Professor Aaron Reeves

Aaron Reeves is Professor of Sociology at LSE. His work studies the causes and consequences of social inequality, with a focus on the political economy of health, welfare reform, and processes of elite formation. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, The Lancet, British Medical Journal, and Socio-Economic Review.

Key expertise: Public Health, Inequality, Political Economy

Aaron's research interests are in three main areas: the political economy of health, the political and cultural consequences of the mass media, and the cultural politics of class.

His research on the political economy of health has used natural experiments to understand whether poverty reduction policies affect health and alter health inequalities. Relatedly, he has published on the influence of the Great Recession and austerity policies on health in Europe and North America. His work on the media has begun tracing the economic, social, and political factors shaping attitudes toward the welfare state and people on welfare in the UK, with a specific focus on how the media shapes these narratives. Finally, he has used interview data, small-scale experiments, and large-scale surveys, to explore the cultural politics of class, examining how social inequalities are linked with economic inequalities.

Aaron co-leads our MSc in Inequalities and Social Science programme.

Aaron is committed to engaging diverse audiences and translating his findings for wider impact.

• He leads a collaborative studentship with Trade Unions Congress as part of the LSE ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership. The project will study the intersectional impact of unions in the UK from the 1980s to today and, in so doing, will produce timely evidence on whether trade unions impact intersectional inequalities in well-being.
• He is part of the World Health Organization's Universal Well-being Economy Initiative, which aims to place multidimensional well-being at the centre of all economic, fiscal and development decisions, and to provide a framework for policies that improve life. These include effective health and social policies, safe living conditions and environmental policies, and adequate social safety nets in case of job loss or other hardship.
• He is part of the Larger Families project, with researchers from LSE, University of York, University of Oxford, and Child Poverty Action Group. The project investigates how families with more than two children are coping with the benefit cap and/or the two-child limit.