Biography
Isik Özel is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Social Sciences at Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), where she also co-directs the Master in Sustainable Development and Global Governance (MASUS). A comparative political economist, her research is driven by a longstanding interest in how institutions are created, evolve, and come under contestation, and in the interplay between institutions and public preferences. She has worked extensively on regulatory governance and climate politics, along with the political economy of education and skills, mostly drawing on cases from Latin America, Southern Europe, and Turkey.
During her fellowship at the STG, Özel will pursue two main strands of her current research: the politics of institutional change under populism and democratic backsliding, with a particular focus on competition regimes; and subnational climate politics and governance. She is Principal Investigator of Subnational Climate Action, a four-year project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (2026–2030), which investigates cross-regional variation in climate action in Germany and Spain.
Özel’s work has appeared in Governance, Socio-Economic Review, Regulation & Governance, Journal of European Public Policy, Review of International Political Economy, and European Sociological Review, among others. Her book, State-Business Alliances and Economic Development: Turkey, Mexico and North Africa, came out of Routledge in 2015.
Özel holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington, Seattle, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). She has undertaken research stays at Freie Universität Berlin, CIDE and El Colegio de México, FLACSO México, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has also taught at the University of Washington, Sabancı University, Hertie School, IBEI, and IE University.