Joshua Fjelstul

Academic interests

Dr. Fjelstul is a political economist and data scientist. His research interests include the politics of compliance with international law and European Union (EU) law, the politics of policy implementation in the EU, and the politics of international courts and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). His methodological interests include analytical and computational game theory, quantitative text analysis, machine learning, and causal inference for policy evaluation. 

His research has appeared in leading academic journals, including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Law and Courts, European Union Politics, and International Interactions. 

Background

Dr. Fjelstul is a researcher at the ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo (since 2022) and a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva (since 2021). Prior to Geneva, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis (2019-2020). 

He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Emory University (2019). He also holds an M.A. in political science from Emory, a B.B.A. in the Canfield McCombs Business Honors Program (CBHP) from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. in history and government from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Selected publications

• Fjelstul, Joshua C. “ExplainingPublic Opinion on the Enforcement of the Stability and Growth Pact during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis.” European Union Politics (Forthcoming). 

• Fjelstul, Joshua C. “How the Chamber System at the CJEU Undermines the Consistency of the Court’s Application of EU Law.” Journal of Law and Courts (Forthcoming). 

• Cheruvu, Sivaram, and Joshua C. Fjelstul. “Improving the Efficiency of Pretrial Bargaining in Disputes over Noncompliance with International Law: Encouraging Evidence from the European Union.” Journal of European Public Policy (Forthcoming). 

• Carrubba, Clifford and Joshua Fjelstul. 2021. “European International Courts: The CJEU and the ECtHR.” In High Courts in Global Perspective: Evidence, Methodologies, and Findings, eds. Nuno Garoupa, Rebecca Gill and Lydia Tiede. University of Virginia Press. 

• Fjelstul, Joshua C. 2019. “The Evolution of European Union Law: A New Dataset on the Acquis Communautaire.” European Union Politics 20(4): 670-691. 

• Fjelstul, Joshua C. and Dan Reiter. 2019. “Explaining Incompleteness and Conditionality in Alliance Agreements.” International Interactions 45(6):976-1002. 

• Fjelstul, Joshua C., and Clifford J. Carrubba. 2018. “The Politics of International Oversight: Strategic Monitoring and Legal Compliance in the European Union.” American Political Science Review 112(3): 429–445.