Biography

Anja Thomas is a Research Associate at the Robert Schuman Centre where she works on populism as a moral pressure on policy-making in parliaments, parliamentary participation in the EMU and the legitimacy of the EU polity during the Covid-19 pandemic. Anja is a member of the core faculty of the EUI for the doctoral programme ‘Perceptions of Europe in a changing world’ (Dahrendorf Programme, European Studies Centre, Oxford University).
Her research focuses on the transformation of representative democracy. She works on members of parliament as main anchors of representation and studies their interaction with government, business and civil society at different levels of governance. Anja combines ethnographic work with systematic comparison across groups with similar observable behaviour and across time periods. During her joint agreement thesis between Sciences Po and the University of Cologne, Anja worked on the (dis)institutionalisation of European affairs control in the French Assemblée nationale and the German Bundestag.
After her PhD, she pursued her work thanks to fellowships in the Oxford University-Sciences Po Postdoctoral Programme and the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute. Her work draws on different bodies of literature, in particular comparative democracy studies and parliamentary sociology, political economy, the sociology of institutions and the study of regimes.

Anja has taught and published widely on questions relating to parliamentary sociology and European integration in different academic communities and languages in Europe, for example on Brexit and parliamentary sovereignty. Her award-winning PhD was published with the German academic publishing house NOMOS. Anja is a member of different networks of EU researchers in Europe and takes regularly part in dissemination and communication activities on EU affairs, for example at the Rendez-vous de l’Histoire à Blois or the Kölner Europatage, at the latter of which she was the keynote speaker. Anja is also interested in questions pertaining to the sociology of democracy studies and cross-cultural comparison.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

Ongoing

• Transnational Democracy in the 21st century

Completed

• Narrating COVID-19: how Europe as Union fares

Recent research output

• THOMAS, Anja (2024), Populism as moral pressure : towards a conceptualisation of the impact of populism on public policymaking in parliament, Working Paper
• THOMAS, Anja (2023), Frankreich, Contribution to book
• THOMAS, Anja (2023), La Chambre des communes et l’Europe : la crise 'à bas bruit', Contribution to book
• THOMAS, Anja (2023), Who lends the EU the ‘right to govern’?: symbolic legitimacy vs. pragmatic policy framing in party communication during the Covid-19 pandemic, Working Paper
• VAN RENTERGHEM, Marion; THOMAS, Anja; LAZAR, Marc; BEAUNE, Clement (2020), Un état européen et démocratique s'est-il révélé dans la crise du Covid?, Video
• THOMAS, Anja (2020), Domesticating' and differentiating the European Union : parliamentary EU experts in the Assemblée Nationale and the Bundestag, Article