Astrid Hedin

Astrid Hedin is a political scientist specializing in historical and organizational research. Her work has examined communist-era state administration, the influence of the communist example on West European social policies through international organizations, and shifts in the Swedish welfare state during the 1970s.
Her research on communist state administration focuses on the implementation structures governing employee travel controls. In her work on policy diffusion, she analyzes how the communist example helped shape West European policy trends during the Cold War. Drawing on the Stanford school of World Polity Studies, she has developed a model of Cold War isomorphism. Her research on Swedish workplace participation policies explored how the political currents of the 1960s and 1970s reshaped the Swedish model.
Astrid Hedin is a 2026 fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study. She has been a Sabbatical Scholar funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, at the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR) at Stanford and Harvard Universities, and at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) at Stanford University. She has also been an Anna Lindh Fellow at the Europe Center at Stanford University.
She teaches political science and public administration at Malmö University. She holds a PhD in political science from Lund University and a docent degree from Uppsala University, Sweden