Sustainable water resource management is a core interest for all societies. As water systems are ... more Sustainable water resource management is a core interest for all societies. As water systems are often common resources, the management of water systems requires coordinated action among actors along the water. For flowing water, a complication for coordination is upstream-downstream relations where what happens upstream affects downstream, but not the other way around. In this study we present results from a survey experiment with politicians in Sweden, focusing on whether and to what extent their willingness to cooperate is affected by their placement upstream or downstream along a fictive water system. Our findings indicate that politicians from upstream and downstream municipalities share the view that upstream politicians bear greater responsibility for undertaking preventive actions and are willing to assume remedial responsibility for problems caused by them. These results challenge the notion that self-interest is the primary obstacle to resolving environmental collective action problems.
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 2020
Democratic responsiveness implies that politicians are expected to be responsive to public demand... more Democratic responsiveness implies that politicians are expected to be responsive to public demands and needs but also that the public is expected to respond to actual policies and reforms by adjusting their demands. What is often overlooked is that policy-specific knowledge is imperative for public policy responsiveness to send correct signals. By using survey experiments, we tested the effects of policy-specific information on policy preferences for privatization of welfare services in Sweden. In line with the thermostatic model, we expected information on the increase of privatization to show negative correlations with demand for more privatization. The experiments showed that policy preferences changed in most policy areas when policyspecific facts were provided. The negative effects of information about privatization were most pronounced among centre-left respondents, increasing the left-right polarization. The results suggest that policy-specific knowledge can serve as a useful mechanism in order to meet the identified theoretical need to strengthen the causal relationship in theories of public responsiveness. The study adds important knowledge to how we understand public responsiveness, and highlight the need of "reality checks" when analysing policy demands.
Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal, 2014
The Swedish welfare state is well known for its considerable size. Although this is still true, t... more The Swedish welfare state is well known for its considerable size. Although this is still true, the recent development has brought a reduction of the scope of the state’s responsibility for welfare. The increased privatisation of welfare services means that the public sector no longer has monopoly on providing welfare services. This change affects people in their daily lives and is likely to have feedback effects for how the welfare state and the government is perceived by public opinion. The aim of this paper is to investigate to what extent and in what way the public responds to policy that reduces the scope of the welfare state. In order to gain legitimacy for welfare state policy, it is vital that politicians represent the public in parliament. A necessary condition for representative democracy to work is that the public reacts on policy change, since decision makers otherwise has little incentive to represent public opinion. Theoretically this paper departs from models of polic...
In the case of the Scandinavian wolf, the species is both considered an impediment to rural livel... more In the case of the Scandinavian wolf, the species is both considered an impediment to rural livelihoods and survival, and valued as an inextricable part of the fauna. Understanding the social, cult ...
Local policy-makers' incentives to address an issue is conditioned by how they perceive public at... more Local policy-makers' incentives to address an issue is conditioned by how they perceive public attention. Our study focuses on drinking water management at the municipal level in Sweden. Provisioning and management of drinking water is a responsibility of the local governments. Interviews with local politicians and public administrators in seven municipalities reveal that local policymakers think that citizens view provisioning of drinking water as a taken for granted service, and also lack knowledge of and interest in drinking water issues. Public attention is further seen as a double-edged sword since engagement in water issues often is a result of problems with water provision. The findings are discussed from a theoretical perspective of the role of agendasetting in public policy. It is argued that the view of policy-makers of citizens as unengaged negatively affects the incentives to bring drinking water to a prominent place on the local policy agenda.
There is a long-standing argument that citizens' trust in the state needs to be recurrently repro... more There is a long-standing argument that citizens' trust in the state needs to be recurrently reproduced for policies to endure and that this also includes trust in its separate policy agencies. Such trust is likely to be more important for costlier policies, as, for example, social insurance schemes.
