I am an assistant professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, a Jean Monnet Chair, and co-founder of the Connected_Politics Lab at UCD. Broadly speaking, my research agenda addresses various aspects of international and comparative politics, with a specific focus on policymaking in the European Union.

My research applies methods adapted from natural language processing to analyse a large corpus of legislative texts in the EU. These new methods and data provide insight into patterns of conflict and cooperation between the Council, the Commission, and the Parliament in the EU policy-making process. These questions lie at the heart of the European integration project and investigating the manner in which patterns of conflict and cooperation between these institutional actors have changed as the EU has evolved over time is central to understanding this EU policy-making process. The methods developed when studying the legislative process in the EU also have the potential to be adapted to other legislative bodies, and further effort in this direction is envisaged as part of the broader research project, starting with the replication of important existing studies in comparative politics.

Previous research pertains to the role of transparency and censorship in the EU policy-making process, specifically looking at how different levels of transparency affect negotiator position taking during negotiations. I have also considered the determinants of legislative transparency within the Council of Ministers, as this is a central concern for those concerned with the democratic legitimacy of EU decision making.

 

Recent publications:

Bearg, N., Cross, J.P. (2022). Central banking in the 21st century- A crisis of accountability. European Journal of Political Economy,  102294 

Cross, J. P., Eising, R., Hermansson, H., & Spohr, F. (2021). Business interests, public interests, and experts in parliamentary committees. Their impact on legislative amendments in the German Bundestag. West European Politics 44(2), 354-377

Cross, J.P., Greene, D. (2020). Talk is not cheap: Policy agendas, information processing, and the unusally proprotional nature of European Central Bank communications policy responses. Governance, 33, 425-444