Daniel Béland
Director, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Daniel Béland is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and James McGill Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University. A student of politics and public policy, Professor Béland has published more than 25 books and 220 articles in peer-reviewed journals and his work has been cited more than 18,000 times, according to Google Scholar. To support his research, he has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) and six SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) standard research/Insight grants and two Canada Research Chairs (a Tier 2 followed by a Tier 1). Taken together, his awards and grants amount to more than three million dollars CDN in external funding.
Professor Béland holds a PhD in Political Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where he returned as a visiting scholar in the spring of 2014. A Part-Time Professor at the University of Southern Denmark from January 2014 to December 2017, he has been a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute, a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Heidelberg University, the University of Nagoya and the National University of Singapore, a visiting professor at the University of Bremen, the University of Helsinki, the University of Southern Denmark, and a Fulbright Scholar at The George Washington University and the National Academy of Social Insurance. Before joining McGill University in January 2019, he held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) at the University of Saskatchewan (Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy).
Professor Béland currently serves as Editor of Policy and Society. He is also on the editorial or advisory board of a dozen journals, including Global Social Policy, Governance, Journal of Aging & Social Policy, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, Policy and Society, Policy Sciences, Social Policy & Administration, The Gerontologist, and World Affairs,. Between 2006 and 2014, he served as Secretary-Treasurer of Research Committee 19 (Poverty, Social Welfare and Social Policy) of the International Sociological Association.Then, between 2014 and 2023, he was President of that research committee. From 2010 to 2013, he also sat on the Academic Council of the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program (Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences). Additionally, Professor Béland is a member of Scholars Strategy Network. In 2014, he was selected to join the initial cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Ten years later, in 2024, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
In addition to his academic work, Professor Béland has participated in numerous training sessions for civil servants, provided policy advice to federal and provincial officials, and testified in front of the Saskatchewan Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission, Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, and the Standing Committee on Finance of the House of Commons (Canada). Moreover, he is very frequently asked to comment on key policy and political issues by Canadian and international media outlets. He has also published articles in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune La Presse, The Globe and Mail, the Hill Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Monkey Cage [Washington Post], the National Post, and The Toronto Star and in magazines and websites like The Conversation Policy Options La vie des idées and The Wilson Quarterly. Since January 2025, he has been a regular columnist for Policy Magazine.
