My broad research interests include political behaviour, representation, European integration and quantitative methods in political science. I am currently working on the following research projects, among others:
If you are interested in more information about any of these projects, please contact me.
Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in the European Union ( PIREDEU) is an infrastructure for research into citizenship, political participation, and electoral democracy in the European Union (EU). It is funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme (FP7). The PIREDEU project coordinator is Stefano Bartolini at the European University Institute, and there are fourteen partner institutions participating in the project. The University of Oxford is a partner institution and I am Deputy Chair of the PIREDEU Steering Committee with special responsibilities as project integrator.
The PIREDEU infrastructure allows a pan-European data collection effort, including media content analysis, candidate studies, manifesto analysis and also a voter survey in every country, ensuring the continuation and development of the European Election Study in the context of the European Parliament elections taking place in June 2009. Such an infrastructure will endow the social science community with the most essential information required for a recurrent audit of all important aspects of the electoral process in the European Union. Since elections are crucial instruments of popular control, elite accountability, and popular representation, auditing these processes is good practice in a number of democracies. Such audits empirically assess the nature of electoral processes and detect challenges and threats to the quality of these processes. The infrastructure project focuses on data which, if not collected at the time of an election, would either be lost or would be recorded in a manner incompatible with the way in which other relevant data have been recorded, so that the complete picture will be unavailable for future research.
At the EU's supra-national level, democratic rules and procedures are not yet well established and the institutions of multi-level governance are constantly being renegotiated and adapted. Auditing the quality of the electoral process at the EU-level is therefore essential. Such an audit involves the activities of (i) parties (and candidates), (ii) mass media and (iii) voters. Scholarly evaluations of electoral processes at the EU level have been hampered until now by the limited amount of empirical information on which they could be based. The PIREDEU project seeks to change this, and to provide a comprehensive empirical database for use by the social science community interested in electoral democracy in Europe. We will investigate the scientific and technical feasibility of building an integrated cross national database concerning relevant activities in the context of the 2009 elections to the European Parliament.