PUBLICATIONS
Party ideology and care policy: The decline of institutional care since 1950 (2025)
Journal of European Social Policy (OnlineFirst)
This paper studies the role of government partisanship in the transformation of two uniquely old care policy areas: the care of people with chronic and severe mental illness, and of children who cannot be cared for by their parents. In 12 advanced capitalist countries between 1950 and 2015, I show that the types of care policies that replaced large, custodial institutions varied with government partisanship. I argue that partisan policy choices reflected parties’ core policy preferences shaped by trade-offs between their redistributive goals and individualist or familial ideals, and the lasting ideological effects of very old societal cleavages.
The Changing Faces of the Modern State (2023)
with Johannes Lindvall, Governance 36(3), pp. 973-993.
This paper describes the changing nature of the English and Swedish states between 1800 and 2020 from the perspective of ordinary citizens. We find that the poor became objects of government policy much earlier than other groups, but they also remained in a world of parochial poor relief even as the middle and the rich began to interact with a more functionally differentiated, professional bureaucracy. These findings have implications for scholarly debates on when the state began to interact directly with the civilian masses and the unevenness of state activities and capacities within countries.
After Asylums and Orphanages (2022)
Doctoral dissertation, Lund University.
My doctoral dissertation investigates variation in the types of care policies that replaced nineteenth-century asylums and orphanages: the state, the market, the family, or voluntary providers. I show that these choices were decisively shaped by partisan conflict, not only over redistribution, but also over how society should be organised: around individuals or families. I contribute to theoretical debates in comparative politics about the dimensionality of party competition and about how partisanship has shaped welfare policy over time.
