Browsing by Author "Samanni, Marcus"

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Driving Forces behind Gender Equality - A Cross-Country Comparison
(2009-12) Wängnerud, Lena; Samanni, Marcus; QoG Institute
There is a growing body of research acknowledging the lack of good cross-country comparisons that contribute to the understanding of what drives change in society, i.e. what make some countries more gender equal than others. In this essay, five explanatory factors—the number of women in elected office, gender sensitive legislation, the level of corruption, government effectiveness, and the level of democracy in a country—are tested in a regression analysis. Gender equality refers to women’s position in their everyday life. The results show that the well-established notion that a high number of women in elected office is related to a high level of gender equality has to be revised. We suggest that a current world-wide quota trend has resulted in an increased divergence between the number of women in elected office and the status of women in society more generally.
Lyckan, välfärdsstaten och statsförvaltningen
(2010-06-14T09:17:05Z) Samanni, Marcus; Göteborgs universitet/Statsvetenskapliga institutionen; University of Gothenburg/Department of Political Science
Quality of Government Makes People Happy
(2010-03) Samanni, Marcus; Holmberg, Sören; QoG Institute
Quality of Government, Political Power and the Welfare State
(2010-03) Rothstein, Bo; Samanni, Marcus; Teorell, Jan; QoG Institute
Why have different industrialized capitalist market economies developed such varying systems for social protection and social insurance? The hitherto most successful theory for explaining this is the Power Resource Theory (PRT), according to which the generosity of the welfare state is a function of working class mobilization. In this paper we argue however that there is an undertheorized link in the micro-foundations for PRT, namely why wage earners trying to handle the type of social risks and inequalities that are endemic for a market economy would turn to the state for the solution Our complementary approach, the Quality of Government (QoG) Theory, stresses the importance of trustworthy, reliable, impartial and reasonably uncorrupted government institutions as a precondition for citizens' willingness to support policies for social insurance and redistribution. Drawing on time-series crosssectional data on 18 OECD countries in 1984-2000, we find (a) that QoG positively affects the size and generosity of the welfare state, and (b) that the effect of working class mobilization on welfare state generosity is increasing in the level of QoG.