Contact
Biography
Will Daniel is Assistant Professor in Comparative Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham (UK). He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and teaches modules in comparative politics and research methods. He also serves as the School's Director of Undergraduate Admissions and Co-Director for the REPRESENT Research Centre for the Study of Parties and Democracy.
Prior to the University of Nottingham, Will was Assistant Professor of Political Science at Francis Marion University in South Carolina (USA). He obtained his PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013, where he was also affiliated with the University's European Union Center of Excellence and held visiting doctoral studentships at Sciences Po - Paris, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Will holds an MA in Political Science and Graduate Certificates in European Union Studies and Western European Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, a BA in French and Political Science from Wake Forest University, and has studied at The German School at Middlebury College.
Expertise Summary
Will is interested in how systemic changes condition behavioural outcomes among political elites. Most of his work examines the individual backgrounds and identities of political actors and asks how their institutional environment affects their career behaviour. His substantive research interests include political parties, legislatures, gender and representation, and European Union politics. He has teaching expertise across the comparative politics, research methods, and international relations curricula.
Will's monograph, Career Behaviour and the European Parliament: All Roads Lead through Brussels?, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Additional research has appeared in JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, European Union Politics, Party Politics, Journal of European Integration, The Journal of European Public Policy, The Journal of Legislative Studies, Research & Politics, and Politics & Gender.
Teaching Summary
At the University of Nottingham, Will regularly provides teaching on the following modules:
- POLI 1014 - Intro to Comparative Politics (module convener)
- POLI 2014 - Crises and Controversies in European Politics
- POLI 2047 - How Voters Decide
- POLI 3121 - Gender and Political Representation (module co-convener)
Current students can book on for office hours during term time, using the School of Politics and IR booking page.
Research Summary
Will's ongoing research examines how institutional and system-level changes in legislative and party politics interact with politicians' individual backgrounds and career behaviours. He's currently… read more
Selected Publications
PhD Supervision
I am interested in supervising students who want to work in the following areas:
- European Union and European integration
- Legislative politics and political parties
- Gender and political representation
- Individual backgrounds and career paths
- Digital campaigning and social media
- Mixed method research designs using bespoke sources of data
Interested students should reach out directly by email to discuss project ideas, prior to applying.
Supervision of successfully completed PhD theses:
Ongoing supervision of PhD students:
- Sarah Jeu - 'China's Cyber Power and the Social Construction of Technology' [2nd supervisor]
Current Research
Will's ongoing research examines how institutional and system-level changes in legislative and party politics interact with politicians' individual backgrounds and career behaviours. He's currently working on a book manuscript with Andrea Aldrich (Yale) about the uneven implementation of gender quotas in Europe and how they have disrupted traditional patterns of career advancement and political representation. He serves as a project lead for a Digital Society Project-funded candidate study, where he is directing a team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers to explore the connection between candidate backgrounds and online behaviours during the 2022 French legislative elections. In a separate pilot project, he is exploring how the national identities of EU political support staff condition the broader behaviours of the institutions in which they serve.
Past Research
Will's book, Career Behaviour and the European Parliament: All Roads Lead through Brussels?, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. The project explores institutional change in the European Parliament and its effect on the career paths of its membership. To do so, he examines the role of legislative professionalization and national political party gatekeepers on the career behavior and advancement strategies of European Parliament legislators. The project uses a major new source of quantitative data that was collected on the personal and professional backgrounds of all European deputies, 1979-2014, that is publicly available. It also relies on over fifty qualitative interviews that were conducted with legislators and other political experts in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Poland.
Related research on the legislative behavior of Members of the European Parliament that builds on this volume has appeared in JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, European Union Politics, Party Politics, Journal of European Integration, The Journal of European Public Policy, The Journal of Legislative Studies, Research & Politics, Politics & Gender, and in the form of various ongoing working papers and book chapters.