Dr Tania Burchardt is Associate Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), Deputy Director of STICERD, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. Tania is programme director for the BSc International Social and Public Policy programme, and convenes SP420 Understanding Policy Research (Advanced) and SP232 Health and Social Care Policy.  She also lectures on various undergraduate and postgraduate courses and supervises PhD students within the Social Policy department. 

Tania’s research interests lie in theories of justice, including the capability approach, measurement of inequality and applied welfare policy analysis. She has held research grants from the British Academy, ESRC, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Nuffield Foundation and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and, with Polly Vizard, has led the programme of research on capability, equality and human rights within CASE. Research projects with which she is currently involved include:

• Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes in a Changing Britain, led by Polly Vizard (funded by Nuffield Foundation). Read more.
• Analysis of Longitudinal Dyadic Data with an Application to Intergenerational Exchanges of Family Support, led by Fiona Steele (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council). Read more.
• Deliberating inequality: How does information impact the social formation of beliefs about economic inequality? With Kate Summers, Fabien Accominetti, Katharina Hecht, Jonathan Mijs and Liz Mann (funded by STICERD and III). And the previous related project: Is there a social consensus on a riches line? with Donald Hirsch and others (funded by Trust for London). Read more.

Recent publications to which she has contributed include Welfare within Families beyond Households: intergenerational exchanges of practical and financial support in the UK, LSE Public Policy Review, 2021; How divided is the attitudinal context for policymaking? Changes in public attitudes to the welfare state, inequality and immigration over two decades in Britain, Social Policy & Administration, 2021; The Conservative Governments’ Record on Adult Social Care, Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes research paper 07, 2020; Does COVID-19 represent a 'new Beveridge' moment, a crisis that will wash away, or a call to action? Report of an expert roundtable, 2020; Living on Different Incomes in London: Can public consensus identify a ‘riches line’? Trust for London, 2020; Capability inequality: up, down, sideways and along, in Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach, 2020. 

Tania is a member of the Equality and Diversity Forum Research Network, which seeks to bring together academics, policymakers and voluntary sector organisations working in these areas, and has been a board member of the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice since 2000 (including two periods as editor). She is a commissioning editor of the LSE Public Policy Review, and an associate of the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre  and the International Inequalities Institute at LSE. In recent years, she has joined advisory/steering groups for the Department of Communities and Local Government, Department for Work and Pensions, Office for National Statistics, Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Resolution Foundation, Health Foundation, Trussell Trust, and Centre on Household Assets and Savings Management (CHASM) at Birmingham.

Tania was educated at the University of Cambridge and the University of East Anglia before completing her PhD in Social Policy at the LSE in 2005.  Tania has worked at the LSE since 1995, when she joined CASE’s Welfare State Programme as a Research Officer. She became a Research Fellow in 2000, and Deputy Director of CASE in 2011 before her stint as Director 2016-2020.  

Tania supervises doctoral studies in areas including:
The capability approach; Multidimensional poverty and inequality; Time use; Choice and autonomy in relation to welfare services and well-being; Empirical welfare policy analysis.
However, please note that Tania has limited capacity to take on new PhD students at present.