Biography

Jane Gingrich received her Ph.D. and Masters in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2007 she has been an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Health and Social Care at the London School of Economics, and as part of an internship she worked with Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Her Majesty’s Treasury in the United Kingdom.
Her Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Making Multiple Markets’, looks at the politics of market reforms in public services. Examining reforms to health, education, and elderly care in Holland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, she argues that far from displaying a unitary logic, these market reforms differ substantially, even within particular sectors, with some favoring service producers like hospitals, others advantaging the users of services, and still others actually bolstering the state’s power. Drawing on dozens of interviews with policymakers, she argues that politicians of both left and right have manipulated markets for partisan ends, challenging the standard state-market, left-right dichotomies of the welfare state literature.
Her current research projects continue this analysis of how policymakers alter and tweak incentives, by focusing on the increasing use of insights from behavioral economics by politicians and bureaucrats. She is also working on a project examining differences in employers’ preferences over spending on transfers and services.