Members

KEPRU members

The members of KEPRU and their main research interests are as follows:

Professor Kurt Richard Luther - Convenor and Editor of KEPRU Working Papers.
Parties and consociational democracy; parties and federalism; radical right-wing parties; parties in Austria; political parties and European integration

Dr Elisabeth Carter: Elections; electoral systems and other electoral institutions; electoral behaviour; party competition, right-wing extremism

Professor Robert Ladrech: Social democratic parties; European transnational party federations; French parties

Dr Philip Catney: British public policy; regional and urban governance; local Europeanization; environmental regulation; political ideologies and political practice

Dr Connor Little: Party organisation, policy and strategy; political careers; environmental politics; government coalitions; public policy; and Irish politics.

Associate members

Professor Thomas Poguntke - Universität Düsseldorf. Party organisation; party linkage; anti-party sentment; green parties; presidentialisation of parliamentary democracies; political parties and European integration; German politics

Dr Nicholas Aylott - Södertörn University. Scandinavian parties; social democracy; parties and the European Union; party organisation

Dr Gemma Loomes
Background and research interests:
I completed by PhD in 2008 under the supervision of Professor Kurt Richard Luther, entitled "Established parties' strategies and party system continuity: an empirical study of 17 western European countries between 1950 and 2006". My thesis focused on the role that political parties can play in the process of party system change and looked explicitly at the strategies and tactics that established parties employed in order to try to preserve their positions at the heart of western European party systems. This study involved assessing access to the media, party finance, electoral systems and electoral laws in order to determine how parties could affect the institutional and electoral environment in which they compete and with what results.

My main research interests lie within the field of comparative western European politics, political parties and party systems, and I am keen to develop my research interests in these fields in the future. My wider research interests include political parties and democracy, electoral systems and institutional engineering, and most notably, the role that political parties can play in shaping their environment.

A revised version of my thesis, Party Strategies in Western Europe: Party Competition and Electoral Outcomes was published by Routledge in 2011. I have worked on a Leverhulme-funded project on party competition on the centre-right with Philip Lynch and Richard Whitaker, and subsequently published an article in Parliamentary Affairs.