Shades of brown and green: Party effects in proportional election systems

By Olle Folke. 2014

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Small parties play an important role in proportional election systems. For example, the emergence and electoral success of environmental and anti-immigration parties have constituted one of the central changes in the political landscape in Europe over the last three decades. But we do not know if this has actually had any implications for policy, since no methods exist for credibly estimating the effect of legislative representation in proportional election systems. Because party representation is not randomly assigned, both observable and unobservable factors influence policy outcomes as well as party representation. Using a part of the legislative seat allocation that is as good as random, I estimate the causal effect of party representation on immigration policy, environmental policy and tax policy in Swedish municipalities. The results show that party representation has a large effect on the first two policies, but not on the tax policy.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3050e8b536076fded90d5ab47bf3751583637935

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. Benny Geys
2. Gianmarco Daniele
3. J. Finnegan

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Sam Fankhauser
2. Benny Geys
3. C. Gennaioli
4. M. Collins
5. Gianmarco Daniele
6. J. Finnegan

Citations in the corpus

• Partisan Politics: The Empirical Evidence from OECD Panel Studies (2017, unknown): “7 Other applications include, for example, Folke (2014) and Freier and Odendahl (2015).”
• Institutions, Climate Change, and the Foundations of Long-Term Policymaking (2019, background): “…the way that electoral rules open up possibilities for green parties to win parliamentary seats and influence policymaking (Andersen, 2019; Folke, 2014; Harrison & Sundstrom, 2010; LaChappelle, 2011), I draw attention to their effect on electoral insulation, which is causally prior to…”
• Interpersonal trust and welfare state support (2015, background): “…individuals are thereby typically seen as more in favour of redistribution, although their ability to achieve these higher preferred levels of redistribution is likely to be mediated by the effective legislative power of left-wing parties (Freier and Odendahl, 2012; Fiva et al., 2014; Folke, 2014).”
• The political economy of passing climate change legislation: Evidence from a survey (2015, background): “Although the impact of party politics on environmental policy can be complex (Folke, 2014), we should therefore expect different trends in climate legislation depending on the political orientation of the parties in power (which in turn reflects the political views of voters, see Lee et al., 2004).”
• Local Favoritism in At-Large Proportional Representation Systems (2016, unknown): “Following previous studies, they can be classified as either belonging to the leftwing socialist camp or the rightwing conservative camp (see, for example, Fiva, Folke, and Sørensen (2013)).”