The paper "The Power of Contact: Europe as a Network of Transnational Attachment", coauthored with Jan Delhey, Monika Verbalyte, and Auke Aplowski, has just been published online first at the European Journal of Political Research. A free pre-print version is available here.

In this article, we propose transnational attachment as a novel indicator of sense of community in Europe, arguing that this hitherto neglected dimension is substantially and structurally different from alternative ones such as cross-border trust and identification. Combining Eurobarometer 73.3 data on ties between all EU-27 countries with further dyadic data, we show empirically that the European network of transnational attachment has an asymmetric core-periphery structure centered around five extremely popular countries (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain). In line with transactionalist theory, cross-border mobility and communication are strongly related to transnational attachment. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the network of transnational attachment is much denser among those with a higher than among those with a lower level of education. Our results suggest that offering European citizens incentives to travel to peripheral countries may help counterbalance the current asymmetric structure of transnational attachment, thereby increasing Europe’s social cohesion.

On Thursday, 12 October 2017, I successfully defended my PhD Thesis Mapping the Transnational World: Towards a Comparative Sociology of Regional Integration. The examination board, consisting of Prof. Dr. Jan Delhey, Prof. Dr. Steffen Mau, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Gerhards, Prof. Dr. Johannes Huinink, Dr. Franziska Deutsch, Dr. Arndt Wonka, and Ms. Nora Waitkus,  unanimously decided on a "pass with distinction".  I would like to thank everyone involved for their commitment.

"On the Europeanization of Actions and Attitudes: A Macrosociological Comparison of the EU Member States", a paper co-authored with Jan Delhey, has been published (in German) at Berliner Journal für Soziologie in a special issue on Horizontal Europeanization edited by Christian Lahusen and Susanne Pernicka.