Research interests
My research is located at the intersection of political sociology and democratic theory: I study the transformation of political representation and participation in liberal democracies and its implications for the desirability and feasibility of institutional reforms. A political scientist and theorist by training, I have conducted qualitative fieldwork in different European countries and I am currently involved in a multi-method project developing new survey measures of political process preferences in Western Europe (PoPPiE).
In my research, I specialise in the comparative study of political participation and institutional design in Europe. I also have a strong interest in the European Union; my first article on the role of democratic innovations in the EU has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy. Currently, I am working on different papers that use quantitative methods and survey data to expand on the empirical findings and theoretical propositions of my doctoral research. These projects aim to explore the realistic conditions of implementing institutional reform and innovation, focusing on their public, political dynamics — and theorising the implications of these conditions for the promises of participatory and deliberative initiatives.
Publications
Simulating democratic reform in the EU: self-legitimation through participatory innovation, Journal of European Public Policy, 2025, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2025.2554911
The European Commission has increasingly invested in forms of direct citizen engagement, recently establishing European Citizens’ Panels as part of its ‘new push for European Democracy’. While such processes have usually been explained as efforts at institutional legitimation, participatory innovations in the EU prove theoretically puzzling: Their strategic and functional value for the Commission remains elusive. This paper develops an alternative theoretical proposition: Rather than legitimating the Commission to an external audience, participatory innovation functions as a simulation of democratic reform that addresses a need for self-legitimation. The analysis demonstrates that participatory innovation can provide the means of self-legitimation precisely because it does not realise democratic participation but enacts a performance of democratic reform. This performance should be understood as a simulation of reform that is both produced by the Commission with a field of advocates, experts, and participation professionals, and designed primarily for this same field of actors. In this way, the instrumental value of participatory innovation lies in how it justifies the work and authority of the Commission to itself. The theoretical proposition is grounded in an empirical study that draws on document analysis of institutional discourse, data on affiliations between actors in the field, and elite interviews.
Keywords: legitimation; European Union; citizen engagement; democratic innovations; institutional reform; social theory
Work in progress
Politicising democratic innovations? Evidence on the divided public resonance of minipublics, Working paper
Abstract
— Working paper, presentation at EPSS 2026
Democratic innovations such as deliberative mini-publics are promoted to revitalise democratic governance – for instance, by moderating partisan polarisation and rationalising public debate. Importantly, these promises depend on democratic innovations having a distinct public resonance: the wider citizenry, beyond the few citizens actually involved, is expected to evaluate such innovations as more legitimate than the status quo. We test this claim through a multi-methods study in Western Europe. We first conduct group interviews (n=110) in Italy, Germany, and Ireland to understand how different groups of citizens make sense of the abstract institution of a mini-public. Based on these data, we develop three propositions about their public resonance. We propose that, first, there is a systematic divide between symbolic and politicised appraisals of democratic innovations – contrasting evaluative perspectives that are likely to produce divergent reactions under real-world political conditions. Second, the new ‘cultural’ cleavage in advanced democracies shapes respondents’ political understanding of democratic innovations. Third, these systematically different understandings are substantively conflicting – pertaining to incongruent normative expectations towards mini-publics, and arguably citizen engagement more broadly. To test these theoretical propositions, we conduct a representative survey experiment. Priming respondents’ political identities and perspectives, we will leverage open-ended survey questions and quantitative text analysis to investigate how groups on opposite sides of the political cleavage describe their understanding and expectations of democratic innovations.
Keywords: democratic innovation; politicisation; cleavage politics; political reasoning; open-ended survey questions
Democratic innovation without participation - Being involved rather than getting involved, Working paper
Abstract
— Work in progress
An influential body of scholarship describes the emergence of post-modern participatory demands in Western democracies: Citizens, and especially younger generations, are seeking greater and more individualised involvement in political decision-making. Democratic innovations such as citizens’ assemblies and deliberative party reform are advocated as institutional responses to this popular demand for more participatory politics. We challenge this interpretation by focusing on the conflicting meanings of participation that underlie stated preferences and reactions amongst the public. Our argument is based on two empirical propositions. First, such participatory demands bear on different and substantively conflicting understandings of citizen engagement and participatory politics. Second, for a majority of the public, these understandings are not associated with individual participation; they construct the citizen as a relatively passive observer rather than an active agent. Support for greater citizen engagement and a more participatory politics, we suggest, rests to a significant extent on notions and potential expectations of being involved by rather than getting involved oneself. We develop these propositions through a series of qualitative group interviews in three West European countries and test them in two original surveys that leverage open-text responses.
Keywords: Democratic innovations; participation; process preferences; Western Europe
Projects
European Regional Democracy Map
As part of the Regioparl project (2020-22), Sarah Meyer, Mario Wolf, and I lead the design and implementation of the European Regional Democracy Map (ERDM), in a collaboration with Arjan Schakel. The ERDM was conceived as a hub for various kinds of information and data on the structures and political dynamics of regional democracy in Europe. Researchers can find, explore, and download a broad array of data on regional government, regional election results and governing coalitions across the continent, as well as regional involvement in EU affairs.
The interactive web application provides an accessible set of tools to compare and visualise data directly on the map, allowing policy analysts and non-experts to research basic information and explore the diversity of regional political institutions.
