Abstract
This paper explores the entrepreneurial experience (and spirit) of politicians. To what extent have they been involved in entrepreneurial activities? Are politicians more or less entrepreneurial than their voters? Are entrepreneurship policies more or less important to politicians compared to the voters they represent? The Members of the Swedish Parliament were asked the same questions regarding their entrepreneurial activities as found in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). The empirical results indicate that when we analyse the statistical significance of the differences and control for individual characteristics, politicians have similar experiences and ambitions to the rest of the population when it comes to entrepreneurial activities. Politicians have a high potential for becoming entrepreneurs in the future, but seem to be less optimistic about how entrepreneurs are perceived in the cultural context. In addition, there is a substantial discrepancy between how politicians and voters perceive the ease of starting and running a business. Unlike politicians, voters do not agree that it is easy to start and run a business in Sweden.
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Notes
For a through description of the emergence and characteristics of the cartel party model, see Katz and Mair (1995).
Unemployment rates peaked in June 2009 at 9.8% (Statistics Sweden 2010).
For more information about the data collection in GEM see www.gemconsortium.org.
Note that the GEM methodology also includes an assessment of the institutional framework for entrepreneurship by national experts (The National Expert Survey). These experts include a few politicians. However, the scope and content of the expert survey do not enable comparison with voters.
The questionnaire can be found at: www.gemconsortium.org.
The response rate was lower than expected. Some Members of Parliament responded that, on principle, they never answered any surveys of this kind. However, according to Sheehan and McMillan (1999), web surveys generally have a lower response rate than mail surveys. A response rate of 20% is normal for a web survey. It should also be noted that elected representatives are often reluctant to participate in surveys (Holmberg 2010).
It might be the case that the propensity to answer the survey questions is dependent on which policy areas the Members of Parliament are specialized in. We find no apparent selection bias with respect to which committees the Members of Parliament belong to. However, recent Members of Parliament have a higher propensity to answer the survey questions.
See, for example, Greene (2003) for details about logit-models.
In the STATA software the Huber–White sandwich estimate of variance is used.
In 2010, 3.5% of Swedish women were involved in total early stage entrepreneurial activities while the corresponding figure for men was 6.2% (Braunerhjelm 2011).
In order to facilitate the analysis of the results, these options are assigned the following continuous values: agree (5), partly agree (4), neither agree nor disagree (3), partly disagree (2), disagree (1).
The statistically significant differences persist when we control for skewness in the distribution of response rates (Appendix B).
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the participants at the Ratio workshop and two anonymous referees for valuable comments on a previous version of the paper. I would also like to thank Camilla Sandberg for her excellent research assistance. The author is grateful to the Swedish GEM team, which facilitated the use of GEM data. Financial support from the Söderberg Research Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.
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Nyström, K. Entrepreneurial politicians. Small Bus Econ 41, 41–54 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-012-9417-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-012-9417-0