MSCA Full-Time Doctoral Fellowship in Political Science & EU Studies

Entitled ‘Dissensus over the rule of law in transnational parliamentary arenas: the case of the European Parliament’ the individual research project the hired fellow will execute is in the fields of Political Science and European Studies.

This is a 3-year full-time EU-funded MSCA doctoral fellowship set up as part of the so-called GEM-DIAMOND research project which will collectively assess the EU’s capacity to act given the challenges facing Democratic Institutions, the rise of Alternative MOdels and mounting Normative Dissensus (DIAMOND).

The hired fellow will accomplish their PhD both at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) as well as at the Université de la Sorbonne (Paris1) as they work towards a double doctoral degree awarded by both institutions.

The fellow hired for three years through the ULB, will tackle the concept of dissensus from a political science perspective by analysing the recent shift from consensus to dissensus regarding liberal democracy. This individual doctoral project will focus on debates in the European Parliament (EP) when unpacking the conflicting conceptions of democracy and the rule of law promoted since the early 1990s. It will shed new light on power and lines of conflict, be they ideological, partisan, strategic or gendered, and map the actors and their political and social resources involved in these controversies along the different lines of conflict.

With a focus on power and ideas, the hired will explore conflicting conceptions of democracy and the rule of law promoted by different political groups in the EP since the early 1990s. The European Parliament is an ideal case to shed light on the divide over the rule of law. As a collective body competing for the embodiment of European democracy, over the past decades, the EP has made the rule of law a central cause. The EP constitutes an excellent empirical field to observe the shift from consensus to dissensus and its effect on the European policy processes