Innovation Policy as Performativity—the Case of Sweden

This article analyzes how the idea of “innovationism” in Sweden has generated a new kind of idea-driven policy around the creation of innovative regional policy. In contrast to similar policies in this area, this policy does not manifest itself through traditional instruments, but evolves through symbolic and ritual performances, in particular through events and conferences. The article asks how this emerging idea has changed the existing institutional formation of sponsoring industrially relevant research. The vision of concerted action between decision-makers within modern innovationism reinforces territorial identity, but it also tends to devolve responsibility to the regional level since concerted action on the national level is hard to obtain. What emerges is a system of governing at a distance where different actors perform their roles according to often academic ideas of innovationism. The study is based on two qualitative studies in Sweden entailing both documentary sources and semi-structured interviews.     

Rent-seeking,political influence and inequality: A simple analytical example

A simple model allowing an analysis of the interaction between economic policy decisions and rent-seeking by private agents competing for political influence, is developed. Rent-seeking may be of the directly unproductive type, requiring resources that are withdrawn from productive activities, or it may manifest itself as income transfers (corruption) to political decisionmakers. In the political-economic equilibrium of the model the extent of rent-seeking, economic policy decisions, income inequality, etc. are endogenously determined.     

Monotone Comparative Statics for Models of Politics

We elucidate a powerful yet simple method for deriving comparative statics conclusions for a wide variety of models: Monotone Comparative Statics ( Milgrom and Shannon 1994 ). Monotone comparative static methods allow researchers to extract robust, substantive empirical implications from formal models that can be tested using ordinal data and simple nonparametric tests. When these methods apply, they can replace a diverse range of more technically difficult mathematics (facilitating richer, more realistic models), assumptions that are hard to understand or justify substantively (highlighting the political intuitions underlying a model's results), and a complicated set of methods for extracting implications from models. We present an accessible introduction to the central monotone comparative statics results and a series of practical tools for using these techniques in applied models (with reference to original sources, when relevant). Throughout we demonstrate the techniques with examples drawn from political science .     

Everyone likes a winner: An empirical test of the effect of electoral closeness on turnout in a context of expressive voting

Under instrumental voting closer elections are expected to have higher turnout. Under expressive voting, however, turnout may increase with decreasing closeness when voters have a preference for winners. An empirical test using data on Belgian municipal elections supports this. We find that turnout reaches a local maximum when the largest party in the election obtains just over 52% of the seats and then falls (supporting the “instrumental” closeness-argument). There is, however, another turning point: the presence of a highly dominating party (receiving at least two-thirds of the votes) stimulates turnout despite the fact that dominance implies lower closeness.     

Race,Social Welfare,and the Decline of Postwar Liberalism: A New or Old Key?

Fifty-one years ago, when liberalism and social welfare democracy were expanding in all advanced industrialized nations, V.O. Key, Jr., forecast the decline of postwar liberalism in the United States. Current discussion of the decline of liberalism has ignored Key or, when evidence is lacking, has incorrectly cited him. In contrast to Key's relatively direct, simple, and heavily documented reasoning, current explanations are multifactorial, complex, less well documented, and often ideologically loaded. Some explanations for the "postwar" decline identify causal factors more than six years after the war, yet they ignore events in 1945–47. At the fifty-first anniversary of V.O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation, attention to Key's forecast and Occam's razor is called for. Key argued that racism in the South, exerted through congressional committees, would lead to a decline of liberalism in the nation. Using "legislative histories," this article compares Key's single-factor "racial" explanation with a two-factor explanation—and by implication with multifactor ones—and finds Key's more compelling and parsimonious. Archival sources indicate that more than two years before the 1948 Democratic Convention, Charlie Ross, Truman's closest advisor, and Truman himself encouraged Key to assess the emerging postwar politics of the South. As Key anticipated, institutionalized racism sunk the Fair Deal and postwar social democracy, despite Truman's efforts. The effects of racism on postwar and current politics and public administration should be reexamined as a key to understanding American distinctiveness or exceptionalism.