I am part-time Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute, which I joined in 2010 as a Jean Monnet Fellow before becoming Research Fellow in 2011. At the Robert Schuman Centre, I lead the Global Governance Programme’s research area on ‘Knowledge, Governance, Transformations’ and am Founding Director of
GlobalStat
.
I am non-resident Visiting Fellow of the European Parliamentary Research Service, Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Innsbruck and LUISS Guido Carli/CIFE and Visiting External Examiner at the Department for Public Policy of the University of Malta. I am
Co-Principal of the EUI’s Interdisciplinary Research Cluster on ‘Crisis of Expert Knowledge and Authority’,
an academic advisor and author of the Enlightenment 2.0 programme of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, involved in the ESPAS Futurium Expert Group on Horizon Scanning, and a member of the Egmont Foresight Network.
Since 2022, I am Associate Editor of Cambridge University Press’ Journal ‘Data & Policy’ and Area Chair for ‘Policy Frameworks, Governance and Management of Data-driven Innovations’ of the Data for Policy Community. From 2015 to 2022, I was Book Review Editor of the Journal of Common Market Studies, and since 2019 I am Editorial Board member of the International Journal Evaluation and Program Planning as well as Board member and academic advisor of the Institute for European Politics in Berlin.
In 2020 I initiated collaboration on ‘Statistical and Data
Literacy in Policy-Making’ with the International Statistical Literacy
Project (ISLP) of the International Association for Statistical
Education (IASE) and the International Statistical Institute (ISI).
My research focuses on the interaction between knowledge, evidence, data, and governance. I analyse how governance by and of knowledge influence transformations of politics and policies. This includes the analysis of measuring and the use of statistics as governance technique; data-based governance; data and evidence literacy in policy-making; evidence-informed policy-making; multilevel and anticipatory governance: socio-economic as well as eco-social policies: and sustainable development.
I hold a PhD in Political Science from Cologne University, where I was Senior Research Associate of the Jean Monnet Chair for Political Science and the Chair for Social Policy and Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences from 2000 to 2014. In 2009, I received the Stiftung Demokratie Best PhD Thesis Award for outstanding research on democratic decision-making within the EU’s supranational polity. Prior to joining the EUI in 2010, I conducted research on EU integration studies; Europeanisation; multilevel and new modes of governance; policy co-ordination; environmental, employment and socio-economic policies; economic governance and cohesion policy; EU constitutionalisation; EU enlargement; and curriculum development in EU studies. Since 2010, I work on the analysis of measuring and the use of statistics as governance technique; data-based governance; data and evidence literacy in policy-making; evidence-informed policy-making; multilevel and anticipatory governance; socio-economic as well as eco-social policies; and sustainable development.
At the EUI, I designed and implemented GlobalStat, a multisource – ‘beyond GDP’ database on developments in a globalised world, of which I am the Founding Director and for which I institutionalised contacts with the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) and OECD to link GlobalStat directly to politics. I also co-directed research projects on measurement as a governance technique to inform evidence-informed policy-making (‘Global Governance by Indicators‘ and ‘On the Political Economy of Measuring State Capacity and Governance‘). I enhanced my expertise through my one-year practice as member of the EUI’s Ethics Committee (2015-16) and my work as policy analyst at the EPRS where I was responsible for research methodologies and strategic liaison to academia (2017-18), further developing the EP’s Statistics Warehouse and developing the EP’s Visiting Fellow and Scholar Programme. In this position, I responded to the practical demand for evidence-informed policy-making in EU politics and developed institutional strategies to meet this demand, including for training approaches for policy analysts and staff.
Over the past 23 years, a multitude of international collaborations enabled me to establish a wide cooperation network within academia and EU politics across and beyond the EU, which made me particularly interested in aspects of global governance, multilevel policy-making, data-based governance, data for policy-making and evidence-informed policy-making.