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

This article conceptualizes the relative absence of youth in legislatures, a feature we perceive as a democratic deficit with detrimental consequences. It introduces a new operationalization: the Youth Representation Index. Rather than calculating youths’ representation by the percentage of Members of Parliament 35 or 40 years old and younger or legislatures’ median age, we argue that scholars should assess youths’ parliamentary presence relative to their proportion of the voting-age population. We contribute by assessing the magnitude of youths’ underrepresentation across countries, finding that adults 35 years old and younger are generally underrepresented in legislatures by a factor of three and those 40 years old and younger by a factor of two. We illustrate that youths’ presence increases under proportional representation electoral systems and with candidate age requirements set at 18 years. Finally, our results illustrate that countries with a younger population display a stronger discrepancy in youth representation.

This article focuses on a specific group of legislators facing large hurdles during recruitment processes, namely young women. Building on the institutional literature, we hypothesize that gender quota regulations, youth quotas, and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems should particularly benefit young women. Our quantitative study, capturing one hundred elections conducted between 2012 and 2017, finds partial support for our expectations. For the three hypotheses, we find that legislative quotas and voluntary party quotas for both youths and gender do not significantly increase the share of young women. In contrast, PR electoral systems render the electoral arena less discriminatory toward younger women.

Research on political representation has shown that corruption is not gender-neutral: it benefits the recruitment of men to political office more than it does women. Yet, it is unclear if all men or a specific type of men, elderly men, benefits the most from corrupt networks in terms of political presence. The ‘old boys’ network thesis’ would single out older men as the most likely beneficiaries of the homosocial capital gained through informal ties in corrupt settings. In this article, we test this thesis based on a dataset comprising 98 national parliaments. Through bivariate and multivariate analyses, we find that corruption tends to benefit the presence of men regardless of their age. We further conjecture that the inclusion of young male patrons into nepotistic and clientelistic networks could further explain why these networks of ‘gendered’ corruption have been so sticky over time.

To what extent and how do men and women differ in their attitudes about poaching? Although research suggests that women can be more concerned about environmental degradation than men, inquiries about communities in protected areas are ambiguous: women are disproportionately affected by anti‐poaching laws and can have greater motivations to violate rules. We conducted a large‐scale survey in communities within the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe and explored attitudes regarding; concern about resources, rule compliance, poaching, and anti‐poaching activities. Although women's attitudes generally are not divergent from men's, we find some differences among nonelectrified households and those with a dependence on resources; these women are less likely to condemn commercial poaching and less willing to engage in anti‐poaching activities. Men in poorer households are more likely to know a poacher. We identify a need of further understanding the causes behind gender differences in conservation attitudes.

In this article, we focus on generational differences in women's representation and hypothesize that younger generations of women should be more highly represented than older generations, both in general and within the same parliament. We tested this hypothesis with data on all members who have ever served in the European Parliament since 1979. Of the four generations who have ever served in Brussels and Strasbourg – the World War II generation, the 1968 generation, the post‐1968 generation and the post‐materialist generation – we found both that women's representation increased with every generation and that their representation differs between generations within the same parliament. Finally, our results indicate that while these processes occurred roughly one generation later in eastern and southern Europe, yet, they happened faster in these parts of the European Union.

The last decades’ reform of public administrations has in numerous countries included the use of performance-related pay (PRP). Such programs have been said to reduce civil servants’ incentives for bribe taking and have therefore been promoted as an anticorruption tool. However, the article proposes that such schemes’ suppressing effect on corruption incentives is questionable in highly corrupt settings because the absence of non-corrupt senior managers—and hence independent performance evaluations—may lead to the capture of such programs. An in-depth study of reforms in the South African civil service provides micro-level insights into the process in which such schemes may fail. The investigation outlines how PRP bonuses are used as rewards from corrupt senior managers to colluding subordinates. Honest bureaucrats are instead isolated and receive no addition to their salary. These selective rewards make honest behavior increasingly costly and function as an incentive for civil servants to engage in bribery.

The advent of ‘Peace Parks’ on the African continent is puzzling from the perspective of institutional theory. We focus on the world’s largest transfrontier conservation cooperation that exists to date, the Kavango–Zambezi Treaty, which was ratified by Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in 2011. The collaboration seeks to foster sustainable governance of resources in the region. The paper asks two questions: What were the main factors facilitating the establishment of the Kavango–Zambezi Treaty? What potential challenges for the treaty remain on the operational level? Analysing interviews with key informants, we contribute by providing insights regarding the emergence and existing challenges of the treaty. Factors reducing coordination problems during the treaty’s establishment included that it did not compete with existing institutions at the international level, the important role played by moral authorities such as Nelson Mandela, and that consensus rather than conflict prevailed between respective political actors as they realized the function of this cooperation. The treaty is challenged by differences in macro-institutional factors amongst participating nations and a variation in the extent to which communities trust in and comply with these institutions. There are significant remaining obstacles with regard to harmonizing policies in the five partner countries.

Objective Although corruption is known to hinder natural resource regulations, the research area remains underexplored. Departing from a debate on the reasons driving people's engagement in corruption, this research note studies why some resource users bribe enforcement officers. Methods In a between‐subjects survey experiment, with a sample of resource users active in South African small‐scale fisheries, we examine the effects of inspectors’ response to bribes and other users’ involvement in corruption on attitudes toward bribery. Results Resource users are more willing to partake in bribery when inspectors turn a blind eye to violations and when fellow users are involved in corruption. Conclusion This lends support for the proposition that engagement in corruption is driven by both the anticipated gains from bribes as well as expectations of others’ behavior. This suggests that anti‐corruption policy should be designed with the insight that more than one of these features affect attitudes to bribe‐taking.