Drinking water provisioning can be approached as a paradigmatic case of transboundary risk manage... more Drinking water provisioning can be approached as a paradigmatic case of transboundary risk management that requires government collaboration. In Sweden, as in most other countries, the provision of safe drinking water and the control of its quality is a responsibility of local governments. This explorative case study investigates how local level decision-makers (politicians and public administrators) identify and understand risks to drinking water services; how they construe governmental responsibility and collaboration between local governments. The empirical results show that decision-makers identify a number of systemically interrelated technical, natural and social risks; that responsibility is understood to be complex and fragmented and that they refrain from collaboration despite clear advantages in theory. Even if the payoff is high from a broad societal perspective for inter-municipal collaborative risk management of drinking water services, collaboration on the local level is low. Institutional uncertainties relating to the allocation of responsibility, transaction costs and political costs for individual municipalities may explain the reluctance to collaborate in this case.
Projektet Rättssäkerhet och politik behandlar frågan om hur rättssäkerhet som värde kommer till u... more Projektet Rättssäkerhet och politik behandlar frågan om hur rättssäkerhet som värde kommer till uttryck i politiska beslut om socialförsäkringens administration. I detta working paper sammanfattas de empiriska resultaten från projektet. Studien utgörs av en analys av större reformer av socialförsäkringens administration från 1955 års beslut om en allmän sjukförsäkring fram till 2000-talets reformer, då försäkringskassorna och Riksförsäkringsverket ersattes av den sammanhållna myndigheten Försäkringskassan och myndigheten Inspektionen för socialförsäkringen infördes. De politiska besluten analyseras med utgångspunkt från begreppen formell och materiell rättssäkerhet och för varje reform dras slutsatser om vilken av dessa två betydelser av rättssäkerhet som har varit mest framträdande. En kontinuerlig jämförelse sker mellan de olika riksdagspartiernas syn på rättssäkerhet. Studien motiveras ytterst genom den generellt intressanta och komplicerade kopplingen mellan rättssäkerhet och legitimitet. Resultaten visar hur organiseringen av välfärdsstaten ger olika förutsättningar att uppnå formell och materiell rättssäkerhet och därmed vilar på olika grunder för legitimitet.
How and when does welfare policy contribute to shape public opinion? This article departs from th... more How and when does welfare policy contribute to shape public opinion? This article departs from the policy feedback research tradition and seeks to contribute to the understanding of how policy influences public opinion (public responsiveness). The argument here suggests that personal experiences in terms of empowerment condition the dynamics between policy and opinion. The empirical case concerns the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care, which resulted an intended increase in private health care centres. In this case, empowerment is assumed to be enhanced by increased exit options and freedom of choice. The specific question in the analysis is whether citizens who have empowering experiences, as a consequence of the reform, are more likely to be positive towards further privatization of welfare services. The results show few effects in general, but there seems to be a correlation between the experience of exiting and more positive attitudes towards privatization.
The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public respond to policy change in re... more The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public respond to policy change in relation to their preferred level of policy. In the paper, this model is tested on public opinion reactions following market-oriented reforms of the welfare service sector in Sweden. The general question in the paper concerns if and how this policy change provides an impact on public attitudes towards privatisation: does the public react at all and in that case, do they adjust their preferences in relation to the level of privatisation in accordance with the thermostatic model? Market-oriented welfare reforms are by some citizens seen as a (positive) re-organisation, and by others as a (negative) retrenchment. A contribution in relation to previous research is that this study also includes individual level factors concerning ideological orientation and proximity that is assumed to condition public responsiveness. The argument is that it's important to consider opinion cleavages when forming hypotheses about the strength and direction of public responsiveness since the effects on preferences may be quite different depending on point of departure. The design of the empirical study is a natural experiment where public preferences of privatisation of health care is measured before and after the implementation of consumer's choice in primary health care in 2009/2010. The results show that there seem to be a thermostatic reaction in relation to the increase in private health care providers: preferences for further privatisation decreases in general after the reform although there are also some variations between groups. An important conclusion is that thermostatic reactions varies according to ideological orientation, where right-oriented react thermostatically and left-oriented do not. The paper contributes to a further understanding of the relation between policy making and public opinion. Also, it expands on thermostatic theory by testing its initial propositions on a new empirical case.
