François Randour
March, 2022 - June, 2022
Visiting post-doctoral fellow
François Randour is a postdoctoral researcher and guest lecturer in political science at the Department of Political, Social and Communication sciences, University of Namur. He is part of the research institute Transitions. After completing his PhD at UCLouvain focusing on the control of Austrian, Belgian and German domestic parliaments of Council of the EU meetings, he is currently investigating the role of MEPs career patterns on their parliamentary activities. He was also previously a guest lecturer at the University of Antwerp (2019-2021) and at UCLouvain (2019-2020) and a visiting scholar at the University of Antwerp in 2018 (Belgium) and at Mannheim University in 2019 (Germany).
Research interests
François Randour's research and teaching interests focus on EU decision-making processes and EU negotiations, regional, national and European parliaments, multi-level governance, federalism and political discourse analysis. He also developed a specific interest in mixed-method research, with a particular focus on qualitative techniques, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and more recently, computational text analysis.
Research project pursued at the CEE
The research stay at SciencesPo is undertaken in the framework of the research project 'Evolv'EP', funded by the FSR-FNRS. The objective of the ‘Evolv’EP’ project is to examine how MEPs’ career patterns shape their voting behavior and parliamentary activities within and across EP’s legislative terms (1979-2019). In particular, during the research stay, François Randour first investigate - together with Prof. Rozenberg - on the impact of MEPs career patterns on the use of (1) written parliamentary questions (about 164.000 parliamentary questions). Beyond the analysis of the quantity of parliamentary questions, the project also looks at the content of the questions, by considering three dimensions: (a) the policies addressed (policy), (b) the questions related to polity and finally, the question of (c) territorial representation of MEPs (local, regional, national, European). Second, the project also analyses comparatively the (varying) use of written explanation of votes by Belgian, French, German, Irish and Luxembourgish MEPs (228 MEPs and about 45.000 WEVs) during the eighth parliamentary term (2014-19). To do so, the project will use a multi-method design combining quantitative text analysis (text as data) and quantitative analysis.
