Browsing by Author "Dahlberg, Stefan"

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Dissatisfied Democrats: A Matter of Representation or Performance?
(2013-04) Dahlberg, Stefan; Linde, Jonas; Holmberg, Sören; QoG Institute
Research on political support around the world has demonstrated massive support for democracy as the underlying principle of governance. At the same time many citizens express dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in practice. People who believe in the principles of democracy, while at the same time expressing discontent with the performance of the political system are often referred to as critical citizens, or dissatisfied democrats. However, the phenomenon of dissatisfied democrats has not received as much empirical attention as it has been discussed theoretically. This paper sets out to empirically investigate and explain the gap between the strong support for democratic principles and the weaker support for the actual functioning of democratic governance, which could be seen as democratic deficit both on the micro- and the micro-level, with a focus on new and old democracies since different types of democracies face different problems and challenges. The paper empirically tests two contrasting explanatory perspectives. The first argues that the reasons for the democratic deficit are to be found on the input side of the political system, and that the solution lies in improving the representative institutions in contemporary democracies. The contrasting argument states that the sources of political support and legitimacy are to be found at the output side of the political system, where the quality of government in terms of non-corrupt and impartial institutions play the pivotal role. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that both explanations are relevant, but factors relating to the input side of democracy seem to be of somewhat greater importance for the likelihood of being a dissatisfied democrat, and that this is particularly the case in established democracies.
Does Party Politicization of Corruption Affect Voter Turnout?
(2016-11) Bågenholm, Andreas; Dahlberg, Stefan; Solevid, Maria; QoG Institute
In this paper, we argue that the effects of corruption on voter turnout not necessarily have to be negative. We argue that voters’ willingness to participate in elections will increase when parties po-liticize the issue of corruption in electoral campaigns, as it indicates party responsiveness to voter concerns. We test this claim by using individual-level data from CSES coupled with unique context data on party politicization of corruption in campaigns. Our findings show that higher perceived levels of corruption are associated with lower voter turnout but that the negative effect of perceiv-ing high corruption on turnout is reduced in an electoral context where corruption is politicized. The results thus show that if corruption is not politicized, individuals’ corruption perceptions exert a significant negative impact on turnout. By politicizing anti-corruption measures, political parties are acting policy responsive and by that they are also affecting voters’ decision whether to vote or not.
Hur representativ är en självselekterad internetpanel? Förtroendet för facket 1986–2006
(SOM-institutet, 2007) Nilsson, Åsa; Ohlsson, Jonas; Dahlberg, Stefan; Oscarsson, Henrik; University of Gothenburg; Göteborgs universitet
The Importance of Electoral and Judicial Trust For Regime Support
(2015-04) Dahlberg, Stefan; Holmberg, Sören; QoG Institute
What kind of institutions is most essential to be trustworthy in order for a society to function well? To the extent that previous research has addressed the problem, trust in electoral, judicial, public administration and economic institutions have been most frequently mentioned as most important. The problem, however, is worth a more thorough research approach, where trust in different kind of institutions is systematically compared across political systems. The study is based on five differ-ent data sources, three aggregated datasets (CSES, WVS and ESS) and two surveys of Swedish citizens (SOM and the Lore Citizen Panel). When it comes to regime support (and legitimacy) institutional trust matters; especially trust in electoral and judicial institutions. Quality of government matters also. Economic factors, however, matter less in this instance. Political factors rule, not economical. Nations succeed when there is trust in electoral and judicial institutions and when there are impartial public administrations.
