“We are, of course, extremely pleased with this prize, particularly as it recognizes and values our intensive collaborative research efforts that began around 2016,” says Kees van Kersbergen about receiving the SER best article prize for his article The Paternalist Politics of Punitive and Enabling Workfare: Evidence from a New Dataset on Workfare Reforms in 16 countries, 1980–2015. It is co-authored with two of his former Aarhus colleagues, Alexander Horn (University of Konstanz) and Anthony Kevins (Loughborough University).

 “We constructed a unique dataset that unveils new insights into the evolution of workfare policies across various nations, challenging prevailing theories and reshaping our understanding of governmental interventions in the labor market,” he explains about their thorough research.

It turns out that it is more government paternalism (moral considerations) rather than neoliberalism (economic considerations) that explains whether government policies in the area of workfare are enabling or punitive.

Kees van Kersbergen underlines that the work on the article often felt like an uphill battle:

“Not only due to the inherent complexities of collecting multi-country labor market policy data but also because of the proverbial 'reviewer #2', who was, let’s say, not very receptive to our challenging of the mainstream views. Therefore, it is all the more gratifying that our work not only got published in Socio-Economic Review, a top journal in our field, but also received the journal’s best paper award.”

Further information

• More about Kees van Kersbergen
• Read the award-winning article
• Read SASE's review of the article