The bigger the better? Evidence of the effect of government size on life satisfaction around the world

This paper empirically analyzes whether government size is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. We thus provide a test of the longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory and public choice theory. According to the neoclassical view, governments play unambiguously positive roles for individuals' quality of life, while the theory of public choice has been developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement in – and regulation of – the economy, thereby harming their citizens' quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government consumption. For low, middle income, and male people, this result is stronger when the government is leftwing, while government consumption appears to be less harmful for women when the government is perceived to be effective. Government capital formation and social spending have no significant impact on life satisfaction.     

The Priorities of Materialist and Post-Materialist Values in the Nordic Countries - a Five-Nation Comparison

The present study takes the theory of post-materialism as a point of departure and compares the priorities of materialist and post-materialist values in the five Nordic countries (Denmark. Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). The prevalence of political values in different countries is also examined, as is the relationship between materialist and post-materialist values and age, from the perspective of whether generational replacement will contribute to the spread of post-materialist values in the Nordic setting. Post-materialist values are given relatively strong emphasis in the Nordic countries because the mass publics are less concerned with economic security values than those in other Western democracies. The priorities of political values have remained relatively stable at the aggregate level from the late 1970s to 1987, although there has been a slight tendency for the mass publics to become more materialist. In all countries the post-war generations are more likely to support post-materialist values than the older generations. The correlations between age and political values have become somewhat smaller over the last 6–12 years.     

Organizational Behavior and Economic Growth: A Norwegian Perspective*

By using game-theory, it is indicated that encompassing organizations may participate in dilemma games with free-rider problems. Next, examinations of institutional details of Norwegian corporatism point out that creative or productive strategies may be quite likely even among small interest organizations. In the last section it is argued that the assumption of economic growth being a collective good is more acceptable the larger the public sector. Again, institutional details need to be in focus. The model closing the paper dwells on whether comprehensive organizations really have stronger incentives to choose creativity rather than to fight for redistributions. A general affirmative answer cannot be provided.     

An extension of Black's theorem on voting orders to the successive procedure

Duncan Black (1958) stated his voting order theorem — ‘the later any motion enters the voting order, the greater its chance of adoption’ — exclusively for the amendment procedure. Niemi and Gretlein's (1985) extension is similarly limited. Here we show that with a change in the focus from social preferences to individual preferences, both Black's theorem and that proved by Niemi and Gretlein apply as well to the successive procedure.     

Fatal outcome of poisoning with the benzodiazepines flunitrazepam and diazepam

On a wintry day a 29-year-old woman was found dead beside her car showing head injuries and signs of hypothermia. Several empty packets of sedative and hypnotic drugs were lying inside the car. Toxicological analysis revealed the presence of flunitrazepam (heart blood of the left and right chamber 0.033 mg/L each), norflunitrazepam (left heart blood 0.029 mg/L, right heart blood 0.027 mg/L), 7-amino-flunitrazepam (left heart blood 0.090 mg/L, right heart blood 0.104 mg/L), diazepam (left heart blood 0.395 mg/L, right heart blood 0.386 mg/L), nordazepam (left heart blood 0.112 mg/L, right heart blood 0.115 mg/L) and temazepam (left heart blood 0.034 mg/L, right heart blood 0.033 mg/L). Neither alcohol nor other drugs were found. It was concluded that benzodiazepine intake led to a disturbance of consciousness. Whether the woman died in this situation due to the icy temperature as a result of hypothermia or whether she died or would have died solely due to benzodiazepine overdosage could not be clarified.     

Central-Local Government Relations in Transition: The Case of Swedish Child Care

The provision of subsidized child care has grown to become asizeable economic activity in Sweden during recent decades.This paper examines the changed financial relation betweencentral and local governments and the impact of child-caregrants on local government behaviour. We find that during anearlier regime, with a system of matching grants, localgovernments responded strongly to the incentives of the rules.This resulted in both intended and unintended outcomes, aswell as a distortion of information to the central government.Experiences from a recent transition of regime towards a kindof closed block grant system, illustrates new types ofadaptive behaviour but also the problem of finding a formulafor a fair allocation of resources among local governments.When designing a block grant system a distinction must be madebetween expenditures and resource needs; cost expenditure datado not necessarily reflect resource needs in cases where thereare national categorical equity goals related to socialservices of a merit-want character.     

Constitutional Design and Government Formation: The Expected Consequences of Negative Parliamentarism

In the early 1970s the Swedish parties designed new rules for government formation. In this study it is shown that the choice of a new voting rule stemmed from a combination of goaloriented behaviour and a process of socialization. In a cross national comparison, it is also shown that there exists an empirical correlation between the Swedish type of rule and (1) a high frequency of minority governments, (2) a high frequency of small minority governments and (3) a short government formation process. From the perspective of coalition formation theory, this is a challenging finding.