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

In this research note, we focus on young adults, a group with distinct claims for political representation but a low representation in political office. Focusing on the cabinet, we analyze the marginalization of young politicians in France, Germany, and the UK using time series data. We find that adults aged 35 and below at the time of nomination have made up a mere 1% of the cabinet posts in these countries over the past 40 years. For the age group of adults aged 40 years and below, the percentage of young ministers has reached 7%. We further display that young women are even more of an anomaly than young men. More explanatory, we identify youths’ lack of electoral- and party capital as major impediments for young politicians gaining a seat in the cabinet. Finally, we investigate the type of portfolios held by the ministers in our sample and find that young ministers are much more likely than older ones to be designated to portfolios with less prestige.

Objective While trust is proposed as a key concept to understand people's compliance in natural resource governance, research would benefit from being more precise. Our aim is to test whether more specific survey measures of people's tendency to violate rules and the degree to which law enforcing rangers are seen as corrupt trumps more commonly used items on intra-personal trust and trust in institutions. Methods We analyze an original survey of residents within the boundaries of the Great Limpopo Park, straddling Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Results While general trust items predict compliance intentions in a first model, these effects largely disappear when we introduce more specific measures. We find consistent negative effects from perceived corruption among rangers. We also report negative effects from perceptions of other people's noncompliant behavior. Conclusion Compliance to natural resource regulations hinges on specific perceptions of how rule enforcing agents and other resource users act.

Why do some political parties have a higher share of elected women? Analysing all parties in the European Parliament (EP) from 1979–2019, we test the effect of five party characteristics (their ideology, age, size, female leadership, and intra-party gender quotas) on their share of female Members (MEPs). We find a higher share of female MEPs in green, liberal and leftist parties and in parties with a female leader. Party gender quotas increase the likelihood to have at least one female MEP.

Abstract The Quality of Government Expert Survey (QoG Expert Survey) is a research project aimed at documenting the organizational design of public bureaucracies and bureaucratic behavior in countries around the world. This report documents the design and implementation of the third wave of the QoG Expert Survey, and initial analysis of the new data. The QoG Expert Survey 2020 produced ten country-level indicators, pertaining to bureaucratic structure (meritocratic recruitment , security of tenure, closedness) and bureaucratic behavior (political interference into day-today bureaucratic decision-making and impartiality). The data is based on the assessments of more than 550 experts, carefully selected for their contextual subject-matter knowledge. The experts took part in the research pro bono. The main innovation of the third wave is the use of anchoring vignettes and Item-Response Theory (IRT)-based aggregation techniques to produce point estimates that account and adjust for systematic differences in expert subjective assessments and variation in expert reliability. The resulting indicators are internally coherent and also correlate well with other well-established measures for the same concepts. The strength of the association between the data from 2020 and the two previous waves of the survey suggests that the data is likely to measure the same underling phenomena, while offering enough variability over time to be used in time-series analysis.

Although subsistence poaching is a large threat to wildlife conservation in Southern Africa, this behavior is seldom researched. Our understanding of individual and community level factors that drive such behavior is limited because of both lack of data and the literature's predominant focus on commercial poaching. The main objective of this study is to contribute to this scanty literature by examining the factors that are correlated to subsistence poaching in the Great Limpopo, a transfrontier reserve spanning across Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. We use collected primary data from a sample of 2282 respondents and 85 villages that are part of the transfrontier conservation area. We focus on two features, reported subsistence poaching incidences in the community and the previous hunting of individuals, a behavior that is now forbidden in this area. We find through multivariate regression analysis that the likelihood for reported poaching incidences was higher in communities with a larger proportion of young men, plenty of wildlife, and experiencing wildlife conflict. In addition, our survey results illustrate that there is less poaching in communities where local people trust each other, respect institutions, perceive that the management of the park is good, and view wildlife as an asset. Some of these variables can be influenced by appropriate interventions; our findings suggest that capacity building in local institutions, use of community-based crime prevention approaches, training related to wildlife management, and public awareness campaigns could be used by policy makers to affect individuals' perceptions and behaviors in this context.