Praktik och integration: pilotprojektet Äntligen jobb

Insider activism—where bureaucrats use discretionary power to advance own ideological goals—has significant implications for regulatory stability and property rights security. Using the Swedish forestry industry as a case study, the purpose of this study is to investigate if insider activism affects the Swedish forestry sector and how such possible regulatory uncertainty influences economic decision-making. Assembled survey data suggest that forest owners perceive regulatory enforcement as unpredictable, leading to defensive actions such as premature harvesting to preempt restrictive future regulations. To explain these patterns, we apply public choice theory and a game-theoretic approach, demonstrating how bureaucratic drift, regulatory ratcheting, and time-inconsistency problems contribute to persistent distortions in forestry policies. Policy wise, the findings emphasize the need for judicial review, regulatory impact assessments, and clearer legislative mandates to reduce enforcement uncertainty and improve institutional trust. This research advances discussions on bureaucratic incentives, regulatory capture, and legal certainty in environmental policy.

How can we fight back against the populist threat to liberty, free markets, and the open society?

This open access book by Nils Karlson explores the strategies used by left- and right-wing populists to make populism intelligible, recognizable, and contestable. Karlson argues that to fight back requires the revival of liberalism itself by defending and developing the liberal institutions, the liberal spirit, liberal narratives, and liberal statecraft. The book presents a synthesized explanatory model for how populists promote autocratization through the deliberate polarization of society and traces the ideational roots of the core populist ideas that form a collectivistic identity politics. Written within the tradition of political theory and institutional economics, this book uses a wide variety of sources, including results and analyses from social psychology, ethics, law, and history.

The book is open source and can be downloaded through the link below.

This paper investigates whether an increased use and reinterpretation of what has been called “fair competition” has occurred at the expense of “free competition” among the central institutions of the European Union. We are also interested in assessing how frequently these terms have been used by the various EU institutions over time.

We have empirically examined this through a quantitative survey of more than 12,000 public documents, out of totally 242 000 documents containing 630 million words, in the EUR-lex database over the last 50 years, from 1970 to 2020. Our conclusion is that the emphasis of the common policies in the EU is likely to have shifted from free competition and an open market economy to “fair competition” in the sense of a level playing field, in official EU documents, such as treaties, EU acts institutions, preparatory documents relating to EU directives and recommendations including motions and resolutions, case law and more.

The European Commission has been a driving force in this development, followed closely by the European Parliament and subsequently by the Council of Ministers. This change entails a risk that the regulation of the European internal market has shifted so that the dynamics of the internal market and thus the EU’s competitiveness will weaken. The change also entails a centralization of decisions at EU level at the expense of the Member States.