Electronic Government, an International Journal, 2013
Choice reform in public healthcare includes the expectation that citizens will choose a healthcar... more Choice reform in public healthcare includes the expectation that citizens will choose a healthcare provider. This paper investigates the informational support they need in order to choose a primary healthcare provider. The study is based on an electronic survey (n = 990) in Sweden. The Callon and Muniesa model is used as the paper's theoretical framework. This model, which describes the sequential phases of isolating alternatives, examining alternatives and ranking and making choices, emphasises that technological devices support consumer choice. The paper concludes that public healthcare web portals and information leaflets are more popular platforms than private healthcare web portals and social networks. The data citizens find most useful for examining alternatives are waiting times, doctors' competences and reception. The paper makes suggestions for the design of technological devices citizens can use to choose healthcare providers. The theoretical framework shows the technological and political character of information used to support choice.
It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that one of the most turbulent political areas in recent ye... more It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that one of the most turbulent political areas in recent years has been asylum policy, which has disclosed a rapidly increasing inflow of asylum seekers, and, in many countries, has been followed by fierce media discussion and political controversies. In Sweden, this development has been heated as the Swedish self-image is one of providing generous policies, which is also reflected in terms of strong refugee policy. The article uses this example to explore assumptions about public responsiveness in previous policy feedback literature and to examine the link between citizens' attitudes towards immigration and changes in asylum policy output, measured as asylums granted, over time in the period 1990-2015. It focuses especially on the link through which citizens become aware of policy output, operationalized as media visualization, and find that including media reveals a suppressed relationship between policy output and public attitudes. The relationship is negative and thus confirms the assumptions of the thermostatic models. Second, the article shows that feedback is mediated by political orientation: People defining themselves politically as right-oriented respond with negative feedback when the number of granted asylums increases, while left-oriented people do not change their attitudes. Based on these findings it is concluded, first, that analyses of democratic responsiveness need to incorporate a clear measure of the link by which exogenous factors become visible. Second, the importance needs to be stressed of considering important cleavages in the population in order to display responsiveness processes fairly.
När en ny politisk majoritet tillträder som ett resultat av medborgarnas röstande i allmänna val ... more När en ny politisk majoritet tillträder som ett resultat av medborgarnas röstande i allmänna val bör följden bli konkreta skillnader i politiken. I denna undersökning ställs frågan om medborgarna uppfattar en förändring av politiken efter ett kommunalt maktskifte. Undersökningen bygger på frågor i enkätundersökningen Väst-SOM 2009. Resultaten visar att en knapp tredjedel av de västsvenskar som bor i kommuner som fick maktskifte efter valet 2006 uppfattar att det har skett förändringar i politiken. Uppfattningen skiljer sig åt mellan olika grupper där bland annat de som har försökt påverka den kommunala politiken och de som arbetar i kommunal sektor anser att det har skett förändringar i högre grad än andra.. CEFOS Working Paper 8 Maktskiften i medborgarnas ögon
Projektet Rättssäkerhet och politik behandlar frågan om hur rättssäkerhet som värde kommer till u... more Projektet Rättssäkerhet och politik behandlar frågan om hur rättssäkerhet som värde kommer till uttryck i politiska beslut om socialförsäkringens administration. I detta working paper sammanfattas de empiriska resultaten från projektet. Studien utgörs av en analys av större reformer av socialförsäkringens administration från 1955 års beslut om en allmän sjukförsäkring fram till 2000-talets reformer, då försäkringskassorna och Riksförsäkringsverket ersattes av den sammanhållna myndigheten Försäkringskassan och myndigheten Inspektionen för socialförsäkringen infördes. De politiska besluten analyseras med utgångspunkt från begreppen formell och materiell rättssäkerhet och för varje reform dras slutsatser om vilken av dessa två betydelser av rättssäkerhet som har varit mest framträdande. En kontinuerlig jämförelse sker mellan de olika riksdagspartiernas syn på rättssäkerhet. Studien motiveras ytterst genom den generellt intressanta och komplicerade kopplingen mellan rättssäkerhet och legitimitet. Resultaten visar hur organiseringen av välfärdsstaten ger olika förutsättningar att uppnå formell och materiell rättssäkerhet och därmed vilar på olika grunder för legitimitet. CEFOS Working Paper 11 Rättssäkerhet som välfärdspolitiskt ideal: Reformer av socialförsäkringens administration från 1955 till 2008.
