Welcome to Janine Wedel's inaugural lecture as a Kerstin Hesselgrens Visiting Professor: The Role of Elite Corruption in Today’s Illiberalism: Trump as “Trickster,” Why Trumpism is No Accident, and theThis talk, by social anthropologist and public policy professor Janine R. Wedel, examines how the activities of a novel breed of “shadow” or “influence elites” have helped corrode civic trust and fueled the surge in income inequality.  Partly as a result, many citizens in the United States and Europe (notably Poland and Hungary) have turned to demagogic figures who flout both the norms of the rigged system they seek to smash, and the Weltanschauung of the establishment. The talk will explore why people turn to them, Donald Trump’s role as “trickster,” and how Trump and other taboo-breaking, system-busting leaders govern once in power. 

Report on seminar 'Modelling Social Mechanisms for Knowledge Generation & Exploration' by Nanda Wijermans (Stockholm Resilience Centre) Over the last decade physicists have developed “social force”

In the US, levels of Covid-19 testing have varied greatly between states. But there seems to be a pattern. According to a new study by Malcolm Fairbrother, researcher at Institute for Futures Studies, , states with high levels of social trust and social capital performs more Covid-19 tests.  

Economics and Philosophy 37 Abstract This paper addresses how to think about the permissibility of introducing deadweight costs (so-called ‘ordeals’) on candidate recipients of goods in order to attain b

Scientific Reports 14 Abstract Trust encourages members of communities to cooperate and provide public goods. However, the literature has yet to fully investigate how high and low trusting communities de

Educational and Psychological Measurement, Vol. 77 (2017), 4, p. 616-630. Abstract Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) provides an important statistical toolbox, but there are a number of ways i

Journal of Development Economics 166 (2024) Abstract We investigate the long-run impacts of Christian missions on female genital cutting (FGC) in Africa. Our empirical analysis draws on historical data o

Pp. 183-202 in B. Kogut (Ed.) The small world of corporate governance. MIT Press.

Environmental Sociology Abstract Existing research shows that public attitudes toward climate policies reflect political trust. Support for some policies may reflect not only trust in the state and its

European Sociological Review, 2017, Vol. 33, No. 3, 337–348 In research on fatherhood premiums and motherhood penalties in career-related outcomes, employers’ discriminatory behaviours are often argued