Research projects

ONGOING RESEARCH PROJECTS

BUREAUCRATIC revolving door  

The research project “Expertise In and Out of Government: The Bureaucratic Revolving Door and Its Regulation in EU Member States” (REVOLVE) looks at the revolving door phenomenon and ways to regulate it in select Member States: Finland, France and Slovenia as well as at the EU level. The project is funded by the Research Council of Finland until 2025. 

The project is discussed here in Finnish and here in English (the latter together with Lola Avril).

LOBBYING IN FINNISH MUNICIPAL POLITICS

The Kone Foundation research project LoSKa (2023-2027) will look into political influencing and lobbying in Finnish municipalities.

The project is discussed here and here in Finnish. 

 

COMPLETED RESEARCH PROJECTS

THIRD COUNTRY LOBBYING

The first Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher project (2013–2016) looked at how non-EU countries seek to influence the EU when it regulates the law and policy of chemicals. The key findings of the project can be found in a research article “‘Mr. Smith Goes to Brussels’: Third Country Lobbying and the Making of EU Law and Policy“, published in 2016 in the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies.

THE LOBBYIST

In my subsequent Academy of Finland Research Fellow project (2016–2021), I focused on the intersections between democracy, constitutionalism and lobbying, and in particular how lobbying regulations articulate and define a lobbyist. The findings are published as three research articles “Legal Lobbying: The Evolving (But Hidden) Role of Lawyers and Law Firms in the EU Public Affairs Market” in German Law Journal (2021),  “Are Lawyer Lobbyists Answerable to ‘a Higher Authority’? Bar Association Rules as Lobbying Regulation in the EU and the US” in Interest Groups & Advocacy (2022),  “A right to lobby? Comparing constitutional discourses in the EU and the US” in the Columbia Journal of European Law (Winter 2021-2022), and in a book chapter “Rock ’n’ Roll Stars or Guitar Technicians? Legal Advisors in NGO Political Advocacy Work” (CUP, 2022).

In addition to my academic work on the regulation of lobbying I have served in various expert positions relating to lobbying and its regulation. 

I was lead investigator in a project on lobbying regulation funded by the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office. The report, published in 2018, examined the lobbying registers of the EU, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Austria, and the US from three different – and yet interrelated – perspectives: 1) how they comply with international recommendations, 2) the role of public authorities, and 3) their advantages and disadvantages. The report, co-authored with Paul Tiensuu and available in Finnish, can be accessed here.

Between 2020-2021 I was an expert member in the Ministry of Justice’ s working group that prepared the Finnish Transparency Register Law.  As of June 2023, I have served as Vice-Chair of the Advisory Board for the Finnish Transparency Register. 

EU GOVERNANCE AND SOFT LAW

My doctoral thesis dealt with how the role of courts has been transformed by new governance instruments. The thesis was then reworked into a monograph entitled Adjudicating New Governance: Deliberative democracy in the European Union, published by Routledge in 2015. I also published a series of articles (European Law Journal, European Law Review, and Transnational Environmental Law) discussing the promises and pitfalls of so-called framework legislation, in particular framework directives in the EU.

My more recent soft law research has focused on EU soft law at the national level. I led the EU Commission funded Jean Monnet European Network on Soft Law Research (SoLaR, 2016–2019). This three-year project, involving contributions from more than 30 researchers from seven EU Member States, looked at the reception and impact of EU soft law in the Member States. A collection, co-edited together with Mariolina Eliantonio and Oana Stefan and entitled EU Soft Law in the Member States: Theoretical Findings and Empirical Evidence, was published by Hart Publishing in 2021.

Together with Mariolina Eliantonio and Steven Vaughan, I co-edited a Special Issue entitled “Is Soft Law Pandemic Proof?” focusing on how Member States use soft law to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The issue was published in the European Journal of Risk Regulation in 2021. My article, co-authored together with Martin Scheinin, analyses how soft law regulation was used in Finland during the first wave of the pandemic.

Together with Mariolina Eliantonio and Ulrika Mörth, I have co-edited  Research Handbook on Soft Law (Edward Elgar, 2023).