Sanna Salo

Sanna Salo is a post-doctoral fellow in the European Union and Strategic Competition programme at FIIA. Salo defended her doctoral thesis at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in 2017. She has since worked at the Universities of Maastricht, Stockholm and Helsinki. Before coming to FIIA in 2022, she was an Academy of Finland post-doctoral fellow at the Center for European Studies at the University of Helsinki.

Salo specializes in comparative politics of European countries. Her work has so far concentrated on the Nordic countries and, most recently, Germany. Substantively, Salo’s research interests are the de- and realignment of political systems in the advanced Western democracies, brought about by the rise of fringe, challenger parties, notably on the far right. In their 2021 monograph, titled the Battle Over Working-Class Voters: How Social Democracy has Responded to the Populist Radical Right in the Nordic Countries (Routledge), Salo and Jens Rydgren examined the competition between the radical right and the center-left parties in the Nordic countries.

Currently, Salo acts as a part-time University Lecturer at the University of Turku, teaching political science, and pursues her own, Kone Foundation-funded project on the intra-party politics of Western European center-right parties. At FIIA, Salo’s focus is the general trends of EU integration and the politics of key EU member states, particularly when it comes to the effects of far-right (and – left) challenger parties on these countries’ EU policies.

In addition to academic publishing, Salo’s work has been published by several policy-relevant outlets, including the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung and the Carnegie Europe Endowment. Salo also acts as the vice-chair for FISA, the Finnish International Studies Association, and is an editor for the Nordic Review of International Studies.

Publications

List of publications (pdf)

All publications