<p> <p> </p></p><p> </p><p>Did the mass media report in a different way about the real estate tax before the Swedish national election 2006 than they did after the election? If there were differences, what could be the cause?</p><p>This study aims to answer these questions by using a quantitative analysis of articles about the real estate tax published in the Dagens Nyheter (DN), the biggest morning daily.</p><p> </p><p>The summer before the election, the ‘Alliance’, (the non-socialist coalition, launched an election promise to abolish the real estate tax. Instead they planned to introduce a low community charge.The Alliance won the election and formed a government to implement their election promise.</p><p> </p><p>The analysis was made on all the published articles in DN that covered the real estate tax issue. In total there were 43 such articles. These where all published between the launch of the campaign promise until the electionday and a month before the proposal was launched 19/9 2007, until the proposal was implemented in 2008.</p><p> </p><p>The study results in three interesting conclusions. After the election, when the election promise was about to become political reality, DN reported more negatively about this specific issue. The genre of the articles varied heavily before and after the election. Before the election more news articles where published than after the election and the letters-to-the-editor about the real estate tax were published almost only before the election. This study also treats the intresting phenomenon that the Alliance, before the election, had the power to define their election promise but after the election they seem to have lost this power and instead the real estate tax question was defined by the media. The Alliance claimed that they would  ”abolish the real estate tax and introduce a low community charge” and DN used this definition in their newspaper. After the election, DN reported about the election as a new real estate tax, which is a very different thing.</p>

Did the mass media report in a different way about the real estate tax before the Swedish national election 2006 than they did after the election? If there were differences, what could be the cause? This study aims to answer these questions by using a quantitative analysis of articles about the real estate tax published in the Dagens Nyheter (DN), the biggest morning daily.   The summer before the election, the ‘Alliance’, (the non-socialist coalition, launched an election promise to abolish the real estate tax. Instead they planned to introduce a low community charge.The Alliance won the election and formed a government to implement their election promise.   The analysis was made on all the published articles in DN that covered the real estate tax issue. In total there were 43 such articles. These where all published between the launch of the campaign promise until the electionday and a month before the proposal was launched 19/9 2007, until the proposal was implemented in 2008.   The study results in three interesting conclusions. After the election, when the election promise was about to become political reality, DN reported more negatively about this specific issue. The genre of the articles varied heavily before and after the election. Before the election more news articles where published than after the election and the letters-to-the-editor about the real estate tax were published almost only before the election. This study also treats the intresting phenomenon that the Alliance, before the election, had the power to define their election promise but after the election they seem to have lost this power and instead the real estate tax question was defined by the media. The Alliance claimed that they would  ”abolish the real estate tax and introduce a low community charge” and DN used this definition in their newspaper. After the election, DN reported about the election as a new real estate tax, which is a very different thing.

Essay 1: (with Henrik Jordahl and Panu Poutvaara) We present and test a theory of prospective and retrospective pocketbook voting. Focusing on two large reforms in Sweden, we establish a causal chain from policies to sizeable individual gains and losses and then to voting. The Social Democrats proposed budget cuts affecting parents with young children before the 1994 election, but made generous promises to the same group before the 1998 election. Since parents with older children were largely unaffected we use a difference-in-differences strategy for identification. We find clear evidence of prospective pocketbook voting. Voters respond to campaign promises but not to the later implementation of the reforms. / Essay 2: This essay presents a detailed analysis of voters' response to municipality and regional level unemployment and economic growth, in Swedish general elections from 1985 to 2002, using data on 284 municipalities and 9 regions. The preferred specification suggests that an increase in regional growth or a reduction in regional unemployment by one percentage point is associated with an increase in the support for the national government by about 0.6 and 1.0 percentage points. Changes in unemployment and growth at the municipality level seem to have muchsmaller effects on government support. / Essay 3: One prediction from cognitive dissonance theory is that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (2008), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve on previous studies by investigating political attitudes, measured just before elections, when they are highly predictive of voting. In contrast to earlier studies I find no effect of voting on political attitudes. This result holds for a variety of political attitudes and data from both Sweden and the United States. / Essay4: (with Niclas Berggren and Henrik Jordahl) We conduct an extensive robustness analysis of the relationship between trust and growth by investigating a later time period and a bigger sample than in previous studies. In addition to robustness tests that focus on model uncertainty, we systematize the investigation of outlier influence on the results by using the robust estimation technique Least Trimmed Squares. We find that when outliers (especially China) are removed, the trust-growth relationship is no longer robust. On average, the trust coefficient is half as large as in previous findings.