| 1. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, 1987-
(författare)
-
Democracy and vaccination uptake - a complex friendship
-
Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Democracies are generally thought to be better able to handle the provision of public goods than non-democracies. However, vaccines are a type of public good where we might expect this dynamic not to apply. Generally, a high vaccination uptake is net-profitable for the state above a certain level of national wealth, given losses of tax income to disease and health care expenditures. At the same time, democracies may be suspected to be less likely to use coercive means to achieve the goal of high uptake. This leads to the hypothesis that at least among rich countries, democracies may fare worse in terms of vaccination uptake.In this paper, I test this proposal using a cross-country panel of WHO uptake data. I test both traditional panel models, as well as an IV-approach using regional democratization waves as an instrument for own-country democracy. With both approaches, the theoretical prediction appears to hold up: rich non-democracies do indeed achieve higher uptake than rich democracies.
|
|
| 2. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael
(författare)
-
Education and voter turnout revisited : Evidence from a Swedish twin sample with validated turnout data
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Electoral Studies. - : Elsevier. - 0261-3794 .- 1873-6890. ; 69
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The association between education and voter turnout is well-established in almost a century of research. The causal status of this correlation, however, is still subject to debate. Results in the previous literature differ substantially, and this may reflect both methodological differences and heterogeneous effects across populations or types of elections. This study addresses the question using a discordant twin design and variance decomposition methods with validated turnout data for both firstand second-order elections in a large sample of Swedish twins, paired with population-wide sibling data. Results show that education does not have an effect on national electoral turnout, but does have an effect on turnout in the European elections. Furthermore, the association between education and turnout is shown to be affected by substantial genetic confounding, which leaves a non-trivial amount of bias even in sibling based designs. This underscores the importance of taking genetic confounding seriously in observational research.
|
|
| 3. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, 1987-
(författare)
-
Essays on the collective action dilemma of vaccination
- 2017
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Vaccines famously possess positive externalities that make them susceptible to the collective action dilemma: when I get vaccinated, I protect not only myself, but also those who I might otherwise have infected. Thus, some people will have an incentive to free ride on the immunity of others. In a population of rational agents, the critical level of vaccination uptake required for herd immunity will therefore be difficult to attain in the long run, which poses difficulties for disease eradication.In this doctoral dissertation, I explore different implications of the collective action dilemma of vaccination, and different ways of ameliorating it. First: given that coercion or force could solve the dilemma, and democracies may be less likely to engage in policies that violate the physical integrity of citizens, democracies may also be at a disadvantage compared to non-democracies when securing herd immunity. In essay I, I show that this is, empirically, indeed the case. Barring the use of extensive coercion therefore necessitates other solutions.In essay II, I highlight the exception to individual rationality found in other-regarding motivations such as altruism. Our moral psychology has likely evolved to take other's welfare into account, but the extent of our prosocial motivations vary: a wider form of altruism that encompasses not just family or friends, but strangers, is likely to give way to a more narrow form when humans pair-bond and have children. This dynamic is shown to apply to the sentiments underlying vaccination behavior as well: appeals to the welfare of society of getting vaccinated have positive effects on vaccination propensity, but this effect disappears in people with families and children. On this demographic, appeals to the welfare of close loved ones instead appears to have large effects.In essay III, I investigate whether the prosocial motivations underlying vaccination behavior are liable to be affected by motivation crowding - that is, whether they are crowded out when introducing economic incentives to get vaccinated. I find that on average, economic incentives do not have adverse effects, but for a small minority of highly prosocially motivated people, they might.
|
|
| 4. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael
(författare)
-
Extraversion Probably Does Not Cause Political Participation. Evidence from Two Genetically Informed Designs
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Political Psychology. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0162-895X .- 1467-9221. ; 44:6, s. 1301-1318
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A substantial literature in political psychology has emphasized the importance of personality traits for understanding differences in political participation. One such trait is extraversion. However, the causal status of this relationship is complicated by a number of issues, not least genetic confounding stemming from the heritability of both personality traits and political participation. This study confirms the well-established naive relationship between extraversion and participation, but goes on with (a) a discordant MZ twin design and (b) a new approach using measured genetic variation, or a polygenic index, in the given trait (extraversion) to assess the causal nature of this relationship. First, utilizing variation in extraversion and participation within identical twin pairs shows that twins with higher extraversion do not participate more. Second, random variation within fraternal twin pairs in a polygenic index of extraversion does predict trait extraversion, but does not predict political participation. In summary, previously identified associations between extraversion and political participation are not likely to be causal, but instead reflect common underlying familial factors.
|
|
| 5. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, 1987-
(författare)
-
Money for nothing? : Motivation crowding and economic rationality in the vaccination decision.
