Biography

Silja Häusermann is a researcher and reader (Oberassistentin) in comparative politics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, where she teaches classes on comparative politics, European politics and comparative welfare state analysis.
Her research interests are in comparative politics and comparative political economy. More specifically, her current work deals with electoral and party system change and their impact on distributive policies in advanced post-industrial democracies, with the dualization of welfare states and labor markets, with changing conflict dimensions in welfare state policy-making and with public opinion in social policy reforms.
She wrote her Ph.D. on the adaptation of continental welfare states (notably pension policies) to post-industrial risk structures (assessed by Prof. Hanspeter Kriesi and Prof. Herbert Kitschelt) at the University of Zurich. The Ph.D. thesis was awarded the ECPR Jean Blondel Prize, as well as the Ernst B. Haas Prize by the European Politics and Society section of the APSA. Her Ph.D. research has also been awarded with the Junior Scientist Award by the Swiss Political Science Association and the Young Researcher Prize by the Journal of European Social Policy and the European Social Policy Analysis Network ESPANET. The revised dissertation will be out as a book with CUP in March 2010.
From 2008 to 2009, Silja Häusermann was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, where she worked mainly with Prof. Peter Mair and Prof. Adrienne Héritier. In 2006, Silja Häusermann spent half a year of doctoral research at Harvard University, Cambridge (USA), as a visiting fellow to the Government Department. At Harvard, her advisor was Prof. Peter A. Hall.
Silja Häusermann has published on comparative welfare state analysis, public opinion and welfare states, and Europeanization of national politics in journals such as the European Journal of Political Research, Socio-Economic Review, European Societies, the Journal of European Social Policy and the Journal of European Public Policy.