Dr Mihail Chiru
Associate Professor of Comparative Central and Eastern European Politics
Mihail Chiru is Associate Professor of Comparative Central and Eastern European Politics at the University of Oxford and Governing Body Fellow of St Antony’s College. He first joined Oxford as a Departmental Lecturer at OSGA in 2019. Prior to Oxford, he taught at the University of Southampton and at the Central European University and conducted postdoctoral work at UCLouvain (Belgium) and Median Research Centre (Romania). He received a PhD (awarded Summa Cum Laude) in Comparative Politics from the Central European University.
His research focuses on legislative behaviour, party politics and voting behaviour in Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union. He is the author of more than three dozen articles published in journals including The Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of European Public Policy and European Union Politics.
Mihail is also the author of a study commissioned by the European Parliament Research Service on the ‘Parliamentary oversight of governments’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic’, which he presented at a hearing of the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic. The study’s conclusions were incorporated in the report that the European Parliament adopted on the pandemic.
He is currently working on three broad research agendas. The first seeks to explain how Eastern and Western European legislators vote on climate change mitigation legislation by leveraging heterogeneity in electoral systems incentives and the uneven distribution of green transition costs to constituencies, while also accounting for public opinion differences. The second agenda draws on observational and experimental data to evaluate the role of civil society ties and militant democracy interventions in the resurgence and potential containment of the far-right in Eastern Europe. The third agenda aims to improve our understanding of how Eastern and Western European politicians react to extreme weather events: under which conditions are they more likely to call for more climate change adaptation measures or on the contrary, to deny the connection between these weather hazards and climate change?