The Importance of Institutional Trust for Regime Support
(2014-03) Dahlberg, Stefan; Holmberg, Sören; QoG Institute
The Meaning of Democracy. Using a Distributional Semantic Model for Collecting Co-Occurrence Information from Online Data Across Languages
(2017-12) Dahlberg, Stefan; Axelsson, Sofia; Holmberg, Sören; QoG Institute
THE QOG EXPERT SURVEY II Report
(2015) Dahlström, Carl; Teorell, Jan; Dahlberg, Stefan; Hartmann, Felix; Lindberg, Annika; QoG Institute
THE QUALITY OF GOVERNMENT EXPERT SUR-VEY II IN BRIEF • The Quality of Government Expert Survey II (QoG Expert Survey II) focuses on the organizational design of public bureaucracies and bureaucratic behavior on countries around the world • It is based on the subjective assessments of carefully selected country experts • Expert participation is pro bono • In total, 7096 questionnaires were sent • 1294 questionnaires were completed • The questionnaire included 71 substantive questions • Geographical coverage: 159 countries • 122 countries have three or more experts • The QoG Expert Survey II includes the following new topics: women in public administration, corruption and embezzlement and transparency • It has also improved measures for personnel management systems and administrative wages • There are one individual-level and one country-level datasets. • The QoG Expert Survey II has, in total, 59 country-level indicators Suggested data citation: Dahlström, Carl, Jan Teorell, Stefan Dahlberg, Felix Hartmann, Annika Lindberg and Marina Nistotskaya. 2015. The QoG Expert Survey Dataset II. University of Gothen-burg: The Quality of Government Institute. Suggested report citation: Dahlström, Carl, Jan Teorell, Stefan Dahlberg, Felix Hartmann, Annika Lindberg and Marina Nistotskaya. 2015. The QoG Expert Survey II Report. Gothenburg: The QoG Working Paper Series 2015:9
The Quality of Government Expert Survey 2008-2011: A Report
(2013-10) Dahlberg, Stefan; Dahlström, Carl; Sundin, Petrus; Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
The literature on the quality of government generally, and corruption more specifically, focus main-ly on the political side of the state. There are however strong reasons to believe that bureaucratic structures have important effects on political, economic, and social outcomes, but with very few exceptions there are no cross-country datasets. In order to meet this challenge, and provide data on the bureaucratic structure on a large number of countries in the developed and the developing parts of the world, this paper presents the Quality of Government Expert Survey. The survey covers a variety of topics relevant to the structure and functioning of the public administration, such as mer-itocratic recruitment, internal promotion and career stability, salaries, impartiality, NPM reforms, effectiveness/efficiency, and bureaucratic representation of, for example, ethnic groups and gender. This paper describe the data-collection, provide some basic facts about the data and about the experts, and, finally, analyze how experts have answered the items in the questionnaire in order to evaluate potential respondent perception bias.
The Quality of Government Expert Survey 2020 (Wave III): Report
(2021-03) Nistotskaya, Marina; Dahlberg, Stefan; Dahlström, Carl; Sundström, Aksel; Axelsson, Sofia; Mert Dalli, Cem; Alvarado Pachon, Natalia; The Quality of Government institute
The Quality of Government Expert Survey (QoG Expert Survey) is a research project aimed at documenting the organizational design of public bureaucracies and bureaucratic behavior in countries around the world. This report documents the design and implementation of the third wave of the QoG Expert Survey, and initial analysis of the new data. The QoG Expert Survey 2020 produced ten country-level indicators, pertaining to bureaucratic structure (meritocratic re- cruitment, security of tenure, closedness) and bureaucratic behavior (political interference into day-to-day bureaucratic decision-making and impartiality). The data is based on the assessments of more than 550 experts, carefully selected for their contextual subject-matter knowledge. The experts took part in the research pro bono. The main innovation of the third wave is the use of anchoring vignettes and Item-Response Theory (IRT)-based aggregation techniques to produce point estimates that account and adjust for systematic differences in expert subjective assess- ments and variation in expert reliability. The resulting indicators are internally coherent and also correlate well with other well-established measures for the same concepts. The strength of the association between the data from 2020 and the two previous waves of the survey suggests that the data is likely to measure the same underling phenomena, while offering enough variability over time to be used in time-series analysis.
The Quality of Government Expert Survey 2020 (Wave III): Report
(2021) Nistotskaya, Marina; Dahlberg, Stefan; Dahlström, Carl; Sundström, Aksel; Axelsson, Sofia; Dalli, Cem Mert; Alvarado Pachon, Natalia; QoG The Quality of Government Institute
The Quality of Government Expert Survey (QoG Expert Survey) is a research project aimed at documenting the organizational design of public bureaucracies and bureaucratic behavior in countries around the world. This report documents the design and implementation of the third wave of the QoG Expert Survey, and initial analysis of the new data. The QoG Expert Survey 2020 produced ten country-level indicators, pertaining to bureaucratic structure (meritocratic re- cruitment, security of tenure, closedness) and bureaucratic behavior (political interference into day-to-day bureaucratic decision-making and impartiality). The data is based on the assessments of more than 550 experts, carefully selected for their contextual subject-matter knowledge. The experts took part in the research pro bono. The main innovation of the third wave is the use of anchoring vignettes and Item-Response Theory (IRT)-based aggregation techniques to produce point estimates that account and adjust for systematic differences in expert subjective assess- ments and variation in expert reliability. The resulting indicators are internally coherent and also correlate well with other well-established measures for the same concepts. The strength of the association between the data from 2020 and the two previous waves of the survey suggests that the data is likely to measure the same underling phenomena, while offering enough variability over time to be used in time-series analysis.
