Sven Oskarsson
Professor at Department of Government, Uppsala University
THE CONPOL PROJECT
The study of how we function as political beings lies at the core of political science. How does it come about, for example, that some people are more politically committed and interested than others? What is it that explains why some people are willing to be candidates for political bodies whereas others would never dream of getting involved with politics? The overriding purpose of our project — known as "Contexts, Networks and Participation: The Social Logic of Political Engagement" (CONPOL) — is to increase knowledge of what explains differences in political participation between individuals. More specifically, we focus on how the decisions of individuals to become involved in politics are shaped in social contexts. In concrete terms this means that the project explores questions like how we are affected by having grown up in a certain family, by having certain friends, by living in a specific area or by being employed at a certain workplace. The project started in 2017 and is funded by a consolidator grant from the European Research Council. You can read more at the project's web page.
Latest Projects
LEVERAGING NEW TECHNOLOGIES TO ADVANCE SOCIAL-SCIENCE GENOMICS
Recently, a number of studies demonstrating genetic effects on social behaviors and attitudes have been published. However, in order to take this emerging field of research to the next level, new approaches, both empirical, methodological, and theoretical, are required. This project consists of several sub-projects focusing on a number of social science core behaviors, attitudes and personality traits. On the basis of genome wide association studies (GWAS) we will investigate to what extent millions of genetic markers (SNPs) are related to different economic and social behaviors and attitudes. Furthermore, we intend to use exogenous variation resulting from various policy reforms (such as school reforms) in order to in a much more stringent way estimate how genetic effects vary across different social and institutional conditions. An important lesson from previous research in the field is that studies of this type require sample sizes that are tens or hundreds of times larger than is usual in traditional social science studies. To meet these demands we have started collaborations with a number of biobanks that can help us reach very large samples of individuals for which genetic information is already available. A central part of the project is to use web and mobile based surveys to obtain information about the key behaviors and attitudes we intend to study for these individuals. The project started in 2017 and is funded by a grant from the Ragnar Söderberg Foundation. The project is based at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) and the project PI is David Cesarini at New York University. You can read more bout the project here.
SCHOOLED IN DEMOCRACY? THE EFFECTS ON POLITICAL INEQUALITY OF TWO SCHOOL REFORMS
Encouraging the ability of children and young people to think and act democratically has been one of the main aims of Swedish education policy throughout the post-war period. During this period Swedish education policy has also been characterized by a clear ideal of equality. The argument that equal access to education for children from different social backgrounds will generate equal opportunity has been at the heart of many of the reforms in school policy that have been introduced over the last century. Much of the research into the effects of different educational reforms has therefore centred on how the changes in the education system have affected social equality in various respects with regard to academic achievement, recruitment to higher education, and choice of occupation and income. On the other hand there is only limited research into how the school reforms have affected political equality in society. This is surprising both against the background of the great significance attached to the role of the school as promoter of democracy in various control documents and against the background of how poorly the occurrence of socioeconomic differences in the political area squares with the democratic maxim of “one person, one vote”. This project aims to fill this lacunae in previous research by examining to what extent school reforms can affect the degree of political inequality in a society. More specifically we will study the extent to which two of the major educational reforms of the twentieth century in Sweden, the nine-year compulsory school reform of 1962 and the upper secondary school reform of 1991, helped to reduce the differences in political participation between individuals of different social, backgrounds. This will be done in part with the aid of statistical analyses based on unique Swedish register data, in part with the aid of qualitative in-depth interviews with individuals who were the subject of these reform. The project started in 2013 and is funded by the Swedish Research Council. You can read more bout the project here.
