Equal rights, unequal treatment? : A field experiment on democracy, discrimination, and urgency among Swedish municipalities.

Sammanfattning

This thesis sets out to explore whether or not Swedish municipalities adhere to and follow The Act of Public Access to Information and Secrecy, which in Swedish is called “Offentlighetsprincipen”. More specifically, it will analyse whether or not the municipalities follow the urgency requirement and if this compliance differs depending on municipal population size. Further, it also sets out to explore whether or not discrimination occurs when municipalities process requests for access to public documents. Although there are laws and clarifications from The Parliamentary Ombudsmen (Justitieombudsmannen) that require municipalities to process these requests within one day, previous research has found that a majority of municipalities do not follow this. Previous research has also found that although direct discrimination is not commonly occurring in Sweden, citizens with Swedish names generally are treated with warmer and more welcoming attitudes than foreign ethnicities when in contact with public officials in Sweden. The main body of data for this study was collected through a digital field experiment where 280 municipalities were contacted by two fictional aliases through email and requested to disclose the exact same type of public document. The results show that the municipalities do not follow the urgency requirement, and no statistically significant difference was found in treatment of the two aliases in the aspect of discrimination other than that the Swedish alias was greeted by name more often than the Arabic alias. Furthermore, the results show that there is a positive association between a larger population and a higher response rate among the municipalities, which could indicate that resources play a role in whether or not municipalities can uphold laws and principles.