DR. KAITLIN ALPER

I am an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern Denmark, based at the Danish Centre for Welfare Studies (DaWS). I was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the same department. My primary research interests are in comparative welfare states and social policy, economic and social inequality, and the political economy of multilevel governance and decentralization in advanced industrial democracies. My work has been published in Social Forces and West European Politics. More information about my research can be found here.

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I completed my Ph.D. in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2022. My dissertation broadly focused on the willingness and ability of subnational governments to affect inequality within their borders via social policy. I am currently in the process of turning the manuscript into a book.

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Prior to pursuing my Ph.D., I received an M.Sc. in Politics and Public Policy from Trinity College Dublin and a B.A. in Political Science and English at the University of Connecticut. In addition, I was a visiting researcher at BIGSSS in the summer of 2019 and the fall of 2021, at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) at Sciences Po Paris in the summer of 2021, and at DaWS at the University of Southern Denmark in the fall of 2021.