By Niklas Romberg
Penn’s leading voice on the welfare state has spent twenty-six years asking why some societies protect their people better than others. The answer, she has found, says as much about the United States as it does about Europe.
Julia Lynch arrived at Penn in 2000 as an Italianist. She had spent her early career deep in the specifics of Italian politics, and ultimately she was drawn to a puzzle she could not let go: Italy and the Netherlands both spent heavily on social welfare, but Italy concentrated almost all of that spending on older people, while the Netherlands spread it across the life course. Why? What explained the shape of social protection, not just its size?
Twenty-six years later, Lynch is one of Penn’s leading scholars of comparative social policy, health inequality, and the political economy of the welfare state. Western Europe is her primary laboratory, with the United States always lurking nearby as the implicit point of comparison.
What Europe Does Differently
Ask Lynch what American students most need to understand about European welfare states, and she does not reach for the obvious talking points. Yes, European systems tend to spend more, cover more people, and protect against a wider range of social risks: job loss, the death of a spouse, the birth of a new child, the transition into retirement. But the mechanism behind that generosity is less intuitive than it first appears.
She points out that European countries often rely on a broader tax base, one that is in some respects less progressive than the American system and draws more revenue from lower- and middle-income earners. What citizens receive in return is broader protection against a wider range of risks. Fewer people are left exposed to catastrophic loss, not because the system redistributes more dramatically, but because it covers more comprehensively.
The United States, by contrast, is a patchwork. Protections can shift dramatically depending on which state you live in, and that variation reflects something deeper than policy design. It reflects a deeper question about social solidarity: which people does a society feel obligated to protect, and under what conditions?
The Far Right and the Welfare State
One of the more counterintuitive threads in Lynch’s work concerns the relationship between the rise of far-right populism and the future of social protection in Europe. The common assumption is that populists mean austerity. It turns out to be too simple.
“There’s enormous variation,” she says. “But if there’s a common thread, it’s a tendency to shrink the welfare state for outsiders, immigrants from outside Europe, non-white, non-Christian communities, while expanding it for insiders.” Many far-right parties have a strongly pro-family, natalist orientation, calling for more generous child benefits and expanded publicly funded childcare. The Christian heritage of these parties shapes both who is included in their vision of social solidarity and who is left out of it.
“It’s complicated terrain,” Lynch says, “moving in different directions at once.” What looks like a simple backlash against the welfare state is often, on closer inspection, a selective redrawing of its boundaries.
Research at the Frontier
Lynch’s current book project takes her into territory that is both politically sensitive and methodologically unusual. She is trying to understand why governments collect, or choose not to collect, data on health inequalities, with a particular focus on racial health disparities. In France and many other continental European countries, the state is legally prohibited from gathering data on race. Lynch wants to know how policymakers come to make those decisions, and what it means for the capacity to address health inequity. Do countries that measure disparities extensively actually do a better job of tackling them? The answer, she suspects, is more complicated than either side of the debate tends to assume.
It is the kind of question that sits at the uncomfortable intersection of data, politics, and identity, which is, Lynch suggests, exactly where the most important research tends to live.
The Joy of Teaching
Lynch teaches two courses a year: a PhD seminar in qualitative methods and research design, and a rotating set of undergraduate offerings on comparative social policy, European politics, and comparative health systems. Her approach is built around the deliberate construction of challenges, asking students to attempt things that seem at first beyond them, then providing the scaffolding to help them succeed.
“I try to build real challenges into my teaching,” she says. “And then I get to watch students succeed at those challenges. That feeling of accomplishment is extraordinary.”
A recent seminar offered a vivid example. Students arrived from Argentina, China, the United States, and beyond, each bringing a different vantage point on questions Lynch has spent her career studying. One paper examined why Argentina, with its deep self-conception as a European nation transplanted to Latin America, had developed the social policy architecture it had. Another traced the variation in how Chinese cities responded to COVID. “I learned so much from those papers,” she says. “That’s a wonderful thing to be able to say as a professor.”
Why Study Europe?
Lynch is candid about what drives her focus on Western Europe. “These are the countries most like the United States in terms of their economic and social goals,” she says, the closest competitors and the most comparable experiments in democratic governance and market capitalism. Studying them is, among other things, a way of understanding what the United States could look like if it made different choices.
But time spent in Europe has also given Lynch something more personal: a recurring reminder of what she values about both sides of the Atlantic. “I never feel more American than when I’m in Europe,” she says. There is, she argues, an aspiration embedded in the American project, toward a genuinely multiethnic democracy, that she finds moving even when the reality falls short. “That aspiration is not always shared in Europe. I love that idea about the United States.”
At the same time, she comes back with a consistent appreciation for something the United States consistently undervalues. In most of Western Europe, there is a much stronger sense that life extends beyond one’s role as a worker, that people are members of society with social lives, relationships, and needs that exist outside of their economic function. The welfare state, in this reading, is not just a policy instrument. It is an expression of a foundational commitment to human sociality. “We are humans first,” she says. “You are not just a head on a stick.”
CES and the Future of European Studies at Penn
Penn has never had a dedicated center for European studies, and for much of Lynch’s time there, the administration showed little appetite for building one. “The priorities were elsewhere,” she says simply. Lynch has been an adviser to Penn’s European Studies program throughout, and a longstanding member of the Council for European Studies, which she describes as her “biggest and best professional and social network.” She has missed only two CES events since she arrived. One of them was for a wedding, she adds.
Into that gap, CES became a lifeline, keeping her connected to Europeanists across the university and beyond. In recent years, she and Professor Mitchell Orenstein have worked to bring CES programming to Philadelphia, helping to turn a corner at Penn and generate new momentum for European studies on campus. She is genuinely grateful for that synergy, and cautiously hopeful about where it leads.
What would she most want from a fully realized European studies center? The answer is immediate: mobility. “Students at all levels need the ability to spend time in Europe, even short stints. Even small amounts of funding for PhD students doing pre-dissertation work can be genuinely generative.” She pauses. “I’ve been working and waiting for twenty-six years. I didn’t always think there was sufficient demand. But that, it turns out, was a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
The author would like to thank Professor Julia Lynch for generously taking the time to sit down for this interview.
Author Bio:
Niklas Romberg is a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, Class of 2027.