-
Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Vaccines famously possess public goods characteristics that make them vulnerable to the collective action dilemma. Economists have posited a simple way of solving the problem -- economic incentives. However, results from studies on motivation crowding suggest that extrinsic incentives can crowd out intrinsic motivation and therefore backfire. This study investigates if vaccines are subject to motivation crowding using two sets of survey experiments. It is found that in the aggregate, introducing economic incentives has positive effects on vaccination propensity. However, for a subset of highly intrinsically motivated individuals, the effect of introducing economic incentives could be negative. Further, the distinction between pure and impure public goods seems to be driving this dynamic.
|
|
| 6. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael
(författare)
-
Moral Enhancement Should Target Self-Interest and Cognitive Capacity
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Neuroethics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1874-5490 .- 1874-5504. ; 10:3, s. 363-373
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Current suggestions for capacities that should be targeted for moral enhancement has centered on traits like empathy, fairness or aggression. The literature, however, lacks a proper model for understanding the interplay and complexity of moral capacities, which limits the practicability of proposed interventions. In this paper, I integrate some existing knowledge on the nature of human moral behavior and present a formal model of prosocial motivation. The model provides two important results regarding the most friction-free route to moral enhancement. First, we should consider decreasing self-interested motivation rather than increasing prosociality directly. Second, this should be complemented with cognitive enhancement. These suggestions are tested against existing and emerging evidence on cognitive capacity, mindfulness meditation and the effects of psychedelic drugs and are found to have sufficient grounding for further theoretical and empirical exploration. Furthermore, moral effects of the latter two are hypothesized to result from a diminished sense of self with subsequent reductions in self-interest.
|
|
| 7. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, et al.
(författare)
-
Quantifying Bias from Measurable and Unmeasurable Confounders Across Three Domains of Individual Determinants of Political Preferences
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Political Analysis. - : Cambridge University Press. - 1047-1987 .- 1476-4989. ; 31:2, s. 181-194
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A core part of political research is to identify how political preferences are shaped. The nature of these questions is such that robust causal identification is often difficult to achieve, and we are not seldom stuck with observational methods that we know have limited causal validity. The purpose of this paper is to measure the magnitude of bias stemming from both measurable and unmeasurable confounders across three broad domains of individual determinants of political preferences: socio-economic factors, moral values, and psychological constructs. We leverage a unique combination of rich Swedish registry data for a large sample of identical twins, with a comprehensive battery of 34 political preference measures, and build a meta-analytical model comparing our most conservative observational (naive) estimates with discordant twin estimates. This allows us to infer the amount of bias from unobserved genetic and shared environmental factors that remains in the naive models for our predictors, while avoiding precision issues common in family-based designs. The results are sobering: in most cases, substantial bias remains in naive models. A rough heuristic is that about half of the effect size even in conservative observational estimates is composed of confounding.
|
|
| 8. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, et al.
(författare)
-
The Fiscal Effects of EU Migration to Slovakia
- 2019
-
Ingår i: Globe in Motion 2. - Bratislava : Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology, Slovak Academy of Sciences. - 9788097097592 - 9788097337209 ; , s. 46-61
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
|
|
| 9. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, et al.
(författare)
-
Uncovering the source of patrimonial voting
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Political Behavior. - : Springer Nature. - 0190-9320 .- 1573-6687. ; 44:4, s. 1681-1702
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The boom in wealth inequality seen in recent decades has generated a steep rise in scholarly interest in both the drivers and the consequences of the wealth gap. In political science, a pertinent questionregards the political behavior across the wealth spectrum. A common argument is that the wealthy practice patrimonial voting, i.e. voting for right-wing parties to maximize returns on their assets. While thispattern is descriptively well documented, it is less certain to what extent this reflects an actual causal relationship between wealth and political preferences. In this study, we provide new evidence by exploitingwealth variation within identical twin pairs. Our findings suggest that while more wealth is descriptivelyconnected to more support for right-wing parties, the causal impact of wealth on policy preferences islikely highly overstated. For several relevant policy areas these effects may not exist at all. Furthermore,the bias in naive observational estimates seems to be mainly driven by environmental familial confoundersshared within twin pairs, rather than genetic confounding.
|
|
| 10. |
- Ahlskog, Rafael, et al.
(författare)
-
Using Genes to Explore the Effects of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills on Education and Labor Market Outcomes
- 2021
-
Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A large literature establishes that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly correlated with educational attainment and professional achievement. Isolating the causal effects of these traits on career outcomes is complicated by reverse causality and selection issues. We suggest a new approach: using within-family differences in the genetic tendency to exhibit the relevant traits as a source of exogenous variation. Genes are fixed over the life cycle and genetic differences between full siblings are random, making it possible to establish the causal effects of within-family variation in genetic tendencies. We link genetic data from individuals in the Swedish Twin Registry to government registry data and find evidence for causal effects of the genetic predispositions towards cognitive skills, personality traits, and economic preferences on professional achievement and educational attainment. Our results also demonstrate that education and labor market outcomes are partially the result of a genetic lottery.
|
|
