A field experiment on ethnic discrimination among local Swedish public officials

Adman, Per; Jansson, Hanna

doi:10.1080/03003930.2016.1244052

Cited by 30 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Coming from a largely conservative and Roman Catholic region, Flemish local politicians might be expected to be relatively more skeptical toward women and immigrants than Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jpart/article-abstract/28/4/535/5055228 by Erasmus University Rotterdam user on 19 February 2019 politicians in less conservative settings. Conversely, previous research has provided evidence of ethnicitybased stereotypes and discrimination among public officials in very different settings, such as US state legislatures (Butler and Broockman 2011), Swedish municipalities (Adman and Jansson 2017), and South African municipalities (McClendon 2016). Also, as discussed in the review, evidence of discrimination in various hiring decisions in Flanders is relatively strong (Baert 2017).…”

Section: Discussion and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Equal Access to the Top? Representative Bureaucracy and Politicians’ Recruitment Preferences for Top Administrative Staff

Bækgaard

George

2018

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

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Although a voluminous literature on representative bureaucracy and minority discrimination suggests that characteristics other than qualifications influence hiring decisions, little is known about whether this also pertains to the top positions in political-administrative organizations. To shed light on this question, we ask how candidate ethnicity, gender, and age affect the recruitment preferences among politicians regarding the candidates for top administrative positions. Our study uses a survey experiment with random assignment of 1,688 Flemish local politicians to one of eight different descriptions of applicants to the leading managerial position of their local authority. We find that ethnic minorities, women, and younger candidates are generally considered more qualified for the job. Moreover, the impact of ethnicity and gender on recruitment preferences is conditional on politicians' ideological predispositions: Left-wing politicians consider ethnic minority candidates more competent, whereas right-wing politicians consider them less representative and are less inclined to invite them for job interviews than candidates from the ethnic majority. Furthermore, politicians furthest to the left are more inclined than right-wing politicians to recognize women as representative of the public at large and support inviting them for job interviews.

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Section: Discussion and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Equal Access to the Top? Representative Bureaucracy and Politicians’ Recruitment Preferences for Top Administrative Staff

Bækgaard

George

2018

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

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“… 4 This is not including one additional study on Swedish officials that I exclude because, although relevant to the present analysis, Swedish officials are required by national law not only to respond to every public request, but are also explicitly required to respond equally to all requests and to offer email as a means of communication, resulting in a response rate of almost 100% (Adman and Jansson, 2017). …”

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confidence: 99%

“…3 See the SI for more information on this process. 4 This is not including one additional study on Swedish officials that I exclude because, although relevant to the present analysis, Swedish officials are required by national law not only to respond to every public request, but are also explicitly required to respond equally to all requests and to offer email as a means of communication, resulting in a response rate of almost 100%(Adman and Jansson, 2017). 5 When this information was not reported, I used online supplementary/replication material whenever available, or directly inquired with the authors, to manually calculate the number of responses received out of the total requests sent.…”

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confidence: 99%

How Responsive are Political Elites? A Meta-Analysis of Experiments on Public Officials

2017

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In the past decade, the body of research using experimental approaches to investigate the responsiveness of elected officials has grown exponentially. Given this explosion of work, a systematic assessment of these studies is needed not only to take stock of what we have learned so far about democratic responsiveness, but also to inform the design of future studies. In this article, I conduct the first meta-analysis of all experiments that examine elite responsiveness to constituent communication. I find that racial/ethnic minorities and messages sent to elected officials (as opposed to non-elected) are significantly less likely to receive a response. A qualitative review of the literature further suggests that some of these inequalities in responsiveness are driven by personal biases of public officials, rather than strategic, electoral considerations. The findings of this study provide important qualifications and context to prominent individual studies in the field.

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“…Nevertheless, a growing empirical literature has established that in many countries, citizens are not treated equally by state bureaucracies. In settings as diverse as the US, Germany, Sweden, South Africa, the UK or China, state bureaucracies have been found to discriminate against members of historically disadvantaged groups, in particular with respect to ethnicity (Distelhorst and Hou 2014;White et al 2015;Adman and Jansson 2017;Hemker and Rink 2017) or race (Keiser et al 2004;Butler and Broockman 2011;Halliday 2011;Giulietti et al 2019). Apart from historically determined discrimination, ingroup favoritism also seems to play an important role, especially in large and ethnically diverse countries such as the US (Broockman 2013), South Africa (McClendon 2016), China (Distelhorst and Hou 2014), or India (Neggers 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bureaucratic discrimination in electoral authoritarian regimes: Experimental evidence from Russia

Rochlitz

Mitrokhina

Nizovkina

2021

European Journal of Political Economy

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Are investors in electoral authoritarian regimes discriminated against for political activism? In this paper, we implement a simple experiment to test whether affiliation with the ruling party or the political opposition affects the probability that investors receive advice from investment promotion agencies in Russian regions. Between December 2016 and June 2017, we sent 1504 emails with a short question and a number of randomized treatments to 188 investment promotion agencies in 70 Russian regions. Although investment promotion agencies are nominally depoliticized in Russia, we find that switching the political affiliation of a potential investor from the opposition party "Yabloko" to the government party "United Russia" on average increases the chances to receive a reply by 30%. The effect strongly depends on regional levels of political competition, with higher levels of discrimination in regions that are less politically competitive.

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A field experiment on ethnic discrimination among local Swedish public officials

Cited by 30 publications

References 23 publications

Equal Access to the Top? Representative Bureaucracy and Politicians’ Recruitment Preferences for Top Administrative Staff

Equal Access to the Top? Representative Bureaucracy and Politicians’ Recruitment Preferences for Top Administrative Staff

How Responsive are Political Elites? A Meta-Analysis of Experiments on Public Officials

Bureaucratic discrimination in electoral authoritarian regimes: Experimental evidence from Russia

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