Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (Am. Econ. J. Appl. Econ. 1:86–111, <CitationRef CitationID="CR30">2009</CitationRef>), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by...</citationref>

We showed, in Berggren and Elinder (<CitationRef CitationID="CR2">2012</CitationRef>), that tolerance toward homosexuals is negatively and quite robustly related to economic growth. In a comment, Bornhoff and Lee (<CitationRef CitationID="CR3">this issue</CitationRef>) question this finding on model-specification grounds. By undertaking three changes, they purport to show that our...</citationref></citationref>

Do voters respond to political parties׳ promises or to their past actions? We use a suitable sequence of events in Swedish politics to provide the first answer to this question. In the 1994 election campaign the Social Democrats proposed major cuts in transfers to parents with young children,...

We investigate how tolerance, as measured by attitudes toward different types of neighbors, affects economic growth in a sample of 54 countries. Unlike previous studies, by Richard Florida and others, we find that tolerance toward homosexuals is negatively related to growth. For tolerance toward...

There are several theoretical accounts of public sector outsourcing. We note that leading theories give different predictions of the influence of political variables and test the predictions on a Swedish data set in which outsourcing varies between municipalities and over time as well as between...