Call of Duty: Bloc Ops. Effects of Bloc Majority Control in Swedish Municipalities, 1993-2022

Sammanfattning

This paper uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of bloc control on municipal outcomes, comparing municipalities where the right bloc barely attains a council-seat majority to those where it barely falls short. The running variable is the seat-majority vote margin: the right bloc's vote share minus the minimum vote share required to win a seat majority under the modified Sainte-Laguë allocation rule. Because many close elections involve councils without a clear bloc majority, the estimates should mainly be interpreted as the effect of right-bloc majority status relative to non-rightmajority outcomes, rather than as a pure left-versus-right ideological contrast. Across a range of fiscal and economic outcomes, I find no statistically significant discontinuities at the cutoff. The results are robust to alternative bandwidth choices, polynomial orders, and standard RDD diagnostics. Overall, the evidence suggests that close changes in right-bloc majority status do not translate into systematic differences in the municipal outcomes studied.