Kåre Vernby

Do larger polities hinder gender parity in elected office? We theorize that when populations grow faster than elected assemblies, a “seat congestion” effect intensifies competition for nominations, enabling men candidates to crowd out women. We test this argument using two nationwide natural experiments: Swedish municipal amalgamations in 1952 and 1973 that abruptly increased electorates. We track the effects in newly digitized historical panel data. Where electorate-per-seat ratios rose, growth in women’s representation slowed. Decomposition analyses show that expanding councils only partially offsets congestion. By identifying polity size as a systematic brake on descriptive representation, the study adds a demographic dimension to debates on institutional design and points to an overlooked cost of increasing jurisdictional size.

Natural disasters can spark demands for democratic accountability yet impose losses and displacement that depress participation. We study approximately 16,000 Swedish tourists exposed to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami who returned home to intact communities. Unlike most people exposed to natural disasters, they faced no increase in the cost of voting, so the case is well suited to studying motivational responses to disaster exposure. We link a survivor registry to population-wide administrative data ( N up to 7 million) and use entropy balancing to compare survivors to matched non-exposed citizens over 25 years. Exposed individuals do not withdraw from participation. Their turnout is 1.4 percentage points higher in 2010 and 2018, a modest but persistent gap. The gap is more than twice as large among the bereaved. Mobilization is strongest among those exposed between ages 16 and 25, which is what habit formation would predict. A 2023 follow-up survey (3,956 respondents; N = 3198 to 3625 per analysis after item non-response) provides descriptive evidence that survivors still evaluate the government’s crisis response negatively and have shifted their partisan sympathies away from the then-incumbent party. The findings indicate that failed crisis management may have lasting consequences for turnout and potentially party choice, and that the electoral stakes of disaster response extend beyond the disaster zone.

Do larger polities hinder gender parity in elected office? We theorize that when populations grow faster than elected assemblies, a “seat congestion” effect intensifies competition for nominations, enabling men candidates to crowd out women. We test this argument using two nationwide natural experiments: Swedish municipal amalgamations in 1952 and 1973 that abruptly increased electorates. We track the effects in newly digitized historical panel data. Where electorate-per-seat ratios rose, growth in women's representation slowed. Decomposition analyses show that expanding councils only partially offsets congestion. By identifying polity size as a systematic brake on descriptive representation, the study adds a demographic dimension to debates on institutional design and points to an overlooked cost of increasing jurisdictional size.

Natural disasters can spark demands for democratic accountability yet impose losses and displacement that depress participation. We study approximately 16,000 Swedish tourists exposed to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami who returned home to intact communities. Unlike most people exposed to natural disasters, they faced no increase in the cost of voting, so the case is well suited to studying motivational responses to disaster exposure. We link a survivor registry to population-wide administrative data (N up to 7 million) and use entropy balancing to compare survivors to matched non-exposed citizens over 25 years. Exposed individuals do not withdraw from participation. Their turnout is 1.4 percentage points higher in 2010 and 2018, a modest but persistent gap. The gap is more than twice as large among the bereaved. Mobilization is strongest among those exposed between ages 16 and 25, which is what habit formation would predict. A 2023 follow-up survey (3,956 respondents; N = 3,198 to 3,621 per analysis after item non-response) provides descriptive evidence that survivors still evaluate the government's crisis response negatively and have shifted their partisan sympathies away from the then-incumbent party. The findings indicate that failed crisis management may have lasting consequences for turnout and potentially party choice, and that the electoral stakes of disaster response extend beyond the disaster zone.

Racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented at all levels of U.S. politics. Yet, the 2020 Census reports that people of color constitute the majority of Americans under 18, and could thus serve as a pool of descriptive candidates in the near future. We study how race and age intersect in the first of multiple steps that may lead to election: interest in running for office. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Survey, we first show that Black and Latino Americans are more interested in running for office than are White and Asian Americans. This observed ambition gap cannot be accounted for by standard explanations like socioeconomic disparities, ideology, political interest, and broad civic engagement. Rather, it is explained by differences among age cohorts: younger Black and Latino Americans are more interested in running for office, due to having been disproportionately engaged in recent movements advocating racial justice. We conclude that differences in political ambition between racial and ethnic groups do not explain the underrepresentation of Black and Latino Americans; rather, by drawing on the untapped ambition found among younger, more diverse cohorts, future recruitment efforts for the next generation of politicians can help translate this potential into representational parity in U.S. politics.

This paper presents an eight-step framework for drafting comprehensive introductions to political science journal articles. It covers opening contextualization, formulation of research puzzles, literature positioning, argument statement, methods preview, and discussion of implications. Four recent articles illustrate each step, and a brief style note identifies recurring problems such as excessive abstraction and formal diction.

Racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in most Western democracies. This article investigates one potential root cause behind this pattern: minority and majority citizens might expect to feel discriminated against if they enter politics. Using data from three large-scale surveys, we find that minorities in both the United States and Sweden are less likely to expect to feel welcome than the majority population. These discrepancies in expected discrimination persist, even after controlling for other factors. Moreover, expected discrimination is not without political consequences: those who expect to feel less welcome are less likely to indicate an interest in running for political office. Finally, these results do not differ for politically engaged citizens who constitute a more realistic pool of potential candidates. We conclude by discussing what expectations of discrimination can tell us about the fairness of the political system and how these attitudes shape political ambition among minorities.

An extensive literature links the rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties to immigration. We argue that another demographic trend is also significant: emigration. The departure of citizens due to internal and international emigration is a major phenomenon affecting elections via two complementary mechanisms. Emigration alters the composition of electorates, but also changes the preferences of the left behind. Empirically, we establish a positive correlation between PRR vote shares and net‐migration loss at the subnational level across Europe. A more fine‐grained panel analysis of precincts in Sweden demonstrates that the departure of citizens raises PRR vote shares in places of emigration and that the Social Democrats are the principal losers from emigration. Elite interviews and newspaper analyses explore how emigration produces material and psychological grievances on which populists capitalize and that established parties do not effectively address. Emigration and the frustrations it generates emerge as important sources of populist success.

Early voting procedures boost voter participation and have therefore been suggested as institutional remedies for the problem of unequal turnout. Scholars have, however, raised concerns that making voting more convenient may actually lead to a less representative electorate. We contribute to this debate by leveraging large-scale Swedish registry data to analyze persons expecting a child around the time of the election. Our results indicate that politically engaged high-status voters are more likely to use the opportunity to vote in advance when faced with the risk of not being able to vote on election day. Given the large number of obstacles to election-day voting that individuals face throughout life, it is therefore conceivable that efforts to make voting more convenient and less costly for citizens may in the end lead to less representative electorates.