Isabel M. Perera, assistant professor of government at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, recently received two awards for her new book, The Welfare Workforce: Why Mental Health Care Varies Across Affluent Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2025). The monograph received the Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize from the International Political Sciences Association and the 2026 European Studies Book Award from the Council for European Studies.
The Welfare Workforce examines the wide variation in services provided to people with mental health challenges in countries with otherwise similar health systems and social policies, such as Norway and Sweden. The comparative analysis offers a window into how government employees are shaping social policy.
Dr. Perera has been a Cornell faculty member since 2020. She holds affiliations with the Center for the Study of Inequality, the Institute for European Studies, the Cornell Center for Health Equity, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. Her scholarship centers on how politics shape the social policies, labor markets, and overall economics of affluent democracies, focusing on the United States and Western Europe.
A graduate of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Dr. Perera earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. After completing her doctorate, she conducted postdoctoral research with the department of medical ethics and health policy at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.