The Winner-Loser Gap in Satisfaction with Democracy Over Time: Evidence from a Swedish citizen panel
(2015-01) Dahlberg, Stefan; Linde, Jonas; QoG Institute
Several studies have demonstrated a gap in political support between electoral winners and losers. This research has generated a large stock of knowledge about the causes and effects of this winner-loser gap. Due to the use of cross-section survey data, however, we know little about the consisten-cy of the winner-loser gap over time. Drawing on a unique Swedish panel survey this study investi-gates the stability of the winner-loser gap among Swedish voters over an electoral cycle. The anal-yses demonstrate a substantial consistency of the gap over time also when controlling for other determinants. The winner-loser gap seems to be a stable phenomenon rather than a short-lived election effect. The results are robust to different specifications and statistical techniques
Understanding Satisfaction with the Way Democracy Works: Democracy versus Bureaucracy
(2012-08) Dahlberg, Stefan; Holmberg, Sören; QoG Institute
The present study is focusing on system factors related to the input side of the democratic system, i.e. the electoral dimension, as well as factors related to the out-put side, i.e. the quality of government. Hence, we will investigate to what extent different election system characteristics as well as degrees of policy representation (in terms of ideological congruence between voters and representatives) and the presence of effective, professional and impartial governmental institutions are related to citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy works. We use data from CSES (www.cses.org) on individual voters and party system characteristics together with data on governmental institutions from the QoG-institute (www.qog.pol.gu.se). Overall our results indicate that factors like government effectiveness is of greater importance for citizens´ satisfaction with the way democracy functions, compared to factors like ideological congruence on the input side. Impartial and effective bureaucracies matter more than representational devices.
Voters' Perceptions of Party Politics - A Multilevel Approach
(2009-04-30T07:06:29Z) Dahlberg, Stefan
Modern representative democracies are often described as government by the consent of the governed rather than government by the people. Elections play a central role in this context and several theorists of modern democracy have struggled to determine the circumstances under which effective political representation can exist. One thing that is clear is that voters’ perceptions of parties’ policy positions are essential, since these views are important determinants of the outcomes of electoral processes and thus the extent to which voters are meaningfully represented in a political system. This book focuses on the agreement in voters’ perceptions of party positions and circumstances under which high levels of perceptual agreement can be obtained. The book contributes to existing research by addressing three sets of research questions. Firstly, the project draws the electoral and institutional context into the research on perceptions and perceptual agreement. Secondly, the research brings the political parties into the equation and thirdly, the study investigates how factors related to both individual voters and political parties interact with the institutional context and so affect voters’ perceptual agreement. The book draws on election study data from 34 countries in a total of 58 elections and is one of the most comprehensive comparative studies of voters’ perceptual agreement hitherto. Whereas earlier studies of the causes of perceptual agreement argued that perceptions of party positions among voters result mainly from endogenous individual level factors such as education, party sympathy and the ideological distance between parties and voters, this study shows that voters’ perceptions also are also affected by exogenous factors related to the electoral systems and the political parties. The book concludes that political representation, as defined by the responsible party model, seems to work best in multiparty parliamentary systems with proportional representation and a strong left-right dimensional structure, in which parties maintain stable and divergent policy positions.
Web-based expert surveys: The opportunities for conducting web-based elite expert surveys
(2007-11) Dahlberg, Stefan; QoG Institute
Web-surveys are today commonly used in a wide range of areas. The interest in web-based surveys is not surprising as they offer a number of advantages compared to traditional mail or telephone interviews. Among the most distinctive positive features are the reductions both in terms of time and costs compared to more traditional surveys. However, even though most parts of the traditional mail- or telephone surveys easily can be translated directly into web-surveys, other methodological and practical obstacles are raised by the use of the internet. This paper sets out to further explore the pros and cons of web-surveys as a tool for conducting web-based elite/expert surveys. The results show that it is important to identify the experts and establish a personal contact, possibly by mail, e-mail or by telephone. Paper-and-pencil surveys do sometimes yield higher response rates compared to web-surveys and should therefore be offered as an alternative. Mixed designs using both paper-and-pencil surveys together with web surveys, do also yield highly similar results. Attrition rates seem to be closely connected with the perceptions of the effort required to complete the survey. Clean and neutral graphics do also seem to produce higher response rates. Language barriers may sometimes be a problem, why the survey should be prepared for the most commonly spoken languages. Reminders should be made cautiously and with a combination of e-mail and post-cards. To build sufficient trust, the project requires some levels of transparency and recognized credibility of the researchers.