Sustainable water resource management is a core interest for all societies. As water systems are ... more Sustainable water resource management is a core interest for all societies. As water systems are often common resources, the management of water systems requires coordinated action among actors along the water. For flowing water, a complication for coordination is upstream-downstream relations where what happens upstream affects downstream, but not the other way around. In this study we present results from a survey experiment with politicians in Sweden, focusing on whether and to what extent their willingness to cooperate is affected by their placement upstream or downstream along a fictive water system. Our findings indicate that politicians from upstream and downstream municipalities share the view that upstream politicians bear greater responsibility for undertaking preventive actions and are willing to assume remedial responsibility for problems caused by them. These results challenge the notion that self-interest is the primary obstacle to resolving environmental collective action problems.
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 2020
Democratic responsiveness implies that politicians are expected to be responsive to public demand... more Democratic responsiveness implies that politicians are expected to be responsive to public demands and needs but also that the public is expected to respond to actual policies and reforms by adjusting their demands. What is often overlooked is that policy-specific knowledge is imperative for public policy responsiveness to send correct signals. By using survey experiments, we tested the effects of policy-specific information on policy preferences for privatization of welfare services in Sweden. In line with the thermostatic model, we expected information on the increase of privatization to show negative correlations with demand for more privatization. The experiments showed that policy preferences changed in most policy areas when policyspecific facts were provided. The negative effects of information about privatization were most pronounced among centre-left respondents, increasing the left-right polarization. The results suggest that policy-specific knowledge can serve as a useful mechanism in order to meet the identified theoretical need to strengthen the causal relationship in theories of public responsiveness. The study adds important knowledge to how we understand public responsiveness, and highlight the need of "reality checks" when analysing policy demands.
Political Behavior: Voting & Public Opinion eJournal, 2014
The Swedish welfare state is well known for its considerable size. Although this is still true, t... more The Swedish welfare state is well known for its considerable size. Although this is still true, the recent development has brought a reduction of the scope of the state’s responsibility for welfare. The increased privatisation of welfare services means that the public sector no longer has monopoly on providing welfare services. This change affects people in their daily lives and is likely to have feedback effects for how the welfare state and the government is perceived by public opinion. The aim of this paper is to investigate to what extent and in what way the public responds to policy that reduces the scope of the welfare state. In order to gain legitimacy for welfare state policy, it is vital that politicians represent the public in parliament. A necessary condition for representative democracy to work is that the public reacts on policy change, since decision makers otherwise has little incentive to represent public opinion. Theoretically this paper departs from models of polic...
In the case of the Scandinavian wolf, the species is both considered an impediment to rural livel... more In the case of the Scandinavian wolf, the species is both considered an impediment to rural livelihoods and survival, and valued as an inextricable part of the fauna. Understanding the social, cult ...
Local policy-makers' incentives to address an issue is conditioned by how they perceive public at... more Local policy-makers' incentives to address an issue is conditioned by how they perceive public attention. Our study focuses on drinking water management at the municipal level in Sweden. Provisioning and management of drinking water is a responsibility of the local governments. Interviews with local politicians and public administrators in seven municipalities reveal that local policymakers think that citizens view provisioning of drinking water as a taken for granted service, and also lack knowledge of and interest in drinking water issues. Public attention is further seen as a double-edged sword since engagement in water issues often is a result of problems with water provision. The findings are discussed from a theoretical perspective of the role of agendasetting in public policy. It is argued that the view of policy-makers of citizens as unengaged negatively affects the incentives to bring drinking water to a prominent place on the local policy agenda.
There is a long-standing argument that citizens' trust in the state needs to be recurrently repro... more There is a long-standing argument that citizens' trust in the state needs to be recurrently reproduced for policies to endure and that this also includes trust in its separate policy agencies. Such trust is likely to be more important for costlier policies, as, for example, social insurance schemes.
