Dr Shaun Wilson is an applied social researcher with a focus on the relationship between employment and welfare states, particularly in the Anglo democratic countries.

In 2021, he authored Living Wages and the Welfare State with Policy Press (an imprint of Bristol University Press), which documented the unexpected defeat of the neoliberal consensus on minimum wages resulting in new potentials for rebuilding the foundations of welfare states centred on wage-earners.

He is presently completing a new book with Cambridge University Press’s Element series on Contentious Politics, called Global Living Wages, which chronicles the emerging relationship between living wages movements in the global south and the politics of building new welfare states. He is also completing an ARC Discovery project focused on worker wellbeing among the delivery drivers.

Shaun is also interested in survey research: he is Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes and was a Chief Investigator of the Australian Cooperative Election Survey in 2025.

Shaun is planning to work on future projects on voter support for the 4-day working week in Australia using new data available through the Work Orientations module, conducted as part of the International Social Survey Program. He has also researched union members’ voting behaviour as well as voter support for new housing compacts in Australia. Shaun is currently an honorary professor of sociology at Macquarie University in Sydney.