Sucessful Defense

We congratulate Andrew Zola on successfully finishing his PhD project. He defended his thesis, Public Opinion in the Political Economy of Welfare State Change: Crisis, Continuity, and Common Sense, on November 28, 2025, at Sciences Po (Paris). The jury included Emanuele Ferragina (Sciences Po, Supervisor), Jane Gingrich (University of Oxford), Maria Grasso (Queen Mary, University of London), Colin Hay (Sciences Po), and Staffan Kumlin (University of Oslo).

The thesis develops a novel political economy perspective on welfare attitudes as a reflection of the public’s “common sense,” that is, the shared, taken-for-granted beliefs. It examines attitudes longitudinally, both across generations for insight into long-run shifts and over the COVID-19 pandemic. This helps to understand how the political economy forces that shape welfare state reforms may also condition individuals’ expectations of the welfare state and those who rely on it.

Analyses were conducted on several data sources, cover 30 countries, and introduce age-period-cohort methodologies to the social policy literature. Taken together, the findings reveal that across countries, there has been a generational realignment towards employment-oriented welfare expectations, a decline in solidarity towards certain beneficiary groups, and evidence that even severe moments of crisis do not divert public opinion away from this trajectory in the short term.

The thesis contributes to social policy literature by offering a conceptual framework that bridges analyses of individual attitudes and macro-level debates of welfare state transformation. It demonstrates how public opinion can legitimize social policy adaptation to the fiscal constraints brought on by the postindustrial transition.