Arrangementer - Side 8

Title: The Institutional Sources of Economic Transformation: Energy Policy from the Oil Crises to Climate Change

Abstract

Why are some governments more effective in promoting economic change than others? We develop a theory of the institutional sources of economic transformation. Domestic institutions condition the ability of policymakers to impose costs on consumers and producers. We argue that institutions can enable transformation through two central mechanisms: insulation and compensation. The institutional sources of transformation vary across policy types—whether policies impose costs primarily on consumers (demand-side policies) or on producers (supply-side policies). Proportional electoral rules and strong welfare states facilitate demand-side policies, whereas autonomous bureaucracies and corporatist interest intermediation facilitate supply-side policies. We test our theory by leveraging the 1973 oil crisis, an exogenous shock that compelled policymakers to simultaneously pursue transformational change across OECD countries. Panel analysis, case studies, and discourse network analysis support our hypotheses. The findings offer important lessons for contemporary climate change policy and low-carbon transitions.

Politics and administrative turnover in highly meritocratic systems

Martin Søyland (Political Science, UiO) presents his R package stortingscrape. This R package aims to effectivize this process for Norwegian parliamentary data. The package makes the data easily accessible, while also being flexible enough for tailoring the different underlying data sources to ones needs. The package philosophy revolves around three core consepts: 1) simplify data formats as much as possible, 2) make interconnected sources of data easily mergable, and 3) minimize overlap in information for different retrival functions.

Title of the presentation "Land Property Rights, Cadasters and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Panel 1000-2015 CE”

Abstract

Since the transition to agricultural production, property rights to land have been a key institution for economic development. Clearly defined land rights provide economic agents with increased access to credit, secure returns on investment, free up resources used to defend one's land rights, and facilitate land market transactions. Formalized land records also strengthen governments' capacity to tax land-owners. Despite a large body of extant micro-level empirical studies, macro-level research on the evolution of formal rights to land, and their importance for economic growth, has so far been lacking. In this paper, we present a novel data set on the emergence of state-administered cadasters (i.e. centralized land records) for 159 countries over the last millennium. We also analyze empirically the association between the development of cadastral institutions and long-run economic growth in a panel of countries. Our findings demonstrate a substantive positive effect of the introduction of cadasters on modern per capita income levels, supporting theoretical conjectures that states with more formalized property rights to land should experience higher levels of economic growth.

Title of the presentation "Regime Threats and State Solutions”

The Research Infrastructure Services Department at USIT is responsible for national e-infrastructure services for computation, storage of research data and more. The group is also responsible for UiO's involvement in national, Nordic and European initiatives and other cooperation projects and initiatives in the field of e-infrastructure and scientific computing.

Optical character recognition (OCR) promises to open vast bodies of historical data to scientific inquiry, but OCR can be cumbersome when documents are noisy. The past 18 months have seen the launch of new OCR processors with vastly improved accuracy. In this seminar, Thomas Hegghammer will give an overview of the latest tools and present a new R package that offers access to the most powerful of them all, Google Document AI.

Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Modern Public Services

Technological shifts are eroding the line between nuclear and conventional weapons. We discuss the implications for strategic stability, and examine Russia’s and South Korea’s deterrence strategies.

Research use and research impact in public administration and policy: Empirical studies of Norwegian government employees

We will discuss Emma Rosengren's chapter, "Armed Neutrality in Dire Straits. A feminist analysis of the 1981 Swedish submarine crisis."

We will discuss Aaron Bateman's article, "Keeping the Technological Edge: Britain and the Strategic Defense Initiative."

Opinion polls are not reported in the media as unfiltered numbers. And some opinion polls are not reported at all. This talk by Zoltán Fazekas from Copenhagen Business School is about how polls travel through several stages that eventually turn boring numbers into biased news. The theoretical framework describes how and why opinion polls that are available to the public are more likely to focus on change, despite most polls showing little to no change. These dynamics are empirically demonstrated using several data sources and measurements from two different democracies (Denmark and the U.K.) covering several years of political reporting. In the end, a change narrative will be prominent in the reporting of opinion polls which contributes to what the general public sees and shares, further consolidating a picture of volatile political competition.

Opinion polls are not reported in the media as unfiltered numbers. And some opinion polls are not reported at all. This talk by Zoltan Fazekas (Copenhagen Business School) is about how polls travel through several stages that eventually turn boring numbers into biased news. 

Unpopular policies leading to the co-production of public services: The case of public transportation in Israel

We will discuss Philipp Lutscher's article, "Digital Retaliation? Denial-of-Service Attacks After Sanction Events".

Neil Ketchley presents Violence, Concessions, and Decolonization: Evidence from the 1919 Egyptian Revolution​

We will discuss Oliver Barton's paper "'No Special Privileges'? British Nuclear Forces, Transatlantic Relations, and the INF Negotiations."

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Title of the presentation "The Phantom at the Opera: How Social Movements Intersect with Institutional Politics; Reflections from A Study of American Political Development”

In this online seminar, we disuss Ian Bowers and Henrik Stålhane Hiim's paper: "Conventional Counterforce Dilemmas: South Korea’s Deterrence Strategy and Stability on the Korean Peninsula".

Title: Mass attitudes in Difficult times: Natural Disasters and Authoritarianism