Johannes Lindvall

The Political Origins of Primary Education Systems: Ideology, Institutions, and Interdenominational Conflict in an Age of Nation-Building

This paper is concerned with the development of national primary education regimes in Europe, North America, Latin America, Oceania, and Japan between 1870 and 1939. We examine why school systems varied between countries and over time, concentrating on three institutional dimensions: centralization, secularization, and subsidization. There were two paths to centralization: through liberal and social democratic governments in democracies, or through fascist and conservative parties in autocracies. We find that the secularization of public school systems can be explained by path-dependent state-church relationships (countries with established national churches were less likely to have secularized education systems) but also by partisan politics. Finally, we find that the provision of public funding to private providers of education, especially to private religious schools, can be seen as a solution to religious conflict, since such institutions were most common in countries where Catholicism was a significant but not entirely dominant religion.

The Electoral Consequences of Two Great Crises

Who benefits from deep economic crises: the left, the right or neither? On the basis of evidence from elections in 1929-1933 and 2008-2013 in all states that were democracies in both periods, it is argued in this article that the electoral consequences of the Great Depression and the Great Recession were surprisingly similar: in both periods, right-wing parties were at first more successful than left-wing parties, although this effect only lasted for a few years. The manner in which a crisis develops over time should be taken into account when examining the effects of deep economic downturns on the electoral fortunes of the left and the right.

Corruption, Bureaucratic Failure and Social Policy Priorities:

This article argues that bureaucratic capacity – the competence and reliability of the national bureaucracy – matters to the allocation of public spending among welfare state programmes since it is difficult for governments to justify high levels of spending on programmes that require bureaucrats to make case-by-case decisions, on a discretionary basis, if the bureaucracy is incompetent, corrupt or both. We expect bureaucratic capacity to have a positive effect on programmes that involve bureaucratic discretion, but weak or no effects on programmes that are more straightforward to implement. In order to test these hypotheses, we analyse public spending on active labour market programmes (which involve a lot of discretion) and parental leave benefits (which involve less discretion). Relying on data for twenty advanced democracies from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, we find that high bureaucratic capacity does have a positive effect on active labour market policy spending, but not on parental leave benefits.

Unions, Social Democrats, and Corporatism. Denmark and Sweden Compared

A number of recent studies have documented weakening ties between social democratic parties and trade unions. This article is concerned with the effects of weakening party— union ties on policymaking. In many classic studies of corporatism it has been argued that this mode of policymaking depends on strong ties between social democratic parties and trade unions. In this article, we argue, in contrast, that strong party—union ties are potentially detrimental to corporatism, because in a polarized political environment unions may be tempted to exert political influence via political allies instead of bargaining with their counterparts. In order to evaluate this argument empirically, we present a detailed analysis of two countries with strong corporatist traditions (Denmark and Sweden) from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Union Density and Political Strikes

Why do trade unions organize antigovernment strikes in some countries but not in others? This article argues that there is a curvilinear relationship between union density and political strike activity. Political strikes are rare in countries with low union density, since effective protests require a basic level of organizational capacity. They are also rare in countries with high union density, since a government that faces a strong union movement has powerful incentives to adjust its policies in order to avoid open confrontation. But political strikes are relatively common in countries with moderate levels of union density, since it is difficult for governments and unions to find viable compromises when the strength of the unions is not secure. The empirical part of the article estimates the relationship between union density and the likelihood of political strikes in two samples of advanced democracies.

The Political Foundations of Trust and Distrust: Reforms and Protests in France

This article argues that the high level of protest activity in France is, at least partly, the result of distrust between the government and the trade unions, and that such distrust is inevitable in a society where unions are sometimes strong enough to mobilise against the government but not confident in their own future strength. This trust problem can be overcome if governments are willing to make institutional changes that commit them to future policies, but such political engineering is costly and unstable, which explains why governments sometimes prefer open confrontation. The empirical part of the paper analyses four French social and labour market reform initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s, demonstrating that the ideas developed in this article help to explain important features of contemporary French policy-making.

Coalitions and Compensation: The Case of Unemployment Benefit Duration

This paper examines unemployment benefit reforms in twenty-five advanced democracies between the middle of the 1980s and the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. The paper’s main argument is that the type of government – coalition or single-party – has an effect on whether cutbacks in social benefits are combined with compensating measures that mitigate the negative effects of the cuts. We show empirically that when cuts in unemployment benefit duration were made by coalition governments, spending on training programs tended to increase, but when cuts in duration were made by single-party governments, training spending tended to decrease. This pattern suggests that coalition governments, but not single-party governments, use compensation mechanisms to build political support for labor market reforms.

Economic Downturns and Political Competition Since the 1870s

Relying on new data on the ideology of heads of government in 27 democracies over a period of more than 140 years, this article shows that short economic downturns, with a single year of falling per capita consumption, have more often resulted in shifts to the right than shifts to the left. But long-lasting economic downturns, with more than one consecutive year of falling consumption, are different, since they tend to affect a much greater proportion of the population: compared with short downturns, which favor the right, long downturns have more uniform political effects.

Public Opinion, Party Politics, and the Welfare State

This chapter examines the long-run relationship between public opinion, party politics, and the welfare state. It argues that when large parties receive a clear signal concerning the median voter’s position on the welfare state, vote-seeking motivations dominate and the large parties in the party system converge on the position of the median voter. When the position of the median voter is more difficult to discern, however, policy-seeking motivations dominate, and party positions diverge. This argument implies that the effects of government partisanship on welfare state policy are more ambiguous than generally understood. The countries covered in the chapter are Denmark, France, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom (going back to the 1960s). The number of observations is (necessarily) limited, but the diverse cases illustrate a common electoral dynamic centered around the position of the median voter.

The martial origins of democracy: a global study of military conscription and suffrage extensions since the Napoleonic wars

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between conscription (the compulsory enlistment of civilians for military service) and democracy. Using the best available cross-country comparable data on the history of conscription and democracy, we demonstrate that there is an empirical relationship between conscription and democratization, but the relationship is more complicated than commonly believed. Specifically, we find that conscription increases the likelihood of male suffrage extensions, but only in wartime (when the conscript army is mobilized). We find no relationship between conscription and democratization apart from extensions of suffrage. Nor do we find support for the hypothesis that conscription shelters democracies from coups.