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Dr Lesch's expertise lies in the politics of policymaking. He has an interdisciplinary research agenda situated at the intersection of comparative public policy, political science, and public health. His main research interests include ideas and policy change, processes of policy transfer, and the politics of evidence-policy making. His research has explored these issues in several different domains, including alcohol policy, public health, and taxation.
His research outputs can be accessed via Google Scholar
Matt was a Research Fellow in the Department of Health Sciences. There, he led the policy section of the Transformative Research on the Alcohol Industry, Policy, and Science (TRAPS), a Wellcome Trust-funded research program investigating the influence of the alcohol industry on alcohol policy and science.
Before joining the University of York, he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University in the Department of Sociology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Matt earned his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2017. He also holds an MA from the University of British Columbia and a BA (Hons.) from Western University.
He is interested in supervising PhD students in comparative public policy, especially but not exclusively in the research areas that are mentioned above.
Matt’s work focuses on the policymaking process, with a particular interest in theories of policy change. He is interested in better understanding how political factors influence the adoption, durability, and spread of evidence-based policy solutions. His most recent research has studied these dynamics through analysis of public health policymaking in Europe (Ireland and the UK), Australia, North America (United States and Canada), and Africa (South Africa and Uganda).
Additionally, he actively participates in several international research collaborations. Notable among these are the WHO Europe/EU Evidence into Action Alcohol Project, the UK/Ireland Alcohol Research Network, and the Kettil Bruun Society for Social and Epidemiological Research on Alcohol.
Theories of the Policy Process
Contact details
Dr Matt Lesch
Department of Politics
University of York
YORK
YO10 5DD