depending on the information environment they are in. They have strong incentives to follow the median voter when the median voter's position is well known, but when there is more uncertainty they have strong incentives to adopt policies they prefer for partisan reasons, since uncertainty makes party leaders more willing to bet that the party's preferred policies are also vote winners. We develop an empirical analysis of how the main parties on the left and the right in twenty democracies have changed their platforms from election to election since the 1960s.

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Challenges for public-service delivery: the case of Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy

September 2022

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33 Reads

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6 Citations

The aim of this paper is to identify the most vaccine-hesitant groups in a contemporary democratic state, Sweden. We rely on two representative surveys that were conducted in 2020 and that asked Swedish citizens how likely they were to accept immunization with a Covid-19 vaccine if one were offered to them. Using clustering methods, we find a wide variety of vaccine-hesitant groups, with the highest levels of vaccine hesitancy among individuals who combine low personal health risks with political orientations and ideological convictions that are associated with antivaccinationist attitudes. The paper's findings have important implications for public-health policy and, more broadly, for theories of how governments can convince individual citizens to play their part in achieving important social goals.


The changing faces of the modern state

August 2022

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15 Reads

Governance

This paper describes the changing nature of the English and Swedish states between 1800 and 2020 from the perspective of ordinary citizens. We identify 13 typical life situations and then describe the types of citizens who interacted with the state, the number and types of public officials with whom they interacted, and where those interactions took place. We distinguish among three typical social groups: the poor, the middle, and the rich. We find, among other things, that the poor became objects of government policy much earlier than other groups, but they also remained in a world of parochial poor relief even as the middle and the rich began to interact with a more functionally differentiated, professional bureaucracy. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates on when the state began to interact directly with the civilian masses and the unevenness of state activities and capacities within countries.


Political science as architecture

June 2022

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523 Reads

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4 Citations

European Political Science

This article compares political science to another discipline, with which it has much in common. That discipline is architecture. The political-science-as-architecture analogy has a long history in political thought. It also has important implications for the ends, means, and uses of political science. It follows from the political-science-as-architecture analogy that political science is necessarily a heterogeneous and pluralistic discipline. It also follows that political scientists have a common purpose, which is to conceive of institutional structures that allow humans to live together in societies, just as the purpose of architecture is to conceive of physical structures in which humans can live together.



Figure 3. trust in politicians, parliament and parties: Denmark and sweden. notes: sweden n = 1539; Denmark n = 1572. the data are from the latest european social survey, from which the Danish data were released in December 2020. the data were collected in late 2018 and are available at www.europeansocialsurvey.org.
Figure 6. ideology and trust in the public-Health authority's ability to respond to covid-19, March-June. notes: the figure describes public trust in the ability of the public-health authorities to guide sweden and Denmark safely through the covid-19 pandemic. the black lines are Denmark; the grey lines are sweden. left-right ideology is measured on a 11-point scale with 0 = left and 10 = right. the lines are locally weighted regression estimates (cleveland 1979). the numbers of observations for Denmark are 1,136, 1,404, and 1,101. the corresponding numbers for sweden are 1,178, 1,371, and 1,113.
Figure 7. ideology and changes in trust between april and June. notes: these scatterplots describe the relationship between political ideology -as reported in april -and changes in public trust in the ability of the national government to guide sweden and Denmark safely through the covid-19 pandemic between april and June 2020 among survey respondents who were included in both rounds of the panel study that was conducted during that period.
sweden and Denmark: the main similarities.
public-health policies in the spring of 2020: a summary.
Trust in government in Sweden and Denmark during the COVID-19 epidemic

May 2021

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479 Reads

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87 Citations

Did the different public-health policies that Sweden and Denmark pursued in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic result in different levels of public trust in governments’ and health authorities’ ability to guide the two countries safely through the pandemic? How did the level of trust change as the pandemic unfolded? And were there any cross-country differences in the correlates of trust? Using three original representative surveys conducted in Sweden and Denmark between late March and late June, 2020, this article answers these questions. It finds that Danes consistently trusted their government and health authorities more than the Swedes did. While Swedish trust was politicized and shaped by ideology from the onset of the pandemic, this only later became the case in Denmark. The findings provide insights into popular evaluations of different public-health policies in two otherwise similar countries, with implications for future policy making. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1909964 .


