Dr Jan Helmdag is Assistant Professor at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University, Sweden, and holds a PhD in political science.
He is the managing director of the Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database. SPIN captures social rights data on a variety of income tax and social policy indicators such as unemployment, sickness, accident, old-age pensions, social assistance, parental leave, student support, and housing benefits. It is due to his contribution that SPIN is now able to provide annual data and thus longer time series, while at the same time being up-to-date by including the latest developments. One additional task of Jan is also to ensure synchronization of SPIN with the research infrastructure on Democracy, Environment, Migration, Social Policy, Conflict, and Representation (DEMSCORE). Prior to joining SPIN, Jan worked as a PhD researcher for the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED2) project.
Since 2024, Jan is the PI of the project on “The dualisation of social rights in Sweden and beyond: How social policy design can maintain or mitigate income inequality”, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE). In this project, he investigates how dualisation within employment is perpetuated by social policy arrangements, specifically by looking at compensation levels of employment-related benefits in Sweden (1960–2023) and an additional 17 affluent countries (1990–2023). One of the main outputs of the project will be the Benefit Dualisation 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 his stay at DSPI in the Trinity term 2025, Jan will work with Professor Kenneth Nelson on several project proposals to establish DSPI as a research hub within the SPIN infrastructure. He will also present the first results of his project on benefit dualisation in the Comparative Social Policy Research Group Seminar on 28 May.
