My research focuses on women in politics, legislative politics, quantitative text analysis and the European Union. My dissertation project focused on the causes and effects of women's representation in Europe: In an article published in Party Politics, I show how UK parties use different strategies to promote women MPs and how contagion influences the way women's representation spreads across the political system. In my second paper, published in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, I show that voters are more positive towards parties that represent women descriptively.  In a paper co-authored with Bruno Castanho Silva published at Legislative Studies Quarterly,  we show that women are speaking different from men in parliament, this difference is due to both substance and style and larger in policy areas that are more important to women. Finally, in a paper published at the European Journal of Politics and Gender, I outline that women are more likely to cosponsor legislation, especially with other women and when they are underrepresented in parliament.

Additionally, I am interested in parliamentary debate more generally: Together with Sven-Oliver Proksch, Will Lowe and Stuart Soroka, we developed an approach to measure legislative conflict through sentiment analysis (published in Legislative Studies Quarterly), which we will apply, among other areas, to the study of minority governments. In a paper in  Political Analysis, Christopher Wratil, Sven-Oliver Proksch and I show how researchers can use automatic speech recognition to generate text data.

In an article published at the American Political Science Review, we use a dataset of speeches in the Council of the EU, collected through that method, to study the responsiveness of governments to public opinion. For more details, see "Publications" and "Ongoing Projects". Together with Christopher Wratil, I recently published research on legitimacy perceptions on the European Union in the European Journal of Political Research. Using a survey experiment in five European countries, we point to the importance of sociotropic representation for legitimacy beliefs: Citizens find decisions to be more legitimate, if other people support those decisions.