Figure 1. The railroad network and the old postal network.
Figure 2. Inspector wingren's travels.
Figure 3. Share of children in permanent schools.
Regression analyses: children in permanent public schools
Regression analyses: geography and history
Railroads and Reform: How Trains Strengthened the Nation State

April 2021

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142 Reads

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6 Citations

British Journal of Political Science

This paper examines the relationship between the coming of the railroads, the expansion of primary education, and the introduction of national school curricula. Using fine-grained data on local education outcomes in Sweden in the nineteenth century, the paper tests the idea that the development of the railroad network enabled national school inspectors to monitor remote schools more effectively. In localities to which school inspectors could travel by rail, a larger share of children attended permanent public schools and took classes in nation-building subjects such as geography and history. By contrast, the parochial interests of local and religious authorities continued to dominate in remote areas school inspectors could not reach by train. The paper argues for a causal interpretation of these findings, which are robust for the share of children in permanent schools and suggestive for the content of the curriculum. The paper therefore concludes that the railroad, the defining innovation of the First Industrial Revolution, mattered directly for the state's ability to implement public policies.


Fig. 5.1 Public Confidence in the Riksbank (Note The figure describes the percentage of survey respondents who say they have confidence in the Riksbank minus the percentage of survey respondents who say they don't. Data for 2013 are missing. The specific question is 'How much confidence do you have in how the following institutions and groups do their jobs?' Source The national SOM surveys, 2005-2018)
Sweden’s Riksbank: Guardian of Monetary Integrity

January 2021

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130 Reads

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2 Citations

The Riksbank, founded in 1668, is the world’s oldest central bank. It has played a central role in Swedish economic policymaking for centuries and enjoys a great deal of confidence among the public. This chapter explains how the Riksbank became what it is today: an independent and widely respected institution. The bank’s high status has emerged because Sweden’s political elites regard the delegation of policymaking authority to the central bank as a way of managing and containing potentially harmful political conflicts. The bank’s status also benefitted from its crisis management performance, navigating Sweden through two large-scale financial crises.


Citations (44)


... Drawing on such work and focusing on the role of pre-electoral alliances, Bäck et al. (2023) argue that there are several ways in which such alliances could influence bargaining duration, either speeding up the formation process or in some cases, pro-longing the process. For example, if parties spend a lot of time before the election bargaining over policy issues, this should reduce uncertainty about potential coalition partners' policy preferences. ...

Reference:

Coalition dynamics: advances in the study of the coalition life cycle
Pre-electoral coalitions, familiarity, and delays in government formation
  • Citing Article
  • May 2023

... In Sweden, a country with high vaccine uptake, it was reported that in 2020 the majority of vaccine-hesitant individuals were primarily young people who declared they would refrain from COVID-19 vaccination because they perceived their risk of severe illness to be low [16]. These findings, in the early stages of the epidemic, even before a vaccine was available, may have helped to emphasize the importance of societal solidarity in communicating the benefits of vaccination [17]. ...

Challenges for public-service delivery: the case of Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy

... En el siglo xxi a nivel global se ha generado un intenso debate sobre el estado de la disciplina y el camino que debía tomar para convertirse en una "buena" ciencia política. Una de las discusiones más candentes refiere a la utilidad de la disciplina y su producción académica a la hora de resolver problemas sociales, con preocupación respecto a en qué medida la creciente valoración de la especialización metodológica nos llevaría a hacernos preguntas que se ajusten a los métodos, pero cada vez menos relevantes para el entorno (Flyvbjerg, 2001;Sartori, 2004;Vallès, 2020;Real-Dato y Verzichelli, 2021;Lindvall, 2022;Capano y Verzichelli, 2023). 1 Otro de los debates refiere a la existencia de distintas corrientes epistemológicas, teóricas y metodológicas en la ciencia política y sus formas de relacionamiento -solo por mencionar un ejemplo ilustrativo de esta discusión, véase la conversación entre Sartori (2004) y Colomer (2004. Algunos hitos de estas discusiones se dieron en la órbita de la academia estadounidense, pero tuvieron repercusión en otras latitudes, como en América Latina, donde se multiplicaron los estudios de "introspección disciplinar". ...

