EUINACTION: Willingness and Capacity for EU Policy Action in Times of Crises: Conflicts, Positions and Outcomes (EUINACTION)
Project focus
Global financial, migration, security, and pandemic crises demand coordination between national governments, which the European Union (EU) historically facilitates. Yet, the surge of Eurosceptic, nationalist and populist political parties and movements across Europe hinder discussions about EU cooperation on various issues. This raises the question of how these competing pressures affect EU policy integration.
Project goals
The project aims to inform responsive and effective policy reforms with findings of the willingness and capacity for European integration in specific policy areas. The consortium will seek to establish under which conditions politicians and institutions in the EU pursue an increase or a decrease of the EU’s policy competencies; when these actors manage to assert their positions in the policy-making processes; and to what extent their positions respond to public demands across and within member states.
Methodology
The researchers will apply state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) methods to textual data (party manifestos, speeches from the European and national parliaments, EU legislative proposals and acts) to analyze the policy goals and policy-making influence of different actors in the EU. This will enable them to explain the mechanisms that drive or obstruct policy change at the European level across policy areas.
Team
Project Leader:
Professor Dr. Nikoleta Yordanova, Leiden University (the Netherlands)
Prof. Dr. Nikoleta Yordanova is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. She is also an Associated Researcher at the Collaborative Research Center “Political Economy of Reforms” (SFB884), the University of Mannheim. In addition, she has served as a co-Principal Investigator of the project ‘Legislative Reforms and Party Competition. ‘ Her teaching spans courses on EU politics and institutions and comparative politics and policy-making in Europe. Her book Organising The European Parliament: The Role of Committees and Their Legislative Influence was published by ECPR Press.
Project Investigator:
Professor Dr. Goran Glavaš, University of Mannheim (Germany)
Prof. Dr. Goran Glavaš is an Assistant Professor at the Data and Web Science group of the University of Mannheim, primarily working in the area of natural language processing (NLP). Other areas of his research and professional interests include machine learning, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence in general. Within NLP, he mainly focuses on lexical and computational semantics, information extraction (primarily events and temporal information), multilingual and cross-lingual NLP, and NLP applications for social sciences and humanities (dominantly political science).
Project Investigator:
Professor Dr. Zachary Greene, University of Strathclyde (UK)
Prof. Dr. Zachary Greene is a Reader (Associate Professor) at the Department of Government and Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland). His research and teaching interests include comparative politics, intra-party politics, parties and elections, legislative behavior, public policy, computational text analysis, and European Politics. His research links the disagreements and dynamics of political parties to their election strategies, government formation, and the policy-making process.
Researcher:
Dr. Anastasia Ershova, Leiden University (the Netherlands)
Dr. Anastasia Ershova is a Post-doctoral Researcher. Anastasia’s work focuses on EU legislative politics and decision-making. Her research touches upon delegation dynamics in the EU, the determinants of the EU Commission’s discretionary powers, and EU responsiveness. She studied political science at the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and the University of Mannheim (Mannheim, Germany). Anastasia obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Konstanz in 2018. Before joining Leiden University in September 2020, she was a Fellow at the Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science (2018-2020), and a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz (2018-2019).
Researcher:
Aleksandra Khokhlova, Leiden University (the Netherlands)
Aleksandra Khokhlova is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Political Science. She holds a BA in Political Science from the Higher School of Economics – St. Petersburg and an MA in International Relations and Regional Studies with a major in European Studies from the University of Tartu. Before joining the Institute, she was a research and teaching associate at the University of Mannheim. Aleksandra’s main areas of interest include political representation and responsiveness in parliaments, party politics, and European Union politics. Her doctoral research focuses on the conditions for and mechanisms of citizen representation in the European Parliament.
Researcher:
Fabian David Schmidt, University of Mannheim (Germany)
Fabian David Schmidt is a Ph.D. candidate at the Chair of Text Analytics for Interdisciplinary Research and supervised by Prof. Dr. Goran Glavaš. The chair is part of the Data and Web Science Group at the University of Mannheim. His research interests are
- Machine Learning & Deep Learning
- Representation Learning for Multilingual & Low-Resource Cross-Lingual NLP
- Cross-Lingual Lexical and Distributional Semantics
- Information Retrieval
Researcher:
Dr. Christine Sylvester, University of Strathclyde (UK)
Dr. Christine Sylvester is a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics at the University of Strathclyde. Her research interests include intra-party agenda setting, policy formation, and party leader survival. She enjoys applying text analysis and machine learning approaches to analyze questions related to these topics. Her research is informed by a curiosity of the world and from her time as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Moldova and researcher in the European Parliament and British House of Commons.
Researcher:
Federico Nanni, The Alan Turing Institute (UK)
Federico Nanni is a Research Data Scientist at the Alan Turing Institute, working as part of the Research Engineering Group, and a visiting fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. A historian by training, he explores the intersections between digital humanities, data science, web archiving, and natural language processing.