Bio and Research

Sara Hobolt is Sutherland Chair in European Institutions at the European Institute. Previously, she has held posts at the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan. She holds an honorary professorship in political science at the University of Southern Denmark and she is associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford. In 2017, Professor Hobolt was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Hobolt has published extensively on European Union politics, elections and referendums. Her most recent books are Blaming Europe? Responsibility without Accountability in the EU (Oxford University Press, 2014, with James Tilley) and Democratic Politics in a European Union Under Stress (Oxford University Press, 2014, co-edited with Olaf Cramme). She was awarded the Best Book prize by the European Union Studies Association in 2010 for her previous book Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration (Oxford University Press, 2009).

In 2011, she received the APSA emerging scholar award for her contribution to the field of elections, public opinion and voting behaviour. She was the 2012 winner of the Nils Kim prize, awarded by the Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund to a young Nordic researcher who has made an outstanding contribution in the social sciences and humanities. Sara Hobolt is Chair of the European Election Studies (EES), an EU-wide project studying voters, parties, candidates and the media in European Parliamentary elections. She frequently comments on European politics, public opinion and elections in national and international media, and she was the BBC television election expert in the 2009 and 2014 European elections.

Sara Hobolt's research interests include European Union politic s, political behaviour (particularly elections and referendums), political institutions, public opinion, comparative European politics, and quantitative methods in political science. She is currently working on an ERC-funded project EUDEMOS: Constrained Democracy: Citizens’ Responses to Limited Political Choice in the European Union as well as an ESRC-funded project on Brexit.