Karl-Oskar Lindgren

Input and output legitimacy: synergy or trade-off? Empirical evidence from an EU survey

Since the breakdown of the ‘permissive consensus’ in the early 1990s we have witnessed an input turn in the debate on EU legitimacy. Many scholars have been arguing for enhancing the input legitimacy of the EU through promoting stakeholder participation and deliberation on important European issues. Yet, others warn that this strategy might not help in increasing overall legitimacy of the EU, since increased input legitimacy could be thought to undermine its output legitimacy by making decision-making less efficient. This article assesses, empirically, the relationship between input and output legitimacy within the context of the EU chemicals policy overhaul. Contrary to what some scholars suggest, we find evidence from a survey that measures aimed at increasing the input legitimacy of the EU also hold the promise of increasing its output legitimacy.

Dyadic Regression in the Presence of Heteroscedasticity : An Assessment of Alternative Approaches

Although the problem of heteroscedasticity has been the subject of much discussion in other areas of applied statistics the problem has received scant attention in the social network literature. This study attempts to remedy this situation by considering how traditional methods for significance testing in dyadic regression models, such as standard QAP tests, perform under conditions of heteroscedasticity. Moreover, the article presents two alternative methods to deal with heteroscedasticity that are both shown to perform rather well with typical social network data under conditions of both heteroscedasticity and homoscedasticity. Overall, the results of the study suggest that applied researchers using regression techniques to study dyadic data are well advised to correct for heteroscedasticity, by either of the two methods discussed here, whenever there is a reason to suspect heteroscedasticity.

Who Knows Best What the People Want: Women or Men? : A Study of Political Representation in India

The notion of representation lies at the heart of liberal democratic thinking, and over the years considerable effort has gone into defining and measuring the concept. The least common denominator in the voluminous literature is that in a representative political system there should be a certain amount of attitudinal congruence between masses and elites. One much-debated strategy for obtaining a better match between elite and mass policy opinion is that of increasing the representation of women in important decision-making positions in society. Using data on nearly 5,000 elite-mass dyads within 24 Indian villages, the authors find strong support for the view that a more equal representation of women increases opinion congruence between masses and elites. The results are challenging because they show that women are not only better equipped than men to politically represent women but also that they are better at representing men—and the results are shown to apply in a variety of socioeconomic contexts.

Why are Immigrants Underrepresented in Politics? Evidence from Sweden

Widespread and persistent political underrepresentation of immigrant-origin minorities poses deep challenges to democratic practice and norms. What accounts for this underrepresentation? Two types of competing explanations are prevalent in the literature: accounts that base minority underrepresentation on individual-level resources and accounts that emphasize political opportunity structures. However, due to the lack of data suitable for testing these explanations, existing research has not been able to adjudicate between these theories. Using registry-based microdata covering the entire Swedish adult population between 1991 and 2010 our study is the first to empirically evaluate these alternative explanations. We examine election outcomes to municipal councils over the course of six elections and find that variation in individual-level resources cannot explain immigrants’ underrepresentation. Further, when comparing immigrants and natives who face comparable political opportunity structures a large representation gap remains. Instead, we argue that discrimination by party gatekeepers plays a more significant role in perpetuating the underrepresentation of immigrants than do individual resources or structural variables.

The Structure of Conflict over EU Chemicals Policy

There is a lively academic debate over whether political cleavages in the European Union (EU) follow mainly territorial (national) or non-territorial (ideological) patterns. This article analyses the cleavages that structure the conflict over European chemicals policy, the so-called REACH system. Taking positions on this major policy as an empirical example, we test these competing theories on the nature of cleavages on environmental policy issues in the EU. We use data from an expert survey of more than 600 individuals to fulfil this aim. The results show that neither of the hypotheses is unequivocally supported. But the data indicate that cleavages based on non-territorial interests are much more important than territorial interests in explaining positions on REACH.

It Runs in the Family

What motivates citizens to run for office? Recent work has shown that early life parental socialization is strongly associated with a desire to run for office. However, parents not only shape their children’s political environment, they also pass along their genes to those same children. A growing area of research has shown that individual differences in a wide range of political behaviors and attitudes are linked to genetic differences. As a result, genetic factors may confound the observed political similarities among parents and their children. This study analyzes Swedish register data containing information on all nominated and elected candidates in the ten parliamentary, county council, and municipal elections from 1982 to 2014 for a large sample of adoptees and their adoptive and biological parents. By studying the similarity in political ambition within both adoptive and biological families, our research design allows us to disentangle so-called “pre-birth” factors, such as genes and pre-natal environment, and “post-birth” factors like parental socialization. We find that the likelihood of standing as a political candidate is twice as high if one’s parent has been a candidate. We also find that the effects of pre-birth and post-birth factors are approximately equal in size. In addition, we test a number of potential pre- and post-birth transmission mechanisms. First, disconfirming our expectations, the pre-birth effects do not seem to be mediated by cognitive ability or leadership skills. Second, consistent with a role modeling mechanism, we find evidence of a strong transmission in candidacy status between rearing mothers and their daughters.

Input and Output Legitimacy: Synergy or Trade-off?

Up to now our focus has been on the democratic credentials of the participatory-governance model.1 However, as we saw in Chapter 1 of the book, those who argue for strengthening the interest-based channel of representation within the Union often see interest-group participation as a way to enhance not only democracy, but also the quality of policy itself. The following excerpt from the White Paper on European Governance provides a good case in point.

Participatory Governance: The Way Forward?

This book is at once conventional and unconventional. As the reader has doubtlessly noticed by now, it does not purport to offer any bold new conjectures or alternative definitions or novel theoretical perspectives. For readers who are familiar with the pluralist debate of the 1950s and the corporatist debate of the 1970s, the promises and pitfalls of the governance model examined here — that of participatory governance — are largely old news.

The Structure of Political Contestation

The notion of political representation lies at the heart of liberal-democratic thinking.1 Scholars use the term “representation” in a range of ways, but few would disagree that democracy requires the existence of a causal link between the preferences of those who govern and the preferences of those who are governed — that is, what is commonly known as political responsiveness (Achen 1978; Przeworski et al. 1999). The great challenge of democratic engineering, of course, is to design political institutions in such a way as to induce the desired degree of political responsiveness. EU is no exception in this regard.

Assessing Participatory Governance — A Survey Approach

Our objective in this book is to offer an empirically well-grounded answer to the vital question of whether recent governance reforms within the EU should be seen as enhancing or as endangering democracy. As we stressed in Chapter 1, we believe there is a great need for such a study. There has been a far-reaching theoretical debate on the desirability of reforms to promote participation and deliberation at the European level. However, empirical studies on the actual effects of such reforms in general — and on the impact of the European Commission’s new governance regime in particular — have been sparse.