Jan Pesl successfully defended his PhD thesis on the EU legitimacy changes on 17 November 2023.
Jan Pesl with his adjudication committee and supervisors. From left: Bjørn Schiermer Andersen, Virginie Van Ingelgom, Jan Pesl, Asimina Michailidou, Cathrine Holst and Hajo Boomgaarden.
Jan Pesl has studied the changes in EU legitimacy preceding Brexit. Between 2004 and 2016, the EU underwent three crises: the financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis and the refugee crisis. These impacted two of EU's central arrangements, the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the Schengen area of unrestricted movement.
How did these three crises change how EU legitimacy was constructed in the UK public sphere?
Pesl answered this question by using computer-assisted quantitative text analysis (supervised machine-learning) and qualitative discourse analysis.
His findings suggest that the EU’s institutional design has led to recurrent legitimation problems and a legitimation crisis. However, it is unlikely that the EU has experienced a severe legitimacy crisis in the period.
About the public defence
Master in Sosiology Jan Pesl at ARENA Centre for European Studies and Department of Sociology and Human Geography defended his thesis ‘From Critical Capacity to Legitimation Crisis: The EU legitimacy changes and the UK public sphere before Brexit’ on 17 November 2023.
The title of the trial lecture was ‘The relevance and challenges of computational text analysis approaches for EU studies/social sciences'.
The adjudication committee was Senior Research Associate Professor Virginie Van Ingelgom, Faculty of Economy, Social and Political Sciences and Communication, UCLouvain, Belgium, Professor Hajo Boomgaarden, Department of Communication, University of Vienna, and Professor Bjørn Schiermer Andersen, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo.
Jan Pesl was one of 15 PhD fellows who took part of the EU funded project The Post-Crisis Legitimacy of the European Union (PLATO), coordinated by ARENA. His supervisors were Senior Researcher Asimina Michailidou, ARENA, and Professor Cathrine Holst, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas.
Find the scientific abstract here.
Congratulations, Dr. Pesl!
