Jan Helmdag Forskare

I am an Assistant Professor at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) and have a PhD in political science.

I am the managing director of the Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database, led by Prof Kenneth Nelson (University of Oxford). In SPIN, we collect institutional data on a large variety of indicators on income taxes and social policies, e.g., unemployment, sickness, accident, pensions, social assistance, parental leave, student support, and housing benefits. Besides data gathering and research, one of my central tasks within SPIN is to ensure synchronization with the research infrastructure on Democracy, Environment, Migration, Social Policy, Conflict, and Representation (DEMSCORE).

From 2024–26, I am leading the project “The dualization of social rights in Sweden: How social policy design can maintain or mitigate income inequality”, which is funded by FORTE with SEK 3.5 million. In this project, I investigate how dualization within employment persists outside of it, and what role social policies have in either mitigating or sustaining this discrepancy. For this purpose, I investigate compensation levels of employment-related benefits in Sweden (1960–2025). One of the main outputs of the project will be the Benefit Dualization Index (BDI), which measures the gap in social rights between labor market insiders and outsiders and will be available in a newly formed SPIN module.

During the Trinity Term (April–June '25) I was a visiting researcher at Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI), University of Oxford.

My CV can be downloaded here.