Lugn och ro i politiken : Hur påverkas offentliga investeringar av låg grad politisk tävlan?

Sammanfattning: How does political competition affect investments in local governments? Previous research and theories suggests that less political competition increases public investments. Theory suggests that due to political parties feeling safer in their seats, they can plan more long-term without losing elections. However, this paper suggests that the opposite might be true; by using multiple regression analysis on a dataset containing 288 Swedish municipalities and examining the correlation between political competition and investments controlling for differences between municipalities, I’ve gotten results pointing in the opposite direction. My findings suggest that less political competition correlates with lower investments overall and in strategically chosen sub-categories. On investments in water and sanitation the effect was a 33 percent decrease in municipalities with low political competition, this is however the only statistically significant result. Total investments were down about 8 percent, investments in specifically targeted programs were 35 percent lower and investment in local politics where 67 percent lower. More research is needed to know if these findings are genuine, but as they contrast previous findings, further work should prove interesting.