New Assistant Professor at the Department

Dear colleagues,

Hopefully you are doing well and are slowly returning to life in the real world again. I am Ellis Aizenberg and recently started as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. I am absolutely thrilled to start working here and am really looking forward to meeting you all and to hear all about your work.

Together with my partner and 9-month old son, I moved to Aarhus from Amsterdam. I am both Dutch and Israeli and grew up in a family where following the news about politics and conflict was always very important. In doing so, I developed an interest in power structures and news dynamics and decided to pursue a study in Political Communication.  

I obtained my PhD last year at the University of Amsterdam at the Political Science department and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher for the last two years at the same institution. I work on interest representation, lobbying and trust with a focus on corporate and citizen interest representation, using computational text methods, experimental designs and surveys.

During my PhD, I studied corporate lobbying behavior and political access in Western Europe with both a longitudinal and comparative perspective. My dissertation illustrates for the first time that corporations have increased their access to the political system in a corporatist context over the past decades. It also shows that economic, political-institutional and issue factors affect corporate lobbying activities. I became interested in corporate power when I worked as a researcher at an international lobby firm before starting my PhD project.

In my new capacity as Assistant Professor, I aim to continue working on corporate lobbying as well as on other ongoing projects that concern interest representation more broadly. These projects tap into citizen lobbying, the effects of Covid on interest representation and I plan to explore the link between interest representation and political trust.

Whenever I have spare time, I like to spend it with family, friends and good food. I also very much enjoy running, hiking and pilates.

Hope to be able to meet you all very soon!

All the best,

Ellis