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In virtually all popular indices and scales measuring bribery and dishonesty on a national level, Sweden performs strongly with its quality of rule of law and absence of corruption. But does this automatically imply that this “least sickly” patient can be declared perfectly healthy? By extensively reviewing existing research and consulting various sources of data, the authors of “A Clean House?” attempt to unpack the Swedish case. What do we know about corruption in Sweden, and what can be said of such affairs over time in the country? The four scholars of political science demonstrate that countries typically viewed as low-corruption states can have particular problems of a different type that should not be underestimated nor neglected.
This thesis contains an introduction and four essays that together address the issues of turnout and habitual voting. Although voting is less unequal than other forms of political participation, it is still biased in favour of more socially affluent citizens. One way to achieve more equal participation is to increase the general turnout. This is the implication of the `law of dispersion', formulated by Tingsten in 1937, which states that as turnout increases, participatory equality also increases. In Essay I, co-written with Mikael Persson and Maria Solevid, we revisit Tingsten's law and find new empirical support for it. One possible path to improving general turnout is the formation of vot...
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book analyses the considerable variation in the shares of private provision for core services in education, health and social services, in the Scandinavian countries. The chapters compare countries, service areas, and the for-profit, non-profit and public sectors. Each focuses on different levels of change: the mix of welfare providers, national laws and regulations, governance in municipalities, nursing homes and schools, and finally, the consequences experienced by the users of the services. The authors ask which combinations of governance structures, service sector providers, and user choice give the best results for active citizenship. Promoting Active Citizenship will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Public Administration and Management, Non-Profit Management, Social Policy, Innovation in Public Service, Social Care and Education and School Research.
Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe challenges a view of Nordic societies as homogenously white, and as human rights champions that are so progressive that even the concept of race is deemed irrelevant to their societies. The book places African Diasporas, race and legacies of imperialism squarely in a Nordic context. How has a nation as peripheral as Iceland been shaped by an identity of being white? How do Black Norwegians challenge racially conscribed views of Norwegian nationhood? What does the history of jazz in Denmark say about the relation between its national identity and race? What is it like to be a mixed-race black Swedish woman? How have African Diaspora...
Based on a new data-set covering 29 European and neighboring countries, this volume shows how, Europeans view and evaluate democracy: what are their conceptions of democracy, how do they assess the quality of democracy in their own country, and to what extent do they consider their country's democracy as legitimate? The study shows that Europeans share a common view of liberal democracy, which is complemented by elements of social and direct democracy, which go beyond the basic liberal model. The level of their demands in terms of democracy varies, however, considerably across Europe and is related to their assessment of democracy: the worse the quality of democracy in a given country, the h...
This book represents the most comprehensive exploration of corruption in U.S. municipal governments written to date. Exploring the 30-year time period from 1990 to 2020 and including all U.S. municipalities with populations of 10,000 people or more, Municipal Corruption: From Policies to People uses both quantitative research and case study analysis to answer the question of why some municipalities fall victim to corrupt acts, while others do not. It tells the stories of a number of communities that suffered through public corruption, investigating factors that contribute to a greater risk of corruption in municipalities, and identifying steps to prevent corruption in communities—including strengthening resident interest and involvement in local affairs, offsetting the decline in local journalism, and reinforcing scrutiny by state governments. Municipal Corruption is ideal supplemental reading for courses on ethics, public affairs, local government, and urban affairs, and it will be immeasurably useful to municipalities considering how to better insulate themselves and their constituents from corrupt acts.
Political Corruption and Democratic Governance explores the effects of political corruption on important aspects of democratic governing. Jongseok Woo and Eunjung Choi use a cross-national lens to analyze how political corruption influences different areas of politics and economics, including electoral outcomes, citizens’ evaluations of democratic norms and values, economic development, distributional justice, and social and political trust in both developed and developing nations. While most works on political corruption focus on the causes of corruption, this book delves into various consequences of it. The discussion in each chapter engages both theoretical and empirical components of political corruption, introducing competing theoretical arguments on a given topic and puts them under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Each chapter involves large-N statistical analysis to make it truly global in scope and to overcome the limits of single (or small-N) case studies on political corruption. This book concludes with critical evaluations about anti-corruption efforts by various IGOs and NGOs and specific policy recommendations to deter corruption.
Probabilistic topic models have proven to be an extremely versatile class of mixed-membership models for discovering the thematic structure of text collections. There are many possible applications, covering a broad range of areas of study: technology, natural science, social science and the humanities. In this thesis, a new efficient parallel Markov Chain Monte Carlo inference algorithm is proposed for Bayesian inference in large topic models. The proposed methods scale well with the corpus size and can be used for other probabilistic topic models and other natural language processing applications. The proposed methods are fast, efficient, scalable, and will converge to the true posterior d...
Corruption has become a central issue in current policy debates. This Handbook provides state of the art research on this important topic. It demonstrates the disastrous effects of high levels of corruption for most areas of human well-being and presents research results about strategies that can get corruption under control.
The Handbook provides a broad introduction to Swedish politics, and how Sweden's political system and policies have evolved over the past few decades.