Dr Anthony Kevins

Anthony is a political scientist interested in the interplay between public opinion, policy-making processes, and government legislation. Some of the questions he’s explored in his research include: How can we best understand social care preferences? What factors shape attitudes toward the welfare state? And why do some citizens want certain groups to have more or less policy influence than others?

Anthony has published over two dozen peer-reviewed studies, including in high-impact journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Political Psychology, and Political Behavior.  His research has been awarded Best Article Prizes from Socio-Economic Review and Political Studies and discussed in media outlets such as The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, and Le Monde.

He holds a five-year appointment to the UK Young Academy, and has more than a decade of teaching experience. He also serves as Lead of the Political Communication Theme at the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, and as Branch Secretary of Loughborough University and College Union.

Below you will find a selection of Anthony's ongoing and past research projects, as well as a sample of his publications on each theme. A complete list of his published research can be found on his CV.

Balancing Social Care Priorities

Aging populations, limited infrastructure and staffing shortages, and reduced government funding have all contributed to the long-running crisis in social care in the UK. Further complicating matters, the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting fiscal challenges have increased public attention to social care while simultaneously decreasing government capacity to finance social programmes. As a result, existing trade-offs in long-term care policy are likely to become even more complex and contentious.

This two-year project – funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG23\231164) – investigates social care preferences under conditions of scarcity, looking at how citizens balance trade-offs across different policy dimensions (e.g., resource distribution, taxation, service provision). The project thus tackles a question that has become central to UK public policy at present: how can governments manage the trade-off between the critical need for high-quality, equitable long-term social care provision and the high financial costs of these measures to citizens?

Who Should Have a Say? Preferences for Differentiated Representation

Equal representation is at the core of representative democracy, but are citizens actually in favour of it? His research on this theme investigates when and why citizens believe that policy-affected individuals should have more or less influence than others. Funded by the EU’s H2020 Programme via a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (Grant Number 750556), his publications on this topic include research on:

• Attitudes toward targeted representation, with a focus on police reform
• Reactions to different representational approaches, with a focus on tax reform
• The impact of public consultations on blame attribution
• Factors shaping the preferred influence of those who stand to gain or lose from legislation

Universalism and the Welfare State

How committed are citizens to universalism, redistribution, and the welfare state, and what factors shape their commitment? Through working on the UNIWEL (Universalism and the Welfare State) project at Aarhus University, he has investigated various topics related to this theme. His published work on the subject has examined:

• The motives citizens ascribe to their pro- and anti-redistribution compatriots
• The effects of welfare state universalism on immigrant integration
• The implications of class identity for social policy preferences
• The attitudinal effects of the structure of inequality across the income spectrum
• The equality and welfare content of party manifestoes
• The use of targeted versus universalistic party appeals

Insiders and Outsiders

What factors shape relations between insiders and outsiders? Building from research he conducted as part of his PhD, he has explored the division between groups that have historically been protected by social policy and labour market regulations (i.e. insiders) and those we have excluded from that protection (i.e. outsiders). Some of the topics he has addressed with this research include:

• The drivers of social assistance reforms
• The relationship between care work, inequality, and job satisfaction
• The effect of labour market vulnerability on attitudes toward immigrants and asylum-seeking policy
• The impact of the insider/outsider divide on generalised trust
• The institutional and political determinants of coverage extension (book - open access copy)

Anthony has been teaching at the university-level since 2013. He has a broad training in political science, and his teaching has covered topics in Comparative Politics, Political Behaviour, International Relations, Political Theory, and Research Methods.

He has taught on a variety of modules at Loughborough, including:

• Comparative Political Economy  
• British Politics and Government  
• Introduction to Philosophy  
• Research Design
• Smart Scholarship

• Alexander Horn, Anthony Kevins, and Kees van Kersbergen. (2024) “Workfare and Attitudes toward the Unemployed: New Evidence on Policy Feedback from 1990 to 2018”, Comparative Political Studies, 57(5), 818-850. doi.org/10.1177/00104140231178743
• Alexander Horn, Anthony Kevins, and Kees van Kersbergen. (2023) “The Paternalist Politics of Punitive and Enabling Workfare: Evidence from a New Dataset on Workfare Reforms in 16 Countries, 1980-2015”, Socio-Economic Review, 21(4): 2137–2166. doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwac060 [Winner of the 2024 SER Best Article Prize for the best paper published in Socio-Economic Review]
• Anthony Kevins and Barbara Vis. (2023) “Do Public Consultations Reduce Blame Attribution? The Impact of Consultation Characteristics, Gender, and Gender Attitudes”, Political Behavior, 45: 1121–1142. doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09751-5
• Anthony Kevins and Seonghui Lee. (2023) “Projection in the Face of Centrism: Voter Inferences about Candidates’ Party Affiliation in Low-information Contexts”, Political Psychology, 44(2): 319-336. doi.org/10.1111/pops.12851
• Anthony Kevins. (2021) “Race, Class, or Both? Responses to Candidate Characteristics in Canada, the UK, and the US”, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 9(4): 699-720. doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1636833 [Media coverage in the Vancouver Sun]
• Anthony Kevins and Joshua Robison. (2021) “Who Should Get a Say? Race, Law Enforcement Guidelines, and Systems of Representation”, Political Psychology, 42(1): 71-91. doi.org/10.1111/pops.12688
• Carsten Jensen and Anthony Kevins. (2019) “Numbers and Attitudes Towards Welfare State Generosity”, Political Studies, 67(2): 496–516. doi.org/10.1177/0032321718780516 [Winner of the Harrison Prize for the best paper published in Political Studies in 2019]
• Anthony Kevins and Stuart Soroka. (2018) “Growing Apart? Partisan Sorting in Canada, 1992-2015”, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 51(1): 103-133. doi.org/10.1017/S0008423917000713 [Media coverage in The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s]