Sebastian Sirén

Short presentation

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Government. My research is oriented towards welfare state analysis, and studies of the causes and consequences of social policy institutions in a cross-country comparative perspective. In my dissertation I explored the driving forces, mechanisms and outcomes of social protection in development contexts. I am currently working on a project on the distributional outcomes of changing social insurance institutions, funded by Forte.

Keywords

• inequality
• social policy
• comparative politics
• welfare state
• poverty

Research

I am currently pursuing a three-year research project with funding from Forte, entitled "Not as bad? The Swedish welfare state transformation and its impact on poverty and inequality in comparative perspective". The aim of this project is to analyse how changing social policies affect economic standards of low-income households, with a focus on heterogeneity among these. Specific questions posed are, how did the inequalities between low-income households evolve? To what extent have changes in the poverty rate been driven changing social risks, on the one hand, and by changing associations between these risks and poverty on the other? To what extent can these trends be explained by changing social policies?

The project combines longitudinal analyses of Sweden with a comparative perspective, based data covering around 30 affluent welfare states between 1990 to the 2020s. Cross-national longitudinal data on households’ living standards from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), will be combined with novel policy indicators from the Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database, reflecting the changing structure of cash transfer systems across welfare states. A combination of decomposition analyses and statistical time-series cross-section regression techniques will be used to explore trends and associations in the data.

At a time when the Swedish social policy model stands at a crossroads, the results will hopefully inform policy debates about the ongoing transformation of the welfare state, contributing with new knowledge about impacts on the living conditions of vulnerable groups, and provide insights into how policies for reducing poverty can be refined.

Media

Economic growth, social policy, and child poverty

I talk about one of the studies from my doctoral thesis, showing how social policy affects the extent to which growth has led to a reduction in child poverty in low- and middle-income countries.

https://x.com/SOFI_su_se/status/1614880259001679877