Publications

Please get in touch if you are interested in reading one of my publications but lack access to them.

Published

2023: Framing Gender-based Violence in Multi-level Contexts: A Networked Approach to Studying Post Adoption of the Istanbul Convention, European Journal of Politics and Gender, DOI: 10.1332/251510821X16693059192022.

International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.

2022: Legislative Communities? Conceptualizing and Mapping International Parliamentary Relations, Journal of International Relations and Development, (with Thomas Malang) DOI: 10.1057/s41268-021-00251-x.

Besides the increasing scope of transnational activities of civil society actors, international relations of national legislatures have long been expanding, yet without attracting substantial scholarly attention. We can observe that national Members of Parliament meet in various bi-and multilateral organisational forms within and beyond international organisations to fulfil parliamentary functions. We present a conceptual framework differentiating between two forms of international parliamentary relations: multilateral vs. bilateral organisation. We argue that multilateral participation is mostly driven by the supply of such organisations and can mainly be found in Europe and Africa. On the contrary, the capacity of chambers can explain the realisation of bilateral channels. We test our claims with data for the international relations of 144 national parliaments. Our explorative empirical study is the first to jointly analyse bi- and multilateral transnational parliamentary relations and shows that international parliamentary cooperation varies over legislatures and regions, generating genuine clusters of institutionalised communities. Our findings help to embed the existing research on international parliamentary institutions and diplomacy in a larger context of international relations. Furthermore, our global relational account of national parliaments speaks to research on diverse topics of domestic outcomes, such as democratisation, norm and legal diffusion, and governmental control.

2021: The Two Faces of International Organizations: Exploring Consequences and Sources of Diversification in World Politics, Ph.D. Dissertation, Free University Berlin, Berlin.

2017: Regional Parliamentary Institutions: Diffusion of a Global Parliamentary Organizational Design?, KFG Working Paper Series, No. 80, August 2017, Kolleg-Forschergruppe (KFG) "The Transformative Power of Europe", Free University Berlin, Berlin.

In the last three decades, Regional Parliamentary Institutions (RPIs) have experienced a rapid increase and spread across all regions around the globe. They represent a unique parliamentary phenomenon of international affairs that first and foremost exhibits a genuine legitimacy nexus between local constituencies and the international area. This paper builds on this characteristic and elaborates a legitimacy approach that identifies three legitimacy mechanisms that may help to conceptualize the establishment of specific design features of RPIs. To this end, a concise typology of RPIs with two disjunctive criteria – election mode and connection to a parent regional organization – provides the grounds for a systematic analysis of their organizational design. Building on a newly created dataset of 68 globally spread RPIs, the empirical analysis generates two main findings: (1) the rapid increase of RPIs after 1989 is empirically corroborated for all regions and most types of these institutions; (2) two standard applications of the developed legitimacy mechanisms – functional and normative legitimacy arguments – are not significant in explaining the choice of specific design features of RPIs. Therefore, the observed rapid increase and global spread of these institutions provide tentative evidence to support a diffusion analysis of their emergence and design, making the paper call for a more thorough conceptualization of RPIs’ organizational design and processes of inter-dependent decision-making.

2016: Analysing Regional Parliamentary Institutions as Organisations, or: What You are Is How You Organise, (Thesis), Free University Berlin, Berlin.

Work in Progress

Conference Papers

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2020: The Rising Cognitive Diversity of International Governmental Organizations, ECPR Virtual General Conference, 24-28 August 2020.

2019: "Organizing Human Rights: Internal Complexity of International Organizations and its Effects on Human Rights Policies", Paper prepared for ECPR Joint Session, Mons, 8-12 April 2019.

2019: "Quantitative and Qualitative Internal Complexity of International Organizations: Patterns of International Organizing", Paper prepared for International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention 2019, Toronto, 27-30 March 2019.

2019: "Organizing Human Rights: The Design of International Organizations and its Eects on Human Rights Policies" [Working Manuscript], Paper prepared for International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention 2019, Toronto, 27-30 March 2019.

2019: "Organizing Human Rights: International Organizations' Internal Complexity and Shapes of Human Rights Policies" [Working Manuscript], Paper prepared for Drei-Lander-Tagung, Conference German, Swiss, and Austrian Political Science Association, ETH Zurich, 14-16 February 2019.

2019: "Legislative Communities? Patterns of Parliamentary Organization of International Relations", Paper prepared for Drei-Länder-Tagung, Conference German, Swiss, and Austrian Political Science Association, ETH Zurich, 14-16 February 2019 [with Thomas Malang].

2018: "Organising Human Rights: The Design of Regional International Organisations and its Effects on Human Rights Instruments" [Working Manuscript], Paper prepared for 13th IR Junior Researcher Conference International Politics, 20-22 April 2018, Political Studies Academy Tutzingen.

2017: "Organising Human Rights: The Design of International Organisations and Interpretations of Human Rights" [Working Manuscript], Paper prepared for 13th International Graduate Conference in Political Science, International Relations, and Public Policy, in Memory of the late Yitzhak Rabin, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 13-14 December 2017, Jerusalem.

2017: "International Parliamentary Institutions: Patterns of International Parliamentary Organizing", Paper prepared for ECPR General Conference, University of Oslo, 6-9 September 2017, Oslo.

Editorial Assistance

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