Aksel Sundström’s research while affiliated with University of Gothenburg and other places

This article contributes to knowledge of how environmental disasters affect ecomodernist beliefs, i.e. the view that technology can solve environmental problems. Such beliefs in the general public are key to build mass support for environmental policies relying on large‐scale scientific solutions, but their stability is poorly understood. We argue that ecomodernist beliefs are more malleable than assumed and can be altered through events that highlight risks arising from a reliance on technological solutions. This study leverages that the Fukushima‐Daiichi accident happened during the fieldwork of a 2011 public opinion survey in Israel. The analysis suggests that ecomodernist beliefs were negatively affected by this unexpected tragedy. Consistent with expectations, we report stronger impact among people with more education. We document similar effects from a controlled survey experiment in the US and Israel, suggesting that these results are generalizable. Our findings are relevant beyond rare environmental disasters as they have implications for how ecomodernist beliefs might be formed and changed.

Responding to those who have read and critiqued your work, such as editors and reviewers, is a central part of academic exchange. To be able to explain and defend the choices you have made in a response letter is also a key skill that takes time to develop. It is my hope that this essay will help you reflect on the process of writing these responses and provide some useful tips toward getting published.

People in political decision-making across the globe tend to be much older than the average voter. As such, parliaments and cabinets are unrepresentative of the larger population. This has consequences: it risks favouring policies geared towards the interests of older cohorts, it might alienate youth from voting and could push parties to appeal (even more) to older voters. In this review, we synthesize the growing literature on youth representation. We do so by: (1) delineating the group of young politicians, (2) discussing why youth ought to be present in politics, (3) empirically depicting the state of youth representation, and (4) illustrating the factors that help or harm youth to enter politics. This synthesis shows the degree to which young people are absent from decision-making bodies across the national, subnational and supra-national levels and attempts to make sense of the reasons why there is such a dearth of youth as candidates and representatives. We conclude by discussing gaps in research and suggesting several avenues for future work.

The U.S. House of Representatives has one of the oldest pools of politicians in the world today: the average member of the House is 58 years at the time of their election, which is about 20 years older than the average American. But why are younger adults scarce among these representatives? Here we trace the relative absence of youth in both the primary and general elections of 2020 using a supply and demand framework. Our study finds that (1) the average candidate is much older than the average citizen and (2) young candidates perform less well than older candidates in both primaries and general elections. These results suggest that youth are disadvantaged because the two main parties do not nominate enough younger adults as candidates for winnable and safe seats. Young adults also seem to be disadvantaged indirectly at the electoral stage because they lack electoral capital (experience in running for and holding office) and tend to suffer strongly from the incumbency advantage of their opponents. We infer from these findings that barring reforms to rules governing minimum candidate ages and term limits, the under-representation of youth in U.S. national-level politics will continue for the foreseeable future.

Conservation rules – e.g. protected area regulations that aim to reduce wildlife poaching – often have an inherent challenge: while relying on that locals should share intelligence about observed crime to authorities, such rules tend to be weakly supported by these communities. Enforcement officials of conservation authorities (such as rangers) are seldom trusted, and this in turn raises doubts about whether locals will provide sufficient information about conservation crime, which is not the least needed in all those settings where a small number of rangers are tasked to monitor vast areas. The case of wildlife poaching in African countries illustrates this tension, where rangers are few, sometimes have a dubious record, and where offenders often are on good terms with locals. This article asks: Why do some locals choose to assist rangers and report on poachers, while others refrain from doing so? We conducted a survey in the years 2017–2018 directed towards 2300 residents in and near the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, where a major challenge is both subsistence and commercial forms of poaching. Our focus was primarily on subsistent poaching. We also conducted in-depth interviews with rangers and park officials to corroborate that our quantitative insights point to the same description of the situation. Our survey demonstrates that people that are afraid of rangers and perceive them as corruptible are less willing to assist in information-sharing. Seeing poaching as condemnable increases people’s propensity to report on illegal activities. In contrast, individuals’ stakes in conservation and perceptions of wildlife as threatened do not predict our outcome. Our findings suggest that to achieve a more thorough involvement of locals in the enforcement of conservation laws, policy needs to change how communities perceive both officials and rules.

The absence of young adults in elected legislative assemblies is a democratic deficit with potentially severe repercussions. Yet, research is rarely able to address the issue of age group representation systematically because we are lacking empirical information on the age distribution in parliaments. The Worldwide Age Representation in Parliaments (WARP) data set remedies this dearth of data. It provides information about the numerical presence of age groups in parliaments, spanning across the globe and over time and includes age data on legislators, such as the share of members of parliament (MPs) aged 30 years or under, 35 years or under, or 40 years or under. The data set also reports measures that compare the presence of legislators aged 30 years or under, aged 35 years or under, aged 40 years or under, aged 41 to 60 years, as well as aged 61 years or over in relation to the same age group in the general population of a given country. Moreover, it includes gendered figures, such as the presence of young female MPs. The WARP data set contains data for more than 700 elections in 149 countries, so far, and is freely available online. It allows for a novel analysis of the age composition of legislatures.

Public opinion surveys are a fundamental tool to measure support for women’s political rights. This article focuses on perceptions of women’s suitability for leadership. To what extent do influential cross-country surveys that include such items suffer from measurement errors stemming from gender of interviewer effects? Building on the literature on social desirability, we expect that respondents are more likely to express preference for men’s suitability as political leaders with male interviewers and more likely to state support for women’s leadership when interviewed by a woman. We hypothesize that these processes are conditioned by having one’s spouse present, by age differences between respondents and interviewers, as well as by respondents’ levels of education. Analyzing Afrobarometer data, we generally find support for our claims. In addition, it seems that men are slightly more affected by such effects than women are. These gender of interviewer effects persist when analyzing alternative survey rounds and are insensitive to various fixed effects specifications and robustness tests. For the analysis of survey data, we suggest that researchers using gender-related items should control for gender of interviewer effects. We propose that comparative survey programs pay even more attention to interviewer characteristics and the interview situation in their protocols.