Political science as architecture

European Political Science

... Importantly, the spread of COVID-19, including not least its death tolls, differed between Denmark and Sweden. Deaths related to the pandemic increased more rapidly in Sweden than in Denmark (Nielsen and Lindvall 2021). These differences had an impact on the perception of the pandemic, including the attitude towards the government's strategies (Schraff 2021; Van der Meer, Steenvoorden, and Ouattara 2023). ...

Trust in government in Sweden and Denmark during the COVID-19 epidemic

... The Swedish school system was established in 1842 making it compulsory for every parish to have organized schools. This responsibility was later transferred to the municipalities (Cermeño et al., 2022). The early modern schools were often village hubs and one of the few institutions rural areas, where children from different farmsteads met. ...

Railroads and Reform: How Trains Strengthened the Nation State

British Journal of Political Science

... The influx of labor into the labor market may undermine union power, since the majority of migrants are non-unionized (Avci & McDonald, 2000). However, once the migrants have been admitted, unions have a strong interest in policies concerning their rights, to prevent immigration from causing a deterioration in wages or working conditions (Boräng et al., 2020;Menz, 2010). In Norway, LO initially endorsed transitional arrangements that imposed restrictions on access to the labor market for individual jobseekers from the new EU member states but made it clear that they welcomed migrants provided that they worked under the same conditions as natives (Hardy et al., 2012). ...

Unions and the rights of migrants in the long run

Journal of European Social Policy

... Access to healthcare was dependent upon individual ability to pay, charity, or membership of privileged groups who could afford some form of mutual insurance. While states were active in the field through subsidies for mutual insurance, investment in infrastructure, and public health measures such as sanitation since the beginning of the modern state (Ansell and Lindvall 2020;Karabatos, Tsagkaris, and Kalachanis 2021;Rogaski 2014), the creation of a healthcare system denotes the granting of statutory rights to medical care for the sick. According to de Carvalho and Fischer (2020, 13), we can speak of the emergence of a healthcare system when (i) a public healthcare initiative is established by a national legislative body, (ii) the system is integrated through designated institutions and responsibilities, and (iii) statutory entitlements to healthcare are granted. ...

Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Modern Public Services
  • Citing Book
  • November 2020

... Another critical criterion is the use of interest rates as a monetary policy tool. Sweden's Riksbank stands out for its aggressive use of negative interest rates to combat deflation and stimulate economic activity, a policy that began in 2015 (Lindvall, 2020). While this approach helped prevent deflation and encouraged spending, it also led to rising property prices and increased household debt, illustrating the challenges of such unconventional monetary policies (Turk, 2015). ...

Sweden’s Riksbank: Guardian of Monetary Integrity

... When proposals originate in parliament, they are often reactions or alternatives to government proposals (Sveriges Riksdag 2019). Only 25 percent of proposals in parliament receive a vote, because the rest are approved by acclimation (Lindvall, Bäck, Dahlström, Naurin, and Teorell 2020). Additionally, to pass, a bill only needs more "yea" than "nej" votes among the parliament members who cast a vote (or who do not abstain). ...

Sweden’s Parliamentary Democracy at 100

Parliamentary Affairs

... In this regard, scholars have thought about state capacity as both a function and a feature of its ability to impose a legible and uniform property rights regime (Scott 1998, p. 35). Indeed, some scholars have used the creation and completeness of land cadasters as metrics of state capacity (Brambor et al. 2020). A related line of research, meanwhile, debates the extent to which the strength and effectiveness of property rights and the institutions surrounding them are a function of state capacity (e.g., Herbst 2000) or instead derive from political calculations (Albertus 2021, Hassan & Klaus 2023, Onoma 2009). ...

The Lay of the Land: Information Capacity and the Modern State
  • Citing Article
  • May 2019

Comparative Political Studies