There are two competing hypotheses regarding demographic processes and technological progress. One holds that a rapidly growing adult population stimulates technological progress, while the other hold

Johan Westerman

Johan Westerman is a researcher who obtained his PhD in sociology from the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) in 2020. His dissertation, entitled Motives Matter, investigated the intrinsic mo

How come today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals? Why has the public opinion in large parts of the world shifted so rapidly in favor of gay and lesbian rights, but been virtua

2008. Journal of Population Economics 21(3), 521-539. Abstract There are obvious reasons why residential construction should depend on the population’s age structure. We estimate this relation on Swedis

Democratization, vol 27, issue 5, p. 699-716 Abstract Within a few years of the historic Arab uprisings of 2011, popular mobilization dissipated amidst instability in many Arab countries. We trace the r

Are some countries better equipped from the onset of a democratization process to become democracies? We compared successful and failed episodes of liberalization over the period 1900 to 2018 to exami

Environmental Earth Sciences 74(6), pp. 4827-4837, doi: 10.1007/s12665-01 Abstract Bacterial attenuation in porous media is often higher in columns than in the field. This study investigates whether this

Stockholm Research Reports in Demography no. 2020:52 AbstractThe world is rapidly converging towards lower fertility: in 2020, countries with a total fertility rate of less than 2.25 will encompass mor

Sweden Democrat voters. Who are they, where do they come from, and where are they headed?

Forskningsrapport 2019:1, 108 s. Europe has experienced major political changes over recent decades, with new political parties having emerged and become established in many countries. The same develop

Overheating. Understanding accelerated change. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. ABSTRACTThe contemporary world is … too full? Too intense? All of the above, and more. Ours is a world of high-speed modernity where exponential growth can be found in domains as different as the number of cellphones in Africa and the number of international tourist arrivals. The fossil fuel revolution two centuries ago led to the contemporary ‘overheated’ world of exponential growth. The main dilemma of this overheated world is the insight that what was the salvation for humanity for two hundred years, namely fossil fuels, has rapidly become our damnation owing to climate change. This lecture outlines the parameters of ‘overheating’ and describes the main global challenges for our century.