Lennard Alke defended his PhD thesis on May 15th, 2025. 

His thesis, "To debate or not to debate: politicization dynamics of EU affairs in national parliaments", was supervised by Emiliano Grossman. It investigates how the politicization of EU affairs in plenary speech has developed in national parliaments, and what determines plenary groups’ politicization behaviour. 

Firstly, the thesis traces the evolution of parliamentary debates on EU affairs in national parliaments. It then mobilises methods of quantitative text analysis to measure the politicisation levels around EU affairs in parliamentary speech. Ultimately, a set of explanatory hypotheses is statistically tested. 
Analytical focus is put on the German Bundestag, the French Assemblée Nationale, and the British House of Commons over a 27-year time span (1990 – 2017).
The thesis finds that all cases reveal a fundamental re-evaluation of EU affairs over time in plenary debate, electoral competition, or general politics. Levels of politicization vary greatly between parliaments and across time, but neither the levels nor the variation are related to the specific focus of re-valuation or the broad national relationship with the process of integration.
Plenary groups use different nuances of politicization strategically. Their decision to politicize the issue is mostly determined by internal factors and the prevalence of eurosceptic sentiment in a given polity. Established parties sidestep electoral conflict or confrontation with a more eurosceptic public and eurosceptic parties, thereby arguably ducking an important democratic responsibility. Parliamentary speech on EU affairs is also not reliably responsive to EU executive events or the exercise of EU authority, and opposition parties politicize EU affairs less than their counterparts in government.

The jury was composed of Mirjam Dageförde (American University of Paris), Emiliano Grossman (Sciences Po, PhD supervisor), Nonna Mayer (CNRS), Julien Navarro (Université catholique de Lille), Etienne Ollion (CNRS), Natasha Wunsch (Universität Freiburg).

Lennard Alke is now working as a Strategy Consultant at Accenture, specialised in Public Services and Capital Markets.