My name is Tom Chevalier and I'm a research fellow at the CNRS, now working at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), here at Sciences Po.

I defended my PhD 10 years ago, in 2015, here at the CEE at Sciences Po. I went on to do post-docs abroad, at Harvard and Oxford, and was then recruited to the CNRS in 2019, at the Arènes laboratory in Brittany, where I worked for 6 years. So I've just changed laboratories.

My research focuses on public policy, social policy and, above all, youth issues.

I do comparative work, in other words I look at what is happening in terms of public action across European countries. More specifically, I have studied all the public policies designed to promote the autonomy of young people in Europe.

The way in which young people access social rights depends on their representation. If young people are seen as children, access to social rights will be familialised, meaning that parents will be helped to look after their children. For example, there will be higher age limits for access to the minimum income, as in France, where the RSA is only available from the age of 25. In other countries, on the other hand, young people, usually from the age of 18, are considered to be adults like every other adult and can access social benefits in their own right. This is the case in the Nordic countries, for example.

More recently, I have started looking at the effects of public action on young people, particularly in terms of youth poverty on the one hand, and political attitudes on the other. I found that the more we acknowledge the adult status of young people, by individualising their access to social rights and defamiliarising social benefits, the less poverty there is among them and the more trust they have in the state and in politics.

In order to disseminate these research findings to public authorities, I also have a number of expert missions. In particular, I am a member of the scientific committee of the CNLE, the French National Council for Policies to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion, and I am also responsible on behalf of France to the European Commission for producing annual reports on the state of social protection as part of a network called ESPAN.

There are several reasons why it makes sense for me to come back to the CEE and Sciences Po. On the one hand, as I work on public policies and their effects on poverty and political attitudes, it brings me closer to the LIEPP, Sciences Po’s Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies, where I have already developed several projects.

On the other hand, in recent years I have also developed research projects on the environment, with a number of colleagues from LIEPP, CEE and CSO here at Sciences Po (Anne-Laure Beaussier, Matteo Mandelli, Bruno Palier), and more specifically on environmental transitions and transformations of the welfare state. 

We are addressing a number of questions. First, identifying the social risks associated with environmental transitions and the people most affected by these social risks. In this work, we distinguish between direct risks, directly linked to climate change – for example, everything to do with heatwaves, floods, etc.. On the other hand, there are indirect risks, i.e. the social effects of environmental policies, which can sometimes be regressive. For example, when you introduce a carbon tax that disproportionately affects the lowest incomes. This is another type of risk that we have identified. And the question is: who is most affected?

Another focus of our research is on policies to protect populations from natural disasters. And here the questions are: do they reflect welfare state regimes? What types of public policy should be taken into account? The literature tends to focus mostly on compensation policies, insurance policies in particular. If you lose your house, what kind of insurance will pay for it? But in fact, we need to take into account the interaction of these public policies with prevention policies (for example, building a dyke to protect your house from flooding) and emergency management policies: at the very moment of flooding, what happens, what does the State do to support you?