Biography

Dovilė’s research interests cover a range of regulatory governance topics. However, risk regulation and bureaucratic reputation take a central role. Dovilė focuses on explaining regulatory agencies’ outputs (e.g., scientific risk assessments), processes (e.g., adherence to legal proceedings), and behaviour (e.g., response to grave public allegations) as well as how regulatory agencies’ conduct is perceived by multiple audiences (e.g., citizens). Theoretically, she focuses on bureaucratic reputation theory and its explanatory power against long-established theoretical approaches. Dovilė employs a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative methods including survey experiments and in-depth comparative case studies. She also works with data scientists to explore how Machine Learning techniques could be used to understand strategic agency communications.

In 2019, Dovilė received the prestigious VENI grant for her project 'Risk Regulation in the European Regulatory State?', funded by the NWO Innovational Research Incentives Scheme. In the four-year project, Dovilė focuses on risk regulation that concerns the timely provision of credible solutions to severe societal threats. The project draws on bureaucratic reputation theory as a novel perspective to explain differences in conduct of regulatory agencies.

Dovilė’s academic articles have been published in top-ranked public administration and political science journals, such as Governance, Public Administration, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Common Market Studies. She contributed to books 'The Institutions of the European Union', 'The Handbook on Regulatory Authorities', 'The Politics of Public Administration' published with Oxford University Press and Edward Elgar Publishing.

Dovilė’s scholarly work has a demonstrated policy impact. She, for instance, conducted a study on the risk regulation of pesticides commissioned by The European Parliamentary Research Service to provide the European Parliament (EP) with evidence-based recommendations on how pesticide regulation (Regulation 1107/2009) could be improved. The results were presented and discussed at the European Parliament committee meeting.