Lise Esther Herman is Senior Lecturer in Politics. Her research bridges the fields of comparative politics, party studies and normative democratic theory, with a primary focus on the theory and practice of democratic partisanship. Specifically, she is interested in the role of partisan agency in contemporary democratic deficits, and in the politicization of democracy by both populist and non-populist actors. Current research projects include a mixed-method analysis of the positions of Members of the European Parliament on rule of law backsliding in the EU, and a comparative study of political debates around citizen participation and democratic innovations in France and the United Kingdom. Her first monograph, Democratic Partisanship: Party Activism in an Age of Democratic Crises, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.

University webpage: https://politics.exeter.ac.uk/staff/herman/