Mattias Agerberg

• University of Gothenburg

Who is deemed vulnerable and in need of protection has a bearing on important policy decisions, such as refugee acceptance or provision of aid. In war, dominant narratives construe women as paradigmatic victims, even while civilian men are disproportionately targeted in the most lethal forms of violence. How are such gender-essentialist notions ref...

The protection of civilians from human rights violations has increasingly become a global priority. The wars in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and the development of the Women, Peace and Security framework have placed conflict-related sexual violence on the global protection agenda. Prior research has found that international attention to, and int...

Refugees arriving in Western countries spend long periods, often over a year, as asylum seekers. We examine how the period affects asylum seekers’ institutional and interpersonal trust. Drawing on theories of need gratification, we suggest that several needs are unfulfilled during this period of existential limbo. Still, some aspects in the new soc...

Measuring corruption has become a global industry. An important and commonly used data source are several large-scale multi-country projects that survey citizens directly about their perceptions and experiences of corruption. Such indicators are regularly used by political scientists to test theories on political attitudes and behavior. However, we...

While commonly deployed in anti‐corruption programs, corruption messaging has shown limited success. I argue that strategies focusing on injunctive norms (what most people approve of) have been underutilized and could be a feasible way of influencing perceptions in a desirable direction. In two studies fielded in Mexico, I first identify a substant...

A chronic problem for democratic governments is generating legitimacy for policy decisions that go against substantial groups of citizens’ legitimate interests. The primary means of achieving this aim involves the arrangements through which policy decisions are made. Whereas research in the field has tended to focus on the arrangements leading up t...

List experiments are widely used in the social sciences to elicit truthful responses to sensitive questions. Yet, the research design commonly suffers from the problem of measurement error in the form of non-strategic respondent error, where some inattentive participants might provide random responses. This type of error can result in severely bias...

In a panel study where one survey was conducted immediately after a terrorist attack in central Stockholm, with over 20,000 participants, we examine the possibility that first-hand experiences with terror increases effects compared to people located elsewhere in Sweden. We use matching and as-if random variation in our data to identify the effect o...

Sexual violence (SV) in conflict is increasingly politicized at both the international and domestic levels. Where SV in conflict is prevalent, we argue international actors perceive gender to be salient and push for a gendered response. Simultaneously, women mobilize politically in response to the threat to their security that conflict-related SV c...

Surveys show that citizens in all parts of the world have a strong distaste for corruption. At the same time, and contrary to the predictions of democratic theory, politicians involved in the most glaring abuse of public office often continue to receive electoral support. Using an original survey experiment conducted in Spain, this article explores...

Education has consistently been found to be positively related to political participation, electoral turnout, civic engagement, political knowledge, and democratic attitudes and opinions. Previous research has, however, not sufficiently acknowledged the large existing between- and within-country variations in institutional quality when studying thi...

In this chapter, we examine to what extent government auditing agencies mediates the effect from proportions of women in parliament on national levels of corruption; thus, we test, using a cross-country comparative design, whether higher proportions of women are associated with well-functioning auditing agencies, which further down the road is asso...

That conflict is highly gendered, with differential impacts on men and women, is uncontested. Besides being particularly exposed to the indirect consequences of conflict, women are often targeted in sexual violence used by government forces and rebel groups alike. While this kind of violence is commonly, and justifiably, discussed in terms of the a...

This article addresses an issue previously neglected in the research on support for populist parties: How do perceptions of the local quality of government (QoG) and local service delivery affect voters’ propensity to vote for a populist party? It argues that personal experience with poor QoG makes voters more likely to support populist parties. Th...

Citizens punish corrupt political parties; that is the microfoundation for the theory that electoral accountability acts as a mechanism to curb corruption. Empirical research, however, shows that the link is weaker than anticipated in theory. Citizens do not always and everywhere “vote the rascals out,” and it is hard to underpin the notion that pe...