My PhD project explores attitudes of citizens and elected representatives towards multilevel government in Norway, a unitary country where the decision-making structure is relatively centralised. I am particularly interested in citizens' preferences for public policy provision by different tiers of government, and their perception of legitimacy of these decisions made in a multilevel context. I also investigate the behaviour and attitudes of elected politicians. In particular, I am interested in the way subnational politicians perceive their duty of representing the interests of their constituents, as well as their duty of representing the views of their parties. I utilise survey data from the Norwegian Citizens Panel (NCP) and the Panel of Elected Representatives (PER), two panels in which I field my original questions and survey experiments.

• Lecturer in SAMPOL348 - Local and Regional Democracy in Multilevel Norway and Europe - Spring 2022 & Spring 2023
• Course coordinator and lecturer in SAMPOL120 - Scandinavian Politics and Government - Spring 2023
• Course collaborator in MET102 - Methods in the Social Sciences - Fall 2023
• Lecturer in SAMPOL305 - Multivariate Data Analysis (Introduction to R) - Fall 2023

Academic article

• Alica, Berkay; Schakel, Arjan Hille (2025). Does multilevel government increase legitimacy? Citizens’ preferences for subnational authority and acceptance of governmental decisions. (external link)
• Alica, Berkay (2023). External Monitoring of Coercive Agents and the Murders of Journalists: A Cross-National Study of Journalist Killings, 1992–2018. (external link)

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.