Young Werther struggling at his desk.

Young Werther struggling at his desk.

Research Statement

My research interests focus on contemporary issues in European politics and the party politics of the treatment of social minorities. My research questions center around how political parties treat and respond to demands for equal treatment by national minorities, particularly members of the LGBTQ community. Besides members of the LGBTQ community, I have a strong personal interest in the status of the Jewish community in Europe in the context of an alleged rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. These constitute my core areas of focus today. Other areas of interest and research include the European Union, compliance with international law, and the politics of the Cheese state.

Below you will find the list of my published works as well as working papers and projects in progress. For a full list of publications, conference papers, and working papers, see my CV.

 

Minority Rights in the European Union:

  • “Where’s the Party? Explaining positions on same-sex marriage in Europe among would-be MPs,” with Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte and Brian Olinger, European Journal of Politics and Gender, 2021.

    ABSTRACT:

    There is a general pattern that the advancement of LGBT human rights legislation advanced in step with changing national public opinion. However, a more detailed analysis shows that some countries’ governments adopted legislation sooner than predicted by levels of national support, while some continue to lag. We argue that knowing why some are leaders and laggards requires investigating the attitudes members of parliament themselves. Furthermore, what drives those attitudes? Does a candidate’s political ideology or personal belief system explain their position? There is evidence for both in the existing literature. Using an under-utilized data set on attitudes candidates for parliamentary office, we find that a candidate’s religious socialization and practice has a greater effect on a would-be MP’s attitudes, but politicization has grown over time. Our findings create a basis for future research to examine how parliamentarians’ attitudes change over time, if at all, and the degree to which there are congruent with their constituents.

  • “The Political Economy of LGBT Rights,” Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Rights, December 2019

    ABSTRACT:

    Equal treatment for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community has improved at a rapid pace around the world since the gay rights movement first rose up to become a salient global force for change. With important regional exceptions, laws criminalizing same-sex sexual relations have not only come down in multiple countries, but same-sex couples can now also construct families in many advanced industrialized countries. Public acceptance of homosexuality, even in some non-Western countries, has increased dramatically. Yet, within those general trends hides the remarkable unevenness in the spread and adoption of policies fostering legal, social, and economic equality for LGBTQ communities around the world. Policy change toward more equal treatment for sexual minorities is concentrated in the developed world and within the cisgender gay and lesbian communities in particular. The existing literature in policy change shows the importance of transnational activists, changing international norms, and increasing levels of secularization have made this possible. But the effectiveness of these factors rests on an underlying foundation of socioeconomic factors based on economic and social development that characterizes advanced industrialized states. There is an uneven distribution of resources and interests among pro and anti-LGBT activist groups alike, and the differing levels of economic development in which they operate that explains the decidedly uneven nature of how LGBTQ human rights have advanced in the past 50 years. In addition, new political parties and activist organizations have emerged to lead the backlash against LGBTQ rights, showing progress is neither inevitable nor linear. In addition, serious gaps in what we know about LGBT politics remain because of the overwhelming scholarly focus on advanced industrialized states and policies that benefit the cisgender, gay and lesbian middle class in primarily Western societies. The study of LGBT politics in non-Western and developing countries is woefully neglected, for reasons attributed to the nature of the research community and the subject area. In the developed world, greater attention is needed to inequality within the LGBTQ community and issues beyond same-sex marriage. Finally, issues of intersectionality and how different groups within the LGBT community have enjoyed most of the benefits of the gay rights movement since its takeoff more than 50 years ago.

  • “Rainbows and Crosses: Noncompliance with EU Law prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination,” Journal of European Social Policy, 2019, 30, 2, 241-258.

