Hege Beate Stein Helland

Hege Stein Helland is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Government and Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism. She obtained her PhD in Political Science in 2021 from the University of Bergen. Helland has previously worked as a researcher at the Department of Government.

Her research focusses on the normative basis and support for public policies and their implementation, and the legitimacy challenges that occur in the interactions between the state and the individual. She does comparative research on coercive and paternalistic state interventions from a quality of government perspective, and her empirical expertise is on children’s rights, child welfare, and discretionary decision-making in welfare institutions and the judiciary. She is currently co-editing a volume on ‘Child Protection and the European Court of Human Rights’ and has recently published several studies on children’s right to participation and on population views on state responsibilities for children. Helland teaches on the legitimacy, power, and influence in health and welfare policies and institutions as well as courts, citizen rights in politics and bureaucracy, comparative child welfare policies, discretion and paternalism.