Sabine Saurugger is Professor of Political Science and former Director of Sciences Po Grenoble. Her research interests encompass European public policies, institutional dynamics, theories of European integration, and the politics of law. In collaboration with Fabien Terpan and Miriam Hartlapp, she has recently concluded a joint ANR-DFG research project of the Effects of Soft Law (EfSoLaw). During her stay as Mercator Fellow at the Jacques Delors Centre from March to May 2026, she will pursue two interrelated research projects. The first, entitled “Framing Crisis in the EU”, examines the influence of individual and collective actor constellations beyond executive leadership on the definition of crisis situations in the European Union, thus contributing to our understanding how different actors gain authority to frame crises and design governance responses in the EU. The second situates this enquiry within a more specific framework: in collaboration with Professor Mark Dawson and Leo Brandt, she will contribute to the DFG-funded project “Populism and the Constitutional Re-Configuration of the European Union”, which investigates the sources of variation in populist parties’ attitudes toward the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) – in particular, how such attitudes are conditioned by a party’s political status as an opposition force, a coalition partner or a governing majority.
