Public Services in Comparative and Historical Perspective is a multi-year research project funded by a Consolidator Grant from the Swedish Research Council. The project involves a team of scholars at the University of Gothenburg and Lund University as well as partners at other universities in Sweden and abroad.
Our research is concerned with the causes and consequences of how crucial public services such as policing, schooling, and public health have been organized across countries and throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Some of the work we do examines long-run trends and enduring differences between countries. In other parts of the project, we concentrate on critical events, periods, and settings.
Among the topics we've studied are judicial reform in hybrid regimes, vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic, the evolution of everyday interactions between citizens and public officials, the effects of women’s political representation on development in corrupt environments, the historical relationship between transport infrastructure and the quality of public education, and health-care reforms in the post-war era.
Our research is concerned with the causes and consequences of how crucial public services such as policing, schooling, and public health have been organized across countries and throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Some of the work we do examines long-run trends and enduring differences between countries. In other parts of the project, we concentrate on critical events, periods, and settings.
Among the topics we've studied are judicial reform in hybrid regimes, vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic, the evolution of everyday interactions between citizens and public officials, the effects of women’s political representation on development in corrupt environments, the historical relationship between transport infrastructure and the quality of public education, and health-care reforms in the post-war era.