Biography

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg. As part of the IUROPA project, I am currently conducting research on European judicial politics. Previously, I was a political advisor in the European Parliament and a research fellow at KU Leuven.

Most of my research addresses different aspects of the interplay between law and politics, frequently in the context of the European Union. I maintain the eurlex R package for accessing data on European Union law.

Interests
  • European integration
  • International institutions
  • Law and politics
  • Text analysis
  • Data science
Education

  • PhD European Law and Politics, 2020

    KU Leuven

  • MA EU International Relations, 2016

    College of Europe

  • BA International Relations, 2015

    University of Groningen

  • LLB International and European Law, 2015

    University of Groningen

Recent Posts

Grid search for elastic net regularization
This post is a footnote to documentation to the glmnet package and the tidymodels framework. glmnet is best known for fitting models via penalized maximum likelihood like ridge, lasso and elastic net regression.
Dec 5, 2021 4 min read Data
The eurlex R package
Dozens of political scientists and legal scholars use data on European Union laws in their research. The provenance of these data is rarely discussed. More often than not, researchers resort to the quick and dirty technique of scraping entire html pages from eur-lex.
Dec 16, 2020 13 min read Data
Kernel density estimation for time series plots
In my research I frequently encounter count data that has a temporal dimension. The standard way of visualizing such data is to take the counts grouped at some temporal level (month, year, etc).
Dec 7, 2019 3 min read Data
Pre-processing steps in quantitative text analysis
In my work I often resort to topic modelling to summarize otherwise intractable textual corpora. Anyone even vaguely familiar with topic modelling and quantitative text methods more generally will acknowledge that how the raw text is prepared in the run-up to analysis is of critical importance.
Jul 8, 2019 1 min read Data
Simulating p-values in a 2x2 design
In a recent paper in which I analysed experimental data on law students' aversion to politically motivated legal arguments, I realized there was a fairly trivial but systematic relationship between changes in the distribution of outcomes drawn from a binomial distribution in the control group and p-values.
Jul 5, 2019 3 min read Data
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Recent Publications

Jan Wouters, Michal Ovádek (2021). The EU and Human Rights: Analysis, Cases, and Materials. Oxford University Press.

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Michal Ovádek (2021). Facilitating access to data on European Union laws. Political Research Exchange.

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Michal Ovádek (2021). Popular tribunes and their agendas: topic modelling Slovak presidents' speeches 1993-2020. East European Politics.

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Michal Ovádek (2021). Procedural Politics Revisited: Institutional Incentives and Jurisdictional Ambiguity in EU Competence Disputes. Journal of Common Market Studies.

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Arthur Dyevre, Monika Glavina, Michal Ovádek (2021). Raising the Bar: The Development of Docket Control on the Court of Justice. Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht.

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Teaching & Presenting

2021

November: Presented research on the EU law and politics of protecting national judicial independence at IUROPA workshop, Gothenburg

November: Presentation on rule of law backsliding in Poland and Hungary to Swedish Liberals

Fall: Teaching classes on EU institutions, Europeanization of foreign policy and European climate and energy policy at University of Gothenburg

Fall: Teaching quantitative text analysis and methods at a PhD academy at Venice International University

Spring: Co-teaching an interdisciplinary course on the European Court of Justice at KU Leuven

January: Invited speaker at a webinar with the Institute for European Law at KU Leuven to discuss developments in EU rule of law policy

2020

November: Spoke about a “New Generation of International Law Databases” as part of the Computational and Empirical International Law Speaker Series

November: Taught a guest lecture about rule of law backsliding in the European Union for students of the Master of European Studies at KU Leuven

September: Defended my PhD thesis on competence contestation in the European Union at KU Leuven

August: With co-authors presented our research on drivers of state interventions before EU courts as part of the ECPR Law & Courts webinar series

July: Presented my research on estimating the preferences of the European Court of Justice as part of the ECPR Law & Courts webinar series

2019

Fall: Taught data science tutorials as part of “Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Europe and the World” (Master of European Studies)

October: Introduction to EU Institutions and Law (Master of European Studies)

July: Presented my experimental paper “Apolitical Lawyer” at IVR Congress in Luzern

July: Introduction to EU Institutions and the Rule of Law Crisis (Global Governance and International Law Summer School, Leuven)

June: Presented my paper on EUSSUE Attention at Quantitative Text Analysis Workshop in Dublin and EPSA Annual Conference in Belfast

February: From Law to Data. A short course introducing data manipulation and analysis in Excel and R intended to popularize data science at Belgian law faculties.

2018

Fall: Teaching assistant on the course ‘Fondements de droit’ at KU Leuven

November: EU law tutorial on the concept of legal basis

October: Introduction to EU Institutions and Law (Master of European Studies)

2017

November: EU law tutorial on the relationship between the EU Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights at KU Leuven

October: Tutorial simulating Brexit negotiations with a design combining elements of two-level game theory and mixed-motive bargaining. Each student played an individual actor with unique preferences (altogether 22 inividual dossiers were drafted).

Blogs & Op-eds

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