Drinking water provisioning can be approached as a paradigmatic case of transboundary risk manage... more Drinking water provisioning can be approached as a paradigmatic case of transboundary risk management that requires government collaboration. In Sweden, as in most other countries, the provision of safe drinking water and the control of its quality is a responsibility of local governments. This explorative case study investigates how local level decision-makers (politicians and public administrators) identify and understand risks to drinking water services; how they construe governmental responsibility and collaboration between local governments. The empirical results show that decision-makers identify a number of systemically interrelated technical, natural and social risks; that responsibility is understood to be complex and fragmented and that they refrain from collaboration despite clear advantages in theory. Even if the payoff is high from a broad societal perspective for inter-municipal collaborative risk management of drinking water services, collaboration on the local level is low. Institutional uncertainties relating to the allocation of responsibility, transaction costs and political costs for individual municipalities may explain the reluctance to collaborate in this case.
Projektet Rättssäkerhet och politik behandlar frågan om hur rättssäkerhet som värde kommer till u... more Projektet Rättssäkerhet och politik behandlar frågan om hur rättssäkerhet som värde kommer till uttryck i politiska beslut om socialförsäkringens administration. I detta working paper sammanfattas de empiriska resultaten från projektet. Studien utgörs av en analys av större reformer av socialförsäkringens administration från 1955 års beslut om en allmän sjukförsäkring fram till 2000-talets reformer, då försäkringskassorna och Riksförsäkringsverket ersattes av den sammanhållna myndigheten Försäkringskassan och myndigheten Inspektionen för socialförsäkringen infördes. De politiska besluten analyseras med utgångspunkt från begreppen formell och materiell rättssäkerhet och för varje reform dras slutsatser om vilken av dessa två betydelser av rättssäkerhet som har varit mest framträdande. En kontinuerlig jämförelse sker mellan de olika riksdagspartiernas syn på rättssäkerhet. Studien motiveras ytterst genom den generellt intressanta och komplicerade kopplingen mellan rättssäkerhet och legitimitet. Resultaten visar hur organiseringen av välfärdsstaten ger olika förutsättningar att uppnå formell och materiell rättssäkerhet och därmed vilar på olika grunder för legitimitet.
How and when does welfare policy contribute to shape public opinion? This article departs from th... more How and when does welfare policy contribute to shape public opinion? This article departs from the policy feedback research tradition and seeks to contribute to the understanding of how policy influences public opinion (public responsiveness). The argument here suggests that personal experiences in terms of empowerment condition the dynamics between policy and opinion. The empirical case concerns the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care, which resulted an intended increase in private health care centres. In this case, empowerment is assumed to be enhanced by increased exit options and freedom of choice. The specific question in the analysis is whether citizens who have empowering experiences, as a consequence of the reform, are more likely to be positive towards further privatization of welfare services. The results show few effects in general, but there seems to be a correlation between the experience of exiting and more positive attitudes towards privatization.
The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public respond to policy change in re... more The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public respond to policy change in relation to their preferred level of policy. In the paper, this model is tested on public opinion reactions following market-oriented reforms of the welfare service sector in Sweden. The general question in the paper concerns if and how this policy change provides an impact on public attitudes towards privatisation: does the public react at all and in that case, do they adjust their preferences in relation to the level of privatisation in accordance with the thermostatic model? Market-oriented welfare reforms are by some citizens seen as a (positive) re-organisation, and by others as a (negative) retrenchment. A contribution in relation to previous research is that this study also includes individual level factors concerning ideological orientation and proximity that is assumed to condition public responsiveness. The argument is that it's important to consider opinion cleavages when forming hypotheses about the strength and direction of public responsiveness since the effects on preferences may be quite different depending on point of departure. The design of the empirical study is a natural experiment where public preferences of privatisation of health care is measured before and after the implementation of consumer's choice in primary health care in 2009/2010. The results show that there seem to be a thermostatic reaction in relation to the increase in private health care providers: preferences for further privatisation decreases in general after the reform although there are also some variations between groups. An important conclusion is that thermostatic reactions varies according to ideological orientation, where right-oriented react thermostatically and left-oriented do not. The paper contributes to a further understanding of the relation between policy making and public opinion. Also, it expands on thermostatic theory by testing its initial propositions on a new empirical case.
