Sanna Salo

Sanna Salo is a Senior Researcher in the European Union and Strategic Competition program at FIIA. Salo has a PhD from European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2017) and 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.

Sanna Salo studies comparative European politics and has mostly focused on the Nordic countries and Germany. In substantive terms, most of Salo’s research has focused on the rise and consolidation of the far-right parties in European party systems, and the response strategies of centrist parties to this development. 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 works as a researcher in the RESLIDE consortium [LINK to RESLIDE website], which studies the resilience of liberal democracy in Finland. The work package that Salo is part of studies, specifically, the pluralization of democracy norms at the global, regional and national levels, the drivers of this normative change and its political consequences. In addition, Salo runs an individual project, titled Divided and Lost? Strategies of center-right parties to the challenge right-wing populism in Finland, Sweden, and Germany, funded by the Kone Foundation. She has taught extensively at the Universities of Turku and Helsinki.

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 is an editor for the Nordic Review of International Studies.

Publications

List of publications (pdf)

All publications