Equal chances in active labour market program placements for different ethnic groups? Examining decision making in the Swedish Public Unemployment Agency.

The project’s aim is to investigate the potential existence of ethnic discrimination in decision making when placing job seekers of different ethnic groups in Active Labour Market Programs (ALMPs) at the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES).

On the one hand, there are activation programs that can enhance skills and thus lead to a better chance of entering the labor market.

On the other hand, there are activation programs that rather ´park´ jobseekers in an occupation without skill enhancement, leading to a worse chance of entering the labor market in comparison.

We will carry out a vignette experiment where job seekers’ unemployment situation is described, and case workers are asked to decide about what type of ALMP the job seeker should be placed in. We will signal the job seekers’ ethnicity through their names and mentioning of their home country.

Other factors that will be included are the job seekers’ education, age, and employment history to examine the influence of different characteristics of job seekers and the interaction of these characteristics with their ethnicity to add more explanation to case workers decision making.

The vignette experiment will be integrated into a standard survey, collecting additional information on the case workers.

Through the survey the project will examine the effects of case workers attitudes and background (e.g., gender, age, ethnic background, professional education, work experience) on their decision making. We will also analyze how case workers’ characteristics intersect with job seekers’ characteristics.

The vignettes will be designed through a qualitative pre-study that consists of document analysis and interviews with case workers in the PES.

After the vignette experiment, focus groups will be conducted with case workers from the same sample to examine their motivations.

The findings of the project will contribute to several research fields by unpacking rationales behind how workers within the PES prioritize various types of activation instruments for different ethnic groups.

This project contributes by empirically demonstrating how decisions might differ for various job seeker groups as well as the motivation behind the decisions.

It thereby offers an endeavor about a less studied type of discrimination and adds an important societal contribution, i.e., discriminatory decision making in welfare institutions that has large consequences for job seekers which results in an inefficient use of public funds.