European radical right, overtourism, digital tools in cities, citizen participation: discover the projects of the CEE new PhD students

In 2024, the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) welcomed 8 new Phd students, focusing on various aspects of the radical right in Europe, digital tools in European (and other) cities, the use of participative devices as a means to restore political trust, and the consequences of overtourism in European cities. Discover their research projects in this article. 

Silvia Cesa-Bianchi joined the CEE to start a joint PhD programme with University of Milano-Bicocca (urban studies laboratory URBEUR). She previously earned a Bachelor's degree in Comparative European and International Legal Studies from the University of Trento and a Master’s degree in Environmental Law and Policy from University College London (UCL). After being a Research Assistant on projects pertaining to sustainability education, energy policies and the protection of biodiversity, she will turn to overtourism in European cities for her PhD research. She wants to use an environmental governance approach (starting from Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework) to analyse the impacts of overtourism and the emerging policy reactions. At the CEE, her PhD thesis is supervised by Richard Balme.

María-Katrina Cortez joined the CEE in March 2024. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, she earned two Master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and Sciences Po, working on young voters and militants of moderate and radical right parties in France. She is broadly interested in the intersection between religion and identity politics. Her PhD research focuses on political shifts to the Right and Radical Right and the resurgence of Catholicism as a political force as well as religious conversions for identitarian and political reasons. For her thesis project, co-supervised by Emiliano Grossman and Juliette Galonnier (CERI), she has been conducting repeated, longitudinal, life history interviews and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork  to investigate political socialisation in the French Right and traditionalist circles and an array of iterations of national identity, conservatism, and Catholicism.

Jessica De Rongé just joined the CEE as part of the POLLOT project led by Brenda Van Coppenolle. She previously earned two Master's degrees, in political science and statistics, from UCLouvain, where she studied youth participation in the Youth for Climate movement and measurement invariance of political efficacy across different cultures. For her PhD thesis, co-supervised by Brenda Van Coppenolle and Jan Rovny, she is studying mini-publics, assemblies of randomly selected citizens, demographically representative of the larger population, brought together to learn and deliberate on a topic in order to inform public opinion and decision-making. She will examine if citizens trust mini-publics as a political institution , and also how citizens and politicians perceive those mini-publics as a tool for participation.

Saga Oskarson Kindstrand earned her Master’s degree in Political Science from Sciences Po. She is interested in the mobilisation of formal partisan participation and populism, with a focus on a recent trend within a handful of European radical-right parties exhibiting characteristics of the mass-party type of organisation. After having conducted an ethnographic study of the Sweden Democrats (the Swedish radical-right party) for her Master’s thesis, she is now conducting a comparative analysis of the Sweden Democrats and the Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany, focusing on the conditions necessary for building party-base linkages and the development of long-term partisan collective identities. Her PhD thesis is supervised by Colin Hay.

Marius Perrin studied at Sciences Po’s School of Public Affairs where he earned a Master in Public Policy and Public Administration and also took part in the Research track. His Master’s research focused on local coalitions with the far right in Norway and Sweden, based on field work and existing data. For his doctoral thesis, jointly supervised by Nicolas Sauger and Caterina Froio, he will work on mainstreaming of the far right in Europe, with a focus on Sweden, Norway and France, using mixed methods. His aim is to understand how parties from both the left and the right seek to ostracise or legitimise each other in the political competition. 

Noémie Piolat earned a Master’s in Political Science (School of Reasearch, Political Behaviour track) from Sciences Po. Her Master’s thesis, supervised by Caterina Froio and Nonna Mayer, focused on the impact of sexism and sexist attitudes on radical right parties’ support in Europe and found that sexism is a good predictor of the support for those  parties in more egalitarian countries, supporting the notion of gender cultural backlash. In her doctoral research, supervised by Caterina Froio, she will continue investigating how sexism interacts with other factors, such as gender and age, by delving into the radical right gender gap in young voters. She plans to continue using quantitative methods, and to add text-as-data as well as an experimental component to her research. 

Oskar Steiner studied international relations and economy at the University of British Columbia and Sciences Po (Menton campus) before completing Sciences Po’s Urban School Master on Governing Ecological Transitions in Cities, alongside a master thesis in sociology. His PhD, supervised by Patrick Le Galès, will build on his Master’s thesis studying the construction and use of “digital twins” (or 3D models) of cities. At the crossroads of urban studies, science and technology studies and sociology of institutions, he will study the life cycle (problematization, construction, usage, maintenance) of AI-based tools used for environmental governance, aiming at understanding how they structure public action in Barcelona, Singapore and Paris. 

Luca Venga obtained a Bachelor's degree in Politics and International Relations from the University of Manchester and a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford. He started a PhD supervised by Patrick Le Galès as part of the LAC-EU doctoral network. He will conduct comparative research on the use of digital tools designed for participatory democracy in some Latin American and European cities, to understand how those tools shape citizen participation and are, in turn, shaped by the preferences and choices of their users. For this, he plans to conduct interviews with members of city governments and citizens, adopting a critical lens that takes into account the political and social aspects of technological innovation. 

Find out more

Welcome to our 10 new PhD candidates (2023)

In 2022, seven new PhD subjects with a focus on Europe and comparative studies

All the CEE PhD candidates