Hello and welcome to EU today, a podcast from the Center for European Studies, a Jean-Monnais Center of Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thank you to the Erasmus Plus program of the European

Commission, the EU delegation to the U.S., and the U.S. Department of Education for supporting

our center and its programs. On this podcast, we sit down with scholars and policy leaders to discuss

pressing issues facing the European Union. We hope you enjoy it.

On this podcast, we'll be interviewing Dr. Jonathan Polk, one of the core participants at the May 2019 Partisan Divides Conference at UNC.

The conference was organized by UNC Political Science Professors Dr. Lisbitt Hoga and Dr. Gary Marks,

as well as their PhD students,

in partnership with the Center for European Studies. At the conference, over 20 professors

and graduate students from UNC and universities worldwide presented and discussed their ongoing

research on divisions among and within parties and voters in the EU.

Jonathan Polk is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Center for European Research at the University of Gothenburg.

Dr. Polk's teaching and research interests include political parties,

European politics, representation, and political participation in economically advanced democracies.

He is currently a member of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, or Chess Research Group,

which administers web-based surveys to estimate the positions of political party leadership in Europe.

He is also the co-principle investigator of the Swedish Party membership survey.

This project collects and

analyzes information on the political attitudes and behavior of over 10,000 members from seven

different Swedish political parties. Interviewing Dr. Polk is Simon Fredholm, a student in the

Transatlantic Masters program. Today I'll be talking to Dr. Jonathan Polk, one of the core participants in the Partisan

Divides Conference happening this week at UNC.

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