    ABSTRACT:

    The Framework Directive on Equality in Employment (EED) is the first and still the only EU law that requires states to combat sexual orientation discrimination. The EED requires states to change employment laws or create news ones that prevent employers and co-workers from discriminating against gay and lesbian employees. Implementation of the EED was problematic, despite strong support for the law among many EU member states. An analysis of the EED’s provisions that change national laws protecting workers from sexual orientation discrimination shows that religious beliefs, attitudes towards homosexuality, and the role religious organizations play in providing social services for the government affect the likelihood of the law being implemented correctly. In countries where religious organizations provide a substantial share of a country’s social services and where socially conservative attitudes are dominant, governments are more likely to implement the law incorrectly. These findings are based on an innovative research design that controls for the legal subject matter a directive addresses. When we take the legal subject matter seriously, public opinion about an EU law can affect compliance, contradicting earlier research showing it has little to no role. This article also sheds more light on how religious organizations and beliefs affect European integration, comparatively understudied in the literature. Specifically, it explains why religious cleavages between the member states will prevent additional EU legislation to protect the human rights of members of the EU LGBT community.

ABSTRACT:

Although a growing number of European governments have legalized same-sex civil unions (SSU) and same-sex marriage (SSM) in the past two decades, others have moved in the opposite direction by stalling partnership legislation or adopting constitutional amendments defining marriage as a heterosexual institution. Why do some European countries move forward with SSU/SSM policies while others do not? Few studies have examined the effects of party politics on partnership laws and those that do highlight the positive influence of Left parties. We revisit this question and suggest that SSU/SSM legalization depends not on governments’ traditional left/right positioning as commonly claimed, but on their preferences for ‘traditional’ versus ‘self-expression’ values. Using event history analysis, we show that governments favoring postmaterialist, self-expression values are more likely to legalize SSU/SSM, irrespective of where they are situated on the conventional left/right spectrum. Along with suggesting that competition over SSU/SSM has not been absorbed into the left/right axis, our findings show the importance of political ideology, and not just social movements or public opinion, for the advancement of LGBT rights in Europe.

ABSTRACT:

The Employment Equality Directive expands protections for, among others, gays and lesbians from discriminatory employment practices. This directive has been implemented poorly in Ireland, the UK, and Germany, because religious organizations believed their core ideological and material interests were threatened by extending these protections, even though degrees of policy fit vary among all three countries. Furthermore, the European Commission’s enforcement measures have not been effective in securing compliance. The European Commission has permitted noncompliance to continue in Ireland and the UK. Only change in the partisan make-up of the government led to compliance. This article speaks to ongoing debates about the causes of noncompliance with European Union law and how religious groups, not often considered in the scholarly literature, are now trying to limit the effects of European integration.

ABSTRACT:

Why are European Jews migrating to Israel in significant numbers? Israeli leaders and popular press reports suggest that incidents of antisemitism have reached such high levels across Europe, even in fully democratic countries, that Jews are leaving once again for greater security. Others suggest that Jews are migrating for the same reasons other migrants do: for greater economic opportunity. Until now, we have had no way of weighing the relative merit of these claims, hampered by the absence of reliable comparative data on antisemitism in Europe. Leveraging a new dataset compiled by the author, this study rigorously tests these competing hypotheses and finds European Jews migrate because of greater economic opportunity in Europe. While concerns about antisemitism in Europe are at record highs and more Jews are considering moving than ever before in the post-war era, so far most Jewish migration is to take advantage of better economic conditions in Israel. These findings explain why European national governments and Jewish community leaders are urging Jews not to migrate to Israel. 

Chapter in Edited Volume

  • "Rightwing Populism in a Post-Marriage World: The Varieties of Backlash" in The Politics of LGBTQ Equality: Marriage and Beyond, Helma de Vries-Jordan, and Ellen Andersen, eds., Kansas University Press, forthcoming.

