Christel Koop

Professor of Political Economy

About

I am a Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London. Previously, I was a Reader, Senior Lecturer, and Lecturer in the same department, and an LSE Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I am also a research associate of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation. I obtained my PhD degree from the European University Institute, and hold a BA and MPhil degree from Leiden University. I held visiting positions at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), the Hertie School in Berlin, the University of Tartu, the University of Utrecht, the Montesquieu Institute in the Hague, and Columbia University in New York.


I am interested in the insulation of policy-making from politics and the electoral process, both at the domestic and European level, and particularly in the field of economic governance. My research has primarily focused on the independence, accountability, performance and politicisation of arm's length bodies. Currently, I am working on a set of papers on citizen engagement by these same organisations.

Publications

You can also find my articles and other publications via Google Scholar; for earlier versions of pay-walled articles, please see my ResearchGate page.

Working papers

Current projects

The research projects I am currently working on are:

(1) Regulators and central banks under pressure: Analysing communicative responses (Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship)

  • Independent regulatory agencies and central banks have come under growing public and political pressure since the global financial crisis. Whilst their independence has always been criticised for a lack of legitimacy, their performance is now also increasingly contested. How have the organisations responded to this pressure? In this project, I analyse the speeches delivered by their key decision-makers between 2000 and 2019. Has the focus shifted toward consumer interests and citizen trust? Has their scope increased, and their complexity decreased? By analysing speeches, the project will shed light on the communicative and strategic responses of unelected bodies under pressure.

(2) Reconnecting citizens to the administrative state (NORFACE grant) (with Martin Lodge, Caelesta Braun, Jacint Jordana, and Nick Sitter)

  • Public administration is central to democratic governance as it connects citizens to the state in multiple ways. Yet, the current age of political turbulence – expressed through citizen dissatisfaction and populist politics – represents a fundamental challenge to the authority of the institutions of the administrative state. This has led to disconnection, but also to administrative efforts to reconnect citizens with the state. The RECONNECT project investigates how calls for more 'responsive' administrative state institutions have developed – both among citizens and politicians – and how the administrative state has sought to become more responsive, especially when simultaneously faced with expectations of neutrality and impartiality. The project explores five distinct citizen-focused dimensions of the administrative state: constitutional, regulatory, enabling, consumer-protecting and consulting dimensions. Using a mixed-methods approach, including attitudinal, media, document and interview analysis, RECONNECT generates new knowledge to compare and explain variation across both European jurisdictions and dimensions of the administrative state. In the process, the project contributes to academic and practitioner debates regarding the future of the administrative state, and to a better understanding of how citizens can be reconnected to wider democratic governance and the administrative state in particular.
  • RECONNECT is funded by the AEI, ESRC, NWO and RCN, and the European Commission through Horizon 2020 (Grant No. 822166).

Supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD projects in areas within my research expertise, especially regulatory policy and decision-making by arm's length bodies.

Current PhD researchers

Graduated PhD researchers

Contact

Location

Department of Political Economy
King's College London
Bush House (North East Wing)
30 Aldwych
London WC2B 4BG
United Kingdom

Telephone

+44 (0)20 7848 7324