The Violent Origins of Finnish Equality

Meriläinen, Jaakko; Mitrunen, Matti; Virkola, Tuomo

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3741493

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 53 publications

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“…The Finnish welfare state, though ultimately ending up similar to the Scandinavian model, followed a different path owing to the disruptive effects of the 1918 civil war; seeMeriläinen et al (2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Making of Social Democracy: The Economic and Electoral Consequences of Norway’s 1936 Folk School Reform

Submitter¹,

Acemoğlu

Pekkarinen

et al. 2021

SSRN Journal

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Upon assuming power for the first time in 1935, the Norwegian Labour Party delivered on its promise for a major schooling reform. The reform raised minimum instruction time in less developed rural areas and boosted the resources available to rural schools, reducing class size and increasing teacher salaries. We document that cohorts more intensively affected by the reform significantly increased their education and experienced higher labor income. Our main result is that the schooling reform also substantially increased support for the Norwegian Labour Party in subsequent elections. This additional support persisted for several decades and was pivotal in maintaining support for the social democratic coalition in Norway. These results are not driven by the direct impact of education and are not explained by higher turnout, or greater attention or resources from the Labour Party targeted towards the municipalities most affected by the reform. Rather, our evidence suggests that cohorts that benefited from the schooling reform, and their parents, rewarded the party for delivering a major reform that was beneficial to them.

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confidence: 99%

The Making of Social Democracy: The Economic and Electoral Consequences of Norway’s 1936 Folk School Reform

Submitter¹,

Acemoğlu

Pekkarinen

et al. 2021

SSRN Journal

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Reforming to Survive

Rasmussen

Knutsen

2022

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This Element details how elites provide policy concessions when they face credible threats of revolution. Specifically, the authors discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent formation of Comintern enhanced elites' perceptions of revolutionary threat by affecting the capacity and motivation of labor movements as well as the elites' interpretation of information signals. These developments incentivized elites to provide policy concessions to urban workers, notably reduced working hours and expanded social transfer programs. The authors assess their argument by using original qualitative and quantitative data. First, they document changes in perceptions of revolutionary threat and strategic policy concessions in early inter-war Norway by using archival and other sources. Second, they code, for example, representatives at the 1919 Comintern meeting to proxy for credibility of domestic revolutionary threat in cross-national analysis. States facing greater threats expanded various social policies to a larger extent than other countries, and some of these differences persisted for decades.

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The Violent Origins of Finnish Equality

Cited by 2 publications

References 53 publications

The Making of Social Democracy: The Economic and Electoral Consequences of Norway’s 1936 Folk School Reform

The Making of Social Democracy: The Economic and Electoral Consequences of Norway’s 1936 Folk School Reform

Reforming to Survive

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