I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Mannheim. From 2010 to 2016, I was based at the European Politics group of ETH Zurich, as a doctoral student, post doc, and senior researcher. I spent Fall 2015 as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University.

My research engages with two parallel developments in European and global governance. One is the so-called “politicization” of the international realm. I am interested in the assumption that citizens, parties and representative institutions have come to exert greater impact on policies and institutional reforms in the EU and beyond. Is this the case? What are the conditions under which these actors matter? What kind of policy and institutional changes do they bring about? Specific projects have focused on differentiated European integration, parliamentary oversight of EU policies, and on the emergence of international parliamentary institutions.

It sometimes goes unmentioned in the politicization debate that many international arenas are in fact dominated by policy experts rather than by voters, parties or even government ministers. Transnational and transgovernmental networks, independent agencies, and task-specific international organizations have proliferated in the past decades. Who acquires and exercises power in and through these networks? To whom are the private and public actors in transnational and transgovernmental arenas accountable? Which interests do they pursue? I explore these questions in a project on transnational internet governance. I study cross-national and cross-sectoral variation in who participates in arenas such as the Internet Engineering Task Force or the Internet Governance Forum, the policy positions of these actors, and the global political conflict lines that they create.

Office hours: Send me an email and we will arrange a time.

Feel free to get in touch should you have any questions:
Prof. Dr. Thomas Winzen
University of Mannheim
School of Social Sciences
A5, 6 (Room A326)
68131 Mannheim
Germany

winzen   a t   uni-mannheim.de
Tel.: +49 (0) 621 181 2058