Rasmus Broms & Elias Markstedt: Local information capacity in Sweden (pdf)

Abstract

A growing strand of research revolving around the concept of legibility emphasizes the central function that information plays for state capacity accumulation. The bulk of these contributions remain focused on the existence of infrastructure supporting such information gathering rather than its actual content and quality. Further, attribution of agency in these narratives tends to remain at the level of the central state. Instead, we focus on local actors, specifically municipalities in Sweden. We use a publicly provided database of Swedish municipalities, containing around 5,000 miscellaneous indicators on various topics, to operationalize the propensity for producing missing data in a given municipality-year as a measure of (low) local legibility. The resulting “missingness”-index is devised through item-response theory modeling and covers all 290 Swedish municipalities between 1995 and 2022. Insofar, we make a methodological contribution by showing how public data repositories—often riddled by data issues endogenous to state capacity—can be leveraged as a valid empirical indicator of the same concept. Further, missingness is positively related to municipal capacity, measured by the administration size. Conversely, it is negatively related to local political autonomy, measured using voting patterns. These findings illustrate the importance of considering local government for the maintenance of state capacity in general.