Dr Isabelle Hertner

Isabelle researches party politics in Germany, Britain, France, and at the European Union level. She is the director of King’s Centre for German Transnational Relations. Isabelle joined King’s in September 2016, having previously worked as a lecturer in German and European Politics and Society at the University of Birmingham. She was also the deputy director of Birmingham’s Institute for German Studies (IGS). Isabelle holds a PhD in European politics from Royal Holloway (University of London) and a MA in European Political and Administrative Studies from the College of Europe in Bruges. She did her undergraduate degree in Politics, French and Italian at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and spent a year studying at Sciences Po Bordeaux.

Research

Isabelle is an expert on political parties in the UK, Germany, France, and at the European Union level. Her research is comparative in nature and draws primarily on qualitative methods, such as elite interviews, surveys, participant observation.

Isabelle’s research focuses on:

• Political parties and gender, and in particular, women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s representation
• Party organisation (intra-party democracy and the power of members)
• Party policies
• Party discourses
• EU-level parties (‘Europarties’) and their organisational and ideological development
• Social Democratic parties and the European Union
• Far-right parties and gender
• The politics of Brexit
• German and French EU politics

Isabelle’s research cuts across EU-level and national politics. She is an expert on political parties at the national and European levels. In 2018 she published her research monograph Centre-left parties and the European Union (Manchester University Press) in which she compared how the Labour Party, the French Socialists and the German Social Democrats deal with the challenges of EU membership. She has also published journal articles on Europarties and their individual members; on toxic masculinity inside political parties; and on the immigration policies and discourses of Germany’s CDU/CSU during Angela Merkel’s chancellorship.

Isabelle has co-edited the 10^th edition of Politics UK (Routledge, 2022), for which she wrote a chapter on Gender and British Politics.

Teaching

Isabelle teaches on a variety of undergraduate modules, such as British Politics, European Gender Politics, and Comparative European Politics.

In the past she has also taught modules on the European Union, Britain and the European Union, Political Analysis, Research Methods, and the Welfare State in Europe.

PhD Supervisions

Isabelle has supervised seven PhD students to completion and would welcome applications in the following research areas:

• Political parties in Europe: organisation, policies, discourses, strategies
• Gender and the far right
• Women and LGBTQ+ people’s representation in politics
• The European Parliament: elections, internal politics and policies
• Europarties
• German and French politics

Expertise and public engagement

Isabelle has appeared live on Sky News to speak about German elections and British EU politics.

Isabelle has also given an interview on BBC 4. In addition, she has written pieces for The Conversation on German politics, done a podcast for The UK in a Changing Europe on the 2021 German elections, written a piece for the LSE’s Brexit blog and the PSA’s Political Insight blog (on the British Labour Party).