Astrid Hedin
Associate Professor/Senior lecturer

Presentation

Astrid Hedin is associate professor of political science and public administration at the Department of Global Political Studies (GPS), Malmö University. She has been a Sabbatical Scholar funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) and was a Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, during spring 2024. She is an alumna of the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR).

Her current research focuses on communist state administrative structures, with particular attention to the implementation structure of travel controls for employees (see Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Public Administration, 2022; Illiberal deliberation in Cooperation & Conflict, 54:2).

During the summers of 2026 and 2027, she will be a Fellow at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, where she will work on her new project, The Communist Welfare State Reconsidered.

Drawing on the Stanford school of World Polity Studies, she has developed a framework for analyzing how the communist example helped propel and shape global policy trends during the Cold War (Cold War Isomorphism, 2016, 2018; Global nyinstitutionalism, 2022).

Astrid Hedin has also examined how left wing intellectual and political currents of the 1960s and 1970s reshaped the Swedish model, tracing how it was renegotiated and reinterpreted over time (see Origins and Myths of the Swedish Model, 2016; Before the Breakdown, 2019).

Blog posts summarizing research articles

Lagging Impact: New Research on Communism Needs to Reach Textbooks on Insights, the online publication of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

How communist regimes directed global dialogue Blog post on the global, blog of the Geneva Global Governance Centre.

How did the Cold war help spur West European welfare state reform? Blog post on the global, blog of the Geneva Global Governance Centre.

Lessons from East Germany How authoritarian states can use international travelers to promote their interests. Blog post on EUROPP blog of The London School of Economics.

Service

At Malmö University, Hedin served as faculty representative 2019-25 and was elected vice chair of the Faculty Board of Culture & Society. Within the Department of Global Political Studies (GPS), she coordinates the subject group, research group, and B.A. programme in political science and public administration.

Training and experience

• Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Studies, summers 2026 and 2027
• Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Sida, the Swedish International Development Agency, 2023-2024, appointed by the Government
• Visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, online 2021/22, on site spring 2024
• Subject coordinator for political science 2012-2016, 2019-ongoing
• Temporary senior lecturer, Lund University, 2016-2018
• Acting GPS research coordinator, autumn 2015
• Anna Lindh fellow of the Europe Center, Stanford University, spring 2012
• Docent/Habilitation/ associate professor in political science, Uppsala University
• Visiting scholar at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (Creees) and the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
• Visiting scholar at the Scandinavian Center for Organizational Research (Scancor), Stanford University
• Post-doctoral fellow of the Swedish Research Council
• Ph.D. in political science, Lund University

Current teaching

• Decision Making in Foreign Policy (Political science Master program)
• Organization Theory (Public Administration program)
• Swedish Politics and Public Administration (Public Administration program)
• Qualitative Methods (Public Administration program)
• Globalization and the Welfare State (Public Administration program)
• International Organizations as Public Administration (Public Administration program)
• The Swedish Institute Summer Academy for Young Professionals (SAYP)