The Influence of Legislative Turnover on Policy Innovation

This research paper contributes to the literature concerning the influence of legislative turnover on policy change. The evidence represented in this paper is based on the specific case of Sweden, with data concerning the legislative turnover in Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, and macro-economic variables to identify fiscal policy. Until now, the research on the causal relationship between political elite circulation, serving as an independent variable, and policy change, serving as a dependent variable, is limited. This study however, aims to fill this gap and thus, to identify the influence of the legislative turnover rate on fiscal policy change, with the main objective to eventually generalize the results to other policy fields as well. Because of practical and statistical reasons, the choice to specify policy change as fiscal policy change had to be made, which is why this paper can be considered to be a preliminary introduction for further research in this specific field of study. In this paper, the theoretical framework is based on the economic theory of the stationary bandit, introduced by McGuire and Olson (1996), indicating the economic incentives parliamentarians have to act in a particular way. This framework proves to be helpful to indicate why turnover matters.