Rasmus Broms’s research while affiliated with University of Gothenburg and other places

As in many countries around the globe, older citizens in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) in Sweden were hit hard by the Coronavirus pandemic, but mortality varied greatly between different facilities. Current knowledge about the causes of this variation is limited. This article closes this gap by focusing on the link between the structural characteristics of LTCFs—ownership, size, and staffing—and the risk of dying from COVID-19 in Sweden during 2020. Having utilized both individual- and facility-level data, our results suggest that lower staff turnover, having a nurse employed at the facility, and smaller facility size are associated with an decreased risk of dying from COVID-19. Ownership type is not directly associated with COVID-19-related mortality, but public facilities have lower staff turnover and fewer personnel with additional employment than privately run facilities, while privately run LTCFs more often have a nurse employed at the facility.

The provision of public services by for-profit and non-profit organizations is widespread in OECD countries, but the jury is still out on whether outsourcing has improved service quality. This article seeks to nuance existing debate by bringing to the fore variation in service quality between different types of non-public providers. Building on theories of dimensional publicness and incomplete contracts, we argue that different forms of non-public ownership are associated with varying intensity of incentives for profit maximization, ultimately affecting service quality. Using residential elder care homes in Sweden as our universe of cases, we leverage novel panel data for 2,639 facilities from 2012 to 2019, capturing the ownership type of the care home operators, against a set of indicators pertaining to inputs, processes, and outcomes. The results suggest that non-public providers with high-powered incentives to make profit, such as those owned by private equity firms and publicly traded companies, perform worse on most of the selected indicators compared to private limited liability companies and nonprofits. Our findings that the intensity of quality-shading incentives is not the same for all non-public providers have important implications for government contracting and contract management.

Objective: We analyzed predictors of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 death among residents of long-term care facilities (LTCFs) in Sweden for the pandemic year 2020 and its different waves. Methods: The study included 99% of Swedish LTCF residents (N = 82,488). Information on COVID-19 outcomes, sociodemographic factors, and comorbidities were obtained from Swedish registers. Fully adjusted Cox regression models were used to analyze predictors of COVID-19 infection and death. Results: For the entirety of 2020, age, male sex, dementia, cardiovascular-, lung-, and kidney disease, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus were predictors of COVID-19 infection and death. During 2020 and the two waves, dementia remained the strongest predictor of COVID-19 outcomes, with the strongest effect on death being among those aged 65-75 years. Conclusion: Dementia emerged as a consistent and potent predictor of COVID-19 death among Swedish residents of LTCFs in 2020. These results provide important information on predictors associated with negative COVID-19 outcomes.

Electoral accountability is widely considered to be an essential component for maintaining the quality of a polity’s institutions. Nevertheless, a growing body of research has found weak or limited support for the notion that voters punish political corruption, a central but partial aspect of institutional quality. In order to capture the full range of institutional dysfunction an electorate should be incentivised to punish, I further the concept of institutional performance voting, that is, voting on institutional quality as a whole. Using a novel data set on performance audit reports in Swedish municipalities between 2003 and 2014, I find that audit critique is associated with a statistically significant but substantively moderate electoral loss of about a percentage point for mayoral parties, while simultaneously associated with a 14 percentage point decrease in their probability of reelection.

The link between taxation and representation is generally considered foundational to the emergence of democratic governance. Nevertheless, the empirical relationship between taxation and the extent to which citizens actually exert representation by turning out to vote remains virtually unexplored. Using a panel of all Swedish municipalities from 1979 to 2018, I find that hikes in local tax rates are linked to increased municipal voter turnout. Accounting for a wide range of confounders, including turnout in concurrent parliamentary- and county elections, these results indicate an important untapped explanation for changes in turnout, while offering a rare explicit test of the taxation-representation argument drawn from a mature democracy.

Against a backdrop of increased levels of marketization of welfare services in OECD countries, this article aims to shed light on the separate effects of private ownership and competition for the market on service quality. Using residential elder care homes in Sweden as our case, we leverage unique panel data of ownership and competition against a set of indicators, pertaining to the structure, process, and outcome dimensions of care quality. The main finding of our analyses is that competition for the market does surprisingly little for quality: private entrepreneurs perform neither better nor worse under stiff competition and the quality of care is approximately the same in those nursing homes that are exposed to the market as in those that are not.

This study highlights the impact that medieval patterns of intrafamily inheritance practices wield on contemporary institutional quality. We argue that regions that practiced inegalitarian inheritance developed stronger institutions than regions that practiced egalitarian inheritance, for two reasons. First, we argue that transmitting land to a single heir resulted in a sense of personal ownership and, by extension, encouraged individual property rights. Second, we argue that the fact that disinherited children were incentivized to seek training and employment outside the family domicile in regions practicing inegalitarian inheritance resulted in trust‐building social interactions. We test our argument using data on medieval inheritance patterns and modern‐day institutional quality in European subnational regions and across countries globally. Our results show that historical inegalitarian inheritance practices are strongly positively associated with contemporary institutional quality. We conclude that historical norms at the family level are still affecting important modern‐day societal functions.

This paper asks if low political competition is associated with more restricted public procurement processes. Using unique Swedish municipal data from 2009 to 2015, it demonstrates that when one party dominates local politics, non-competitive outcomes from public procurement processes are more common. What is most striking is that the risk of receiving only one bid, on what is intended to be an open and competitive tender, considerably increases with longstanding one-party rule. The paper contributes to a significant body of work on the detrimental effects of low political competition, and the results are particularly interesting from a comparative perspective since Sweden—an old democracy with a meritocratic bureaucracy, characterized by low levels of corruption and clientelism—is a highly unlikely case in which to find such tendencies.

Higher education is increasingly expected not only to provide students with disciplinary knowledge and skills but also to prepare them for a future career. As political science is a diverse discipline and does not train students for a certain profession, its students often feel uncertain of the career paths available to them and how their expertise can be used in a future career. In this article, we present and discuss the course ‘The Professional Political Scientist’, given at the bachelor’s level at the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, which is an attempt to fill this gap. We present the preparatory work, the design, the pedagogy behind the themes and exercises included in the curriculum, as well as the experiences and evaluations of the first three rounds of the course. Finally, we provide suggestions for teachers interested in developing similar courses.