Uppsala university

Projects:

GxE in political and prosocial attitudes and behaviour: How are political and prosocial attitudes shaped by genetic and environmental factors?

Participating researchers:

Asya Bülbül
ESSGN doctoral candidate

Email: asya.bulbul@statsvet.uu.se
Asya Bülbül is a Ph.D. researcher in the Department of Government at the Uppsala University. She holds an M.Sc. in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University (METU) and a second M.A. in Political Science from Stony Brook University. Asya’s research interests fall mostly within political psychology and political behavior. Her current work delves into understanding the genetic influences on political attitudes.

Sven Oskarsson
Professor of Political Science

Email: sven.oskarsson@statsvet.uu.se
Sven Oskarsson is Professor at the Department of Government. He mainly teaches methods at different levels. His research interests include political representation and participation and social science genomics. His previous work has appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Nature and Behavior Genetics.

Rafael Ahlskog
Researcher in Political Science

Email: rafael.ahlskog@statsvet.uu.se
Website: http://www.ahlskog.se/
Rafael Ahlskog works at the intersection between political science and social science genetics. He has a keen interest in giving new life and nuance to old theories of political behavior, psychology and preference formation by integrating new methods and insights from complex trait genetics and genomics. This involves both testing established theories with methods that are more immune to genetic confounding as well as developing new hypotheses on how genes and environment interact to shape us as political beings. Apart from social science genetics, he has done research in fields as disparate as vaccination policy and behavior, fiscal effects of migration, the bioethics of moral enhancements, and information effects in taxation policy.

Qinya Feng
Affiliated researcher

Email: qinya.feng@statsvet.uu.se
Qinya Feng is a researcher at the Department of Government. Her research interests include political psychology and social science genetics, with a particular interest in exploring the development of political attitudes, behaviour, and psychological traits related to social diversity and intergroup relations. Her PhD project focused on attitudes towards immigration and residential mobility, with methods and perspectives from social science genetics.

Oskar Pettersson
Affiliated doctoral candidate

Email: oskar.pettersson@statsvet.uu.se
Oskar Pettersson is a PhD student in the project The genetics of life course outcomes. His research is about gene-environment interaction: the idea that genetic factors can have different effects depending on environmental characteristics. Specifically, he investigates whether genetic influences on social and political outcomes (e.g., education and participation) vary depending on macro-level institutions, neighbourhood contexts, and socioeconomic background.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 programme under grant agreement number 101073237