Jakub Sowula

Jakub Sowula studied political science, economics and mathematics (first state examination) at the University of Tübingen. His thesis, which was awarded as outstanding thesis by Polis e.V., focused on welfare state change in Germany, Italy, Sweden and the USA (1980-2018) as prototypical cases of welfare regimes.

After his graduation, he worked at the University of Tübingen as a researcher for the research unit Comparative Public Policy and completed his second state examination at the Seminar for Training and Further Education of Teachers in Rottweil, Germany.

From September 2020 he worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Bern University of Teacher Education (Switzerland). From December 2020 onwards he simultaneously pursued his PhD at the University of Tübingen under the supervision of Prof. Martin Seeleib-Kaiser in joint supervision with Prof. Sebastian Tempelmann from the Bern University of Teacher Education on the topic of Young Minds and Political Competencies in the Context of Welfare Support. The dissertation was completed in February 2025. 

Currently, he works at the University of Tübingen as a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer. His research interests include public policy research, focusing mainly on social policies from a comparative perspective. Key topics of expertise in this context are welfare state change and welfare regimes, as well as (young) people's welfare deservingness opinions and welfare attitudes. Besides comparative public policy, his interests lie in political education, didactics and how to use AI in political science research.

His own as well as collaborative research on the topics of welfare state change and the consequences of welfare state design, welfare regimes, welfare attitudes, as well as educational science has been published in leading social science journals such as Journal of European Social Policy, Social Policy & Administration, Journal of Social Policy, International Journal of Science Education and Swiss Political Science Review.

Seeleib-Kaiser, M., Shvyrev, L., & Sowula, J. (2025). Decent work and welfare states: Two sides of the same coin? In In M.Moore, C. Scherrer, & M. van der Linden (Eds.), The Elgar Companion to Decent Work and the Sustainable Development Goals (pp. 577–603). Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035300907.00058

Gielens, E., Sowula, J., & Leifeld, P. (2025). Goodbye human annotators? Content analysis of social policy debates using ChatGPT. Journal of Social Policy, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279424000382

Tempelmann, S., Sowula, J., & Cacchione, T. (2024). Intentional water and tired wood: exploring causes for primary teachers’ reference to intuitive construals in science education. International Journal of Science Education, 47(3), 379–398. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2024.2324852

Sowula, J. (2024). Deservingness and Welfare Attitudes Through Young Eyes: The Future of the Swiss Welfare State. Swiss Political Science Review, 30(3), 280–308. https://doi.org/10.1111/spsr.12606

Sowula, J. (2024). Mind the gap: Young people and welfare-state related knowledge in deservingness and welfare attitude research. Journal of European Social Policy, 34(1), 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287231222884

Sowula, J., Gehrig, F., Scruggs, L. A., Seeleib-Kaiser, M., & Ramalho Tafoya, G. (2024). The end of welfare states as we know them? A multidimensional perspective. Social Policy & Administration, 58(5), 785–799. https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12990

Sowula, J., & Seeleib-Kaiser, M. (2023). The perceived dilemma between debt reduction and a fair society: Saving for a rainy day without increasing poverty? In B. Greve (Ed.), Welfare States in a Turbulent Era (pp. 48–70). Edward Elgar.

Seeleib-Kaiser, M., & Sowula, J. (2020). The genesis of welfare regime theory. In C. Aspalter (Ed.), Ideal Types in Comparative Social Policy (pp. 41–60). Routledge.

Reinprecht, C., Seeleib-Kaiser, M., & Sowula, J. (2018). Mythen der vergleichenden Sozialpolitikforschung? Sozialer Fortschritt, 67(8–9), 783–805. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45018360

For full record see: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9888-4905