Sofia Wickberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science since August 2021. She is affiliated with the AISSR and the ACES, and a member of the programme group Transnational Configurations, Conflict and Governance. She previsously taught at Sciences Po (Paris and Reims), where she received her PhD, and at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (FR). She is associated with Sciences Po’s Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) and the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP). She is a founding member of the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN) and regularly collaborates with the OECD, the Open Government Partnership, the European Commission, the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre and Transparency International.

Expertise and research fields

• Corruption, anti-corruption efforts and public integrity: Sofia’s PhD and ensuing research focuses on the politics of anticorruption and public integrity and the definition of corruption as a public problem in Western Europe. She is currently working on the development of new methods for evaluating policy interventions in this policy domain.
• Transnationalisation of public policy: Her research also touches on the transnationalisation of policymaking and its effects on classical concepts and theories of policymaking. She is particularly interested in the construction of global and European public problems.
• The role of ideas, science and expertise in policymaking: Sofia’s research and teaching also looks at the role of ideas (in general) and science and expertise (in particular) on policymaking at the national, international and transnational levels.

Other links

• AISSR
• ACES

Research methods

•    Elite interviews
•    Archival research
•    Document analysis
•    Case studies
•    Interpretive policy analysis

Current research projects

I am currently working on a research project exploring the uses and effects of parliamentary ethics instruments in French politics.

I also work on a project that compares how gender-based violence is dealt with within the parliamentary institutions within the EU.

My latest research project is interested in how political corruption is socially constructed by the activities of different types of media and educational actors, and how political corruption affects citizens’ understanding of the quality of democracy, its legitimacy and credibility.

Research grants & honours

2023:  European Commission Horizon Europe “RESPOND Rescuing Democracy From Political Corruption In Digital Societies” (as WP leader, with Anne Kroon and Christopher Starke)

2023: Amsterdam Centre for European Studies “(Self-)Regulating sexual and moral harassment in European parliaments” (with Liza Mügge)

2022: Sciences Po LIEPP project “PolEthics: Beyond ethics instruments and institutions: an exploratory study of the uses and effects of ethics instruments in the French Parliament »

Sofia Wickberg teaches a graduate-level elective course titled ‘Draining the swamp: fighting corruption in the EU and beyond’, an RMSS methods elective on Policy Oriented Research, a BA elective on the international sources of public policy (how ideas, instruments and practices travel across borders) as well as a BA thesis group titled ‘What matters is what works”? Knowledge and expertise in policymaking’.