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Aksel Sundström

Director

Department of Political Science
Telephone
+46 31-786 16 07
Mail
aksel.sundstrom@pol.gu.se
Visiting address
Sprängkullsgatan 19
41123 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 711
40530 Göteborg

Professor

Department of Political Science
Telephone
+46 31-786 16 07
Mail
aksel.sundstrom@pol.gu.se
Visiting address
Sprängkullsgatan 19
41123 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 711
40530 Göteborg

About Aksel Sundström

Professor in political science.

He was a Democracy Fellow at Harvard University 2017-2018 and a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford, the spring 2022.

Sundström is responsible for developing the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute datasets and overseeing the work of the QoG data team, an open data platform on corruption and other societal indicators.

He was recently awarded an ERC Starting Grant, which will fund the project Female Leaders and African Droughts (Fem-LEAD).

Sundström has two major research interests; 1) the study of environmental politics, especially in low-income countries, and 2) the study of political representation, focusing on the absence of women and youth in political institutions.

Within the larger theme of environmental politics, Sundström examines a host of issues: He works with several projects funded by the Swedish Research Council that study different political dimensions of protected nature reserves in African countries. Besides a focus on comparative politics, he has wide experience of field research work in South Africa and neighboring countries. His dissertation studied the problem of corruption and local bribery among officials in natural resource governance (example of articles in Global Environmental Change and Public Administration). He is currently advancing research on how environmental shocks affect public opinion and political behavior.

Within the theme of political representation, Sundström studies a number of knowledge gaps. In several outputs, he has developed the insights on how to measure and understand processes around women's political presence and rights across the world. Together with colleagues in the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, he has launched the 'Women's Political Empowerment Index', a set of data that is free for the public to download and use (see also Sundström et al. 2017). For an example of work on public support for female leaders across Africa, see article in Public Opinion Quarterly.

He has published the book Youth without Representation, which examines the low presence of young adults as candidates and politicians around the world (University of Michigan Press). The book (written with Daniel Stockemer) is the first to tackle this problem and, as it has been selected for an open access initiative, it is free to download.

His research has been published in a range of outlets, including; Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Governance, Party Politics and World Development (see Google Scholar).

Sundström supervises several PhD-candidates (one recently defended). He was until recently in charge of the political science track within the Programme in Environmental Social Science (SMIL) at the School of Business, Economics and Law.

For a full list of publications, see CV.

Example of recently published articles:

Michaelsen, P., A. Sundström and S. C. Jagers (2025) "Mass support for conserving 30% of the Earth by 2030: Experimental evidence from five continents"; PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2503355122

Sundström, A. (2024) “Environmental disasters and ecomodernist beliefs: Insights from a quasi-natural experiment”, Policy Studies Journal.

Ahlerup, P., A. Sundström, S. Jagers and M. Sjöstedt (2024) “Climate Shocks, Regional Favoritism and Trust in Leaders: Insights from Droughts in Africa”, World Development, 183.

Selection of work in progress:

Dawson, S., F. Haass, C. Müller-Crepon, A. Sundström (2025) The Ethnic Politics of Nature Protection in Africa the Journal of Politics, conditionally accepted.

“The Impact from Corruption on Climate Change Mitigation” with N. Harring, S. Jagers and M. Povitkina (QoG Working Paper 2024:3). RnR, Environmental Politics..

“When Elders Rule: Age Composition in Decision-Making and Legitimacy Perceptions” with C. McClean (Yale) and D. Stockemer (Ottawa) (QoG Working paper 2024:6). Under review.

“Public Resources and Accountability: Experimental Evidence” with M. Alvarado, T. Ahmed and S. Jagers (QoG Working paper 2024:15). Under review.

Sundström, A., S. Dawson, S. Pailler. “Protected Areas and Spillovers on Corruption” (QoG Working Paper 2024:16) Under review.

For more information, see personal webpage: www.akselsundstrom.com

Education

PhD, Political Science, University of Gothenburg, 2015.

Visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, Spring 2015.

Spent one undergraduate semester at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Recognitions

Winner of the First-time Voter Award 2023, with D. Stockemer, for work on youth inclusion in electoral affairs in 2022 (the book Youth Without Representation and the WARP Dataset), awarded by the International Centre for Parliamentary Studies.

ERC Starting Grant, 2023.

Nominated by University of Gothenburg to the 2019 Pro Futura program – Riksbankens Jubileumsfond’s effort to promote cutting-edge research in humanities and social sciences.

Shared third-prize in the essay competetion Intergenerational Justice Prize 2018 (with Daniel Stockemer).

Nominated to Elsevier's Atlas award for article in World Development (Sundström et al. 2017), August 2017.

Young sustainability talent 2016, a recognition given to 33 persons in Sweden by the magazine Aktuell Hållbarhet.

The 2016 Eva Selin Lindgren memorial scholarship (given annualy to one researcher at Chalmers or GU).

Received the "best paper" prize at the Swedish Political Science Association’s meeting 2014.

Other

Work experience as a journalist, foreign affairs reporting (example here).