Kerem Gabriel Öktem is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy (SOCIUM) at Bremen University, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Bilkent University, Turkey, for his thesis ‘Pathways to Universal Social Security in Lower Income Countries: Explaining the Emergence of Welfare States in the Developing World’. His research focusses on questions of how to conceptualize, measure and make sense of social policy developments throughout the world, with a focus on the Global South. Currently, he is exploring on the sequence of inclusion into social security in Turkey and India in the research project ‘Mechanisms of Social Policy Diffusion: Ideational Dynamics of Inclusion and the Political Legitimation of Beneficiary Groups’ and contributes to the 'Welfare, democracy, and populism under the Covid19 crisis (WELDECO)' project at DI as a country expert.