Daniel Edmiston joined the Institute of Government and Public Policy and the Department of Political Sciences and Public Law in November 2023. In January 2024, he will launch a five-year project "Who counts? Incorporating a 'missing minority' to re-examine the profile, drivers and depth of poverty across Europe" (WHOCOUNTS) supported by the European Research Council (ERC) through a Starting Grant.
Income surveys are often used to calculate poverty statistics in Europe, but they do not always take into account everyone living in poverty. Excluding those not living in private households from official statistics limits our ability to study poverty and its causes. Much more than merely technical or pragmatic, such practices reflect a set of theoretical and normative judgments about who counts when it comes to researching poverty and social policy.
Supported by a €1.5 million grant, the WHOCOUNTS project will develop and deploy new datasets on the social groups often rendered invisible through official poverty statistics and policy evaluation in Europe. Led by Daniel, the project will address noncoverage errors in conventional distributional analyses to improve out conceptual, methodological and substantive understanding of poverty across Europe. The team will analyse data from eight European countries, considering demographics, low-income dynamics and policy interventions. The use of adjusted and unadjusted European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) datasets will provide more accurate estimates of poverty levels and nuance explanations of deep poverty.
Daniel has previously worked for the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, London School of Economics, University of Oxford and University of Leeds. He has undertaken national and comparative research drawing on mixed methods approaches to critically examine the effects of welfare policy and politics.
