Alexandre Afonso

I am an associate professor of public policy at Leiden University, Netherlands. I focus on the comparative political economy of labour markets and welfare states in Europe. My work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of European Public Policy and Governance, among others. You can have a look at my publications and my profile on Google scholar and Researchgate, where most of my work can be dowloaded in open access.

In May 2018, I was awarded a VIDI personal grant (2018-2023) from the Dutch Science Foundation NWO for a project on the relationship between immigration control and welfare state development. Information about this project can be found here.

Before joining Leiden University, I was a lecturer (Assistant professor) in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. I have held positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, the European University Institute in Florence and the University of Amsterdam. I earned my PhD in Politics at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in June 2010. I grew up in Switzerland, hold Swiss and Portuguese citizenships, and speak French, Portuguese, Italian, German and Dutch, all with questionable accents.

I occasionally blog here and tweet here. My research has been reported in Science, the Times Higher Education, the New York Times, The Nation, Slate, El Paìs, and Mediapart. I have written for the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the Daily Telegraph, CNN and Jacobin, among others.