    ABSTRACT

Among the issues supposedly central to rightwing populist ideology is opposition to sexual diversity and LGB human rights. By standing for traditional social values, they assign the LGBT community outsider status, as alien to the “people.” However, a survey of rightwing populist parties’ positions across Europe shows there is more diversity than often assumed. In countries where there is no same-sex marriage and low public approval of homosexuality, RWP parties are at the vanguard of opposing LGB rights in their party system. However, in countries where approval of gay rights is high nationally and SSM is in place, rightwing populist parties defend LGB rights and give the community “insider” status, making them part of the “people.” One implication is that as attitudes and the legislative status quo changes, so do the positions of RWP parties on gay rights, a phenomenon consistent with other components of rightwing populist ideology. One possible consequence of the ability to morph positions on LGB rights is the stunting of further progress in extending the protection of LGBT human rights as the appeal of rightwing populism grows among some members of the LGBT community itself.

Working Papers:

Rainbows and Referenda: Popular Votes Over LGBT Rights in Switzerland Since 2005”

ABSTRACT:

Will democratic majorities deny the civil rights of minorities when given the opportunity at the ballot box? With regard to the LGBT rights specifically, the record is mixed. Same-sex partnerships (SSP) have been approved by democratic majorities in referenda in five countries. Popular initiatives to ban same-sex marriage (SSM) have only succeeded in the United States in the 2000s and in Croatia in 2013, excluding the referenda that received a majority of votes in Slovakia and Romania, but were nullified for failure to have sufficient turnout. In Switzerland, two popular initiatives were held in 2016—one at the federal level, known as the people’s initiative “Für Ehe und die Familie—Gegen die Heiratstrafe (For Marriage and the Family—Against the Marriage Penalty),” and in the canton of Zürich, “Schutz der Ehe (Protection of Marriage),” which would amend the canton’s constitution to define marriage as exclusively between a man and woman. This article moves beyond debates over whether majorities overturn minority rights, but what shapes voters’ choices. Analyzing four referenda over gay rights over 20 years in Switzerland, we find that a voter’s religiosity has declined over time as factor and partisan identity has frown in importance.

BOOK

  • The Political Economy of Noncompliance: Adjusting to the Single European Market, Routledge, 2011.

ABSTRACT

The Political Economy of Noncompliance explains why states fail to comply with international law. Over the last sixty years, states have signed treaties, established international courts and other supranational institutions to achieve the benefits of international cooperation. Nowhere has this been more successful than in the European Union. European integration has produced one of the most intensely legalized regimes in the world. Yet, even in the European Union, noncompliance of states often occurs. This book explores the sources of and reasons for noncompliance, and assesses why noncompliance varies across the Member States and over time by looking at the domestic politics of complying with international law. The author uses examples from the history of economic integration in the EU in three countries and two different policy areas to demonstrate these mechanisms at work.

OTHER TOPICS:

  • "Bearing their share of the burden: Europe in Afghanistan," European Security, 2009, Vol. 18, Issue 4, pp. 461-482.

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the relative burden European members of NATO are bearing in the war in Afghanistan. Some argue that the current contribution of European forces is on par with the American contribution. However, current studies do not analyze Europe's ISAF contribution in comparison to some benchmark by which relative burden-sharing can be accurately determined. This article compares Europe's involvement in the war in Afghanistan to past missions, current contributions and in light of the benefits each country is likely to enjoy. The quantitative and qualitative findings show that there is an extensive amount of free-riding occurring both in terms of hard and soft power, although it varies across time and even within NATO Europe. Inadequate forces provided by European NATO countries jeopardize the likelihood of success in Afghanistan.

  • "Weighing Macedonia's Entry into NATO," Mediterranean Quarterly, 2010, Vol. 21, Issue 1, pp. 45-60.

ABSTRACT

Greece's veto of the entry of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2009 provides an opportunity to evaluate the possible costs and benefits of a FYROM membership. For NATO, FYROM's inclusion has only a marginal impact on the success of NATO's military missions. In fact, the inclusion of FYROM could mean more, not fewer, security challenges for the alliance. For FYROM, the benefits of NATO candidacy have not materialized. While its civil-military relations have improved, shortcomings still exist among FYROM's democratic and free-market institutions. Evaluating FYROM's case for membership results in a better understanding of the challenges and concerns related to continued eastward expansion.