From the 1930s to the 1980s, Swedish politics was based on the assumption that social change could be accomplished through a specific political and administrative process. National politicians decided the aims of policy, government commissions of inquiry engaged experts who compiled available...

Four interrelated arguments are presented to form a theory about the relation between the logic of markets, social efficiency and the quality of government. The first is that competitive markets with a certain set of characteristics are the most efficient organizational form for creating a...

The importance of political institutions for economic growth and social well-being has been demonstrated in a number of studies. Societies in which agents trust that other agents will collaborate in establishing and maintaining efficient institutions produce more social benefits. Yet there is...

Social trust is a crucial ingredient for successful collective action. What causes social trust to develop, however, remains poorly understood. The quality of political institutions has been proposed as a candidate driver and has been shown to correlate with social trust. We show that this...

The main question addressed in this paper is how the great variation in the level of social trust in different countries can be explained. Most empirical research on this question has been based on survey data which has limitations when it comes to capturing the causal mechanisms. Building on...

What does it take to move a society from an inefficient equilibrium, characterized by low social capital, distrust and inefficient legal and political institutions, to the opposite situation? The starting point is a discussion of solutions to the `social dilemma' problem presented in rational...

Research on democratization and quality of government (QoG) has highlighted the impact of poor governance on people’s living conditions. Simultaneously we have gained knowledge about global child poverty. Here these two strands of research are brought together. We use survey micro-data from 68...