Sabine Saurugger

Sabine Saurugger is a professor of political science and former director of Sciences Po Grenoble-UGA. Her research focuses on the study of European Union public policies and institutions, the relationship between law and politics, and the politics of crises, with a particular focus on the European Union. Her work on EU public policies and institutions analyses how the EU’s institutional architecture shapes and is reshaped by policy-making processes, drawing on policy process and actor-centred approaches to understand institution-building, interest representation and policy change. In the area of law and politics, she investigates the interplay between legal norms and political dynamics within the EU, studying how hard and soft law interact, how litigation and judicial strategies are mobilized by political and social actors, and how the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) functions as a political actor in its own right. Her research on the politics of crises analyses how the EU responds to, and is transformed by, successive crises – economic and financial, health related, and geopolitical. The focus is on particular on the role of policy entrepreneurs, institutional resilience, and the process of preference formation in shaping EU governance under conditions of uncertainty. 

Across these three areas, she concentrates on an actor-centred approach that pays close attention to how institutions, norms and crises interact to redefine boundaries and legitimacy of European integration. 

• Junior Chair of the Institut universitaire de France (2009-2014)
• Senior Chair of the Institut universitaire de France (2026-2031)

Sabine Saurugger is member of the editorial boards of the Journal of European Integration (JEI), the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis (JCPA), Political Studies Review (PSR) and the Revue française de science politique (RFSP).

She is co-founder with Philippe Rivaud and former editor of the journal Politique européenne.