Both consensus democracy and proportional electoral systems have been deemed to favor political participation over political competition. The aim of this paper is to test whether these power-sharing institutional arrangements correlate positively with non-democratic attitudes when the degree of ethnic and religious fragmentation is low. Data about people's attitudes towards democracy are collected from the World Value Survey and European Value Survey and cover up to 55 democratic societies. The hypotheses are tested by employing an ordinary least square multivariate regression model and use ethnic and religious fractionalization as interaction variables. By doing so it is possible to determine whether the correlation between the two power-sharing institutions and the share of non-democratic attitudes among a population might be moderated by a third variable (either ethnic or religious fractionalization). The main finding of the paper seems to suggest that no such interaction effect seems to be active. Neither consensus democracy nor proportional electoral systems were shown to correlate positively with non-democratic attitudes when the degree of ethnic or religious fractionalization was low. However, there seem to be some indications that proportional electoral systems might correlate negatively with non-democratic attitudes when ethnic fractionalization is low.

Countries with proportional representation are increasingly introducing an electoral threshold to stop smaller parties from entering their parliaments. In this paper, I’m focusing on the  proportional electoral system and mainly why some countries choose to impose a barrier to their parliaments and others do not. First I did a survey to see which countries that are using it and after that I decided to do three case studies including: Sweden, The Netherlands and Turkey. I used Carles Boix theory on proportional electoral systems. The main variable in his theory is that the “threat” from the social democratic parties has an affect on the enforcement of a PRsystem. I wanted to examine whether it was possible to apply this theory on the implementation of thresholds. Finally, it is possible to conclude that Boix theory can be used even when studying the emergence of electoral barriers. Boix theory suggests that any "threat" from new parties makes the old, larger and established parties or other government organizations want to impose a threshold to secure their positions. This was the case in Sweden and in Turkey. In countries where this situation does not exist, it seems to be no need for an electoral barrier, as shown in the Netherlands.

Ett sedan länge betraktat problem inom politisk ekonomi är om, och i så fall i vilken utsträckning, politiska partier påverkar ekonomiska policyutfall. Syftet med studien är att undersöka om det rådande politiska majoritetsförhållandet i kommunfullmäktige har en effekt på kostnaderna för och kvaliteten inom en verksamhet som kommit att hamna allt högre på den politiska dagordningen under coronapandemin – äldreomsorgen. Studien tar avstamp i teoretiska utgångspunkter i form av medianväljarteoremet och citizen candidate-modellen. I syfte att estimera effekten av den politiska majoriteten på äldreomsorgen tillämpas en skarp regression discontinuity (RD) design för två kostnadsmått och två kvalitetsmått; antalet fallskador bland personer 80 år och äldre per 1 000 invånare samt brukarbedömning avseende äldreomsorg i särskilt boende. Resultatet visar att en vänsterblocksmajoritet är associerad med drygt 23 procent högre kostnader för äldreomsorg i kronor per invånare samt drygt sex procentenheters lägre nivå i fråga om brukarbedömning än jämfört med andra partikonstellationer. Resultaten är dock inte stabila över olika ekonometriska specifikationer och ytterligare studier skulle därmed behövas för att säkrare kunna belägga ett eventuellt samband.