Prof. Dr. Berthold Rittberger

Biography (Eng Trans incomplete)

Berthold Rittberger is professor and chair of international politics at LMU Munich, where he collaborates with an outstanding team and is part of a broader research group that includes the teams of Laura Seelkopf and Bernhard Zangl. His research focuses on European politics and integration, the transformation of international order, and questions of legitimacy and representation in the EU and international politics.

Before joining LMU in 2011, he held a professorship and chair in political science and contemporary history at the University of Mannheim from 2007-2011. From 2005 to 2007 he served as junior professor of comparative politics at the Kaiserslautern University of Technology (now RPTU). He held postdoctoral positions at the Mannheim Centre of European Social Research (MZES) and was a Prize Research Fellow (PRF) at Nuffield College, Oxford. He studied Public Policy and Administration (Verwaltungswissenschaft) at the University of Konstanz (alas without completing the Diploma degree) and received his MSc in European Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1999. He obtained his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2003, where he had a studentship at Nuffield College, generously funded by the DAAD and the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), and even more generously supervised (and fed) by Jeremy Richardson and Alec Stone Sweet. His thesis, “Building Europe's Parliament. Democratic Representation Beyond the Nation State,” was published by Oxford University Press in 2005 and was co-winner of the best dissertation prize awarded by the European Union Studies Association (EUSA).

Rittberger’s research has been published in many (more or less leading – depends on who one asks) academic journals. Some of his more relevant work has appeared in the European Journal of Political Research (on women’s representation in the European Parliament, with Jessica Fortin-Rittberger), European Union Politics (on EU enlargement attitudes, with Jürgen Maier, and long before experiments became ‘the’ thing), West European Politics (on EU agencies, with Arndt Wonka), Regulation & Governance (on regulatory governance, with Michael Blauberger), the Journal of Common Market Studies (on “governance”, thanks to Beate Kohler’s mentorship), the Journal of European Public Policy (on numerous shades of EU integration, with many amazing colleagues), Global Studies Quarterly (on the contestation of the Liberal International Order, with fancy IR profs). He has written several books, including a research monograph “European Blame Games: Where does the Buck Stop?” (with Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Bernhard Zangl, Lisa Kriegmair, OUP 2024) and “Integration and Differentiation in the European Union: Theory and Policies” (with Dirk Leuffen and Frank Schimmelfennig, Palgrave 2022). The EU is transforming so rapidly that his (unfortunately not yet best-selling) popular science-book “Die Europäische