Electronic Government, an International Journal, 2013
Choice reform in public healthcare includes the expectation that citizens will choose a healthcar... more Choice reform in public healthcare includes the expectation that citizens will choose a healthcare provider. This paper investigates the informational support they need in order to choose a primary healthcare provider. The study is based on an electronic survey (n = 990) in Sweden. The Callon and Muniesa model is used as the paper's theoretical framework. This model, which describes the sequential phases of isolating alternatives, examining alternatives and ranking and making choices, emphasises that technological devices support consumer choice. The paper concludes that public healthcare web portals and information leaflets are more popular platforms than private healthcare web portals and social networks. The data citizens find most useful for examining alternatives are waiting times, doctors' competences and reception. The paper makes suggestions for the design of technological devices citizens can use to choose healthcare providers. The theoretical framework shows the technological and political character of information used to support choice.
It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that one of the most turbulent political areas in recent ye... more It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that one of the most turbulent political areas in recent years has been asylum policy, which has disclosed a rapidly increasing inflow of asylum seekers, and, in many countries, has been followed by fierce media discussion and political controversies. In Sweden, this development has been heated as the Swedish self-image is one of providing generous policies, which is also reflected in terms of strong refugee policy. The article uses this example to explore assumptions about public responsiveness in previous policy feedback literature and to examine the link between citizens' attitudes towards immigration and changes in asylum policy output, measured as asylums granted, over time in the period 1990-2015. It focuses especially on the link through which citizens become aware of policy output, operationalized as media visualization, and find that including media reveals a suppressed relationship between policy output and public attitudes. The relationship is negative and thus confirms the assumptions of the thermostatic models. Second, the article shows that feedback is mediated by political orientation: People defining themselves politically as right-oriented respond with negative feedback when the number of granted asylums increases, while left-oriented people do not change their attitudes. Based on these findings it is concluded, first, that analyses of democratic responsiveness need to incorporate a clear measure of the link by which exogenous factors become visible. Second, the importance needs to be stressed of considering important cleavages in the population in order to display responsiveness processes fairly.
När en ny politisk majoritet tillträder som ett resultat av medborgarnas röstande i allmänna val ... more När en ny politisk majoritet tillträder som ett resultat av medborgarnas röstande i allmänna val bör följden bli konkreta skillnader i politiken. I denna undersökning ställs frågan om medborgarna uppfattar en förändring av politiken efter ett kommunalt maktskifte. Undersökningen bygger på frågor i enkätundersökningen Väst-SOM 2009. Resultaten visar att en knapp tredjedel av de västsvenskar som bor i kommuner som fick maktskifte efter valet 2006 uppfattar att det har skett förändringar i politiken. Uppfattningen skiljer sig åt mellan olika grupper där bland annat de som har försökt påverka den kommunala politiken och de som arbetar i kommunal sektor anser att det har skett förändringar i högre grad än andra.. CEFOS Working Paper 8 Maktskiften i medborgarnas ögon
Projektet Rättssäkerhet och politik behandlar frågan om hur rättssäkerhet som värde kommer till u... more Projektet Rättssäkerhet och politik behandlar frågan om hur rättssäkerhet som värde kommer till uttryck i politiska beslut om socialförsäkringens administration. I detta working paper sammanfattas de empiriska resultaten från projektet. Studien utgörs av en analys av större reformer av socialförsäkringens administration från 1955 års beslut om en allmän sjukförsäkring fram till 2000-talets reformer, då försäkringskassorna och Riksförsäkringsverket ersattes av den sammanhållna myndigheten Försäkringskassan och myndigheten Inspektionen för socialförsäkringen infördes. De politiska besluten analyseras med utgångspunkt från begreppen formell och materiell rättssäkerhet och för varje reform dras slutsatser om vilken av dessa två betydelser av rättssäkerhet som har varit mest framträdande. En kontinuerlig jämförelse sker mellan de olika riksdagspartiernas syn på rättssäkerhet. Studien motiveras ytterst genom den generellt intressanta och komplicerade kopplingen mellan rättssäkerhet och legitimitet. Resultaten visar hur organiseringen av välfärdsstaten ger olika förutsättningar att uppnå formell och materiell rättssäkerhet och därmed vilar på olika grunder för legitimitet. CEFOS Working Paper 11 Rättssäkerhet som välfärdspolitiskt ideal: Reformer av socialförsäkringens administration från 1955 till 2008.
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Papers by Anna Bendz