Encouraging Fathers' Care: Causes and Consequences of Fathers' Parental Leave Provisions in Cross-National Comparative Perspective

Why do some countries provide more generous parental leave benefits to fathers than others? What dimensions of parental leave are most effective at encouraging fathers to take time-off work to care for children?

This project is divided into two parts. The first part examines relationships between different political actors and fathers’ parental leave provisions across 22 affluent democracies from 1965 to 2011. The research thus engages in an emerging debate about the sources of recent shifts toward gender egalitarian family policy models.

The second part examines relationships between different types of paid parental leave provisions and (a) trends in fathers’ use of parental leave across 15 European countries, and (b) fathers’ share of parental leave in Germany, Sweden, and the UK.

​This project is funded by Forte: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare for 2020-2023 (2019-00337).

The Power of Protest? Investigating Forms of Collective Action and their Influence on Environmental Policies

As part of a global action in 2019, students went on strike from school. The action was inspired by Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old Swedish environmental activist, and called on world leaders to take immediate action on the climate crisis. Will such actions have an impact on government responses?

Earlier research has been so far inconclusive about the impact of protest on legislation, but clear evidence of protest effects on legislative agenda-setting and beyond has emerged from more advanced data-intense analyses. In this light, Katrin Uba (P.I., Uppsala University) and I investigate protest-policy relationships over a forty-year period in Sweden using new data and an innovative design.

This project is funded by the Swedish Research Council for 2020-2022 (P.I.: Katrin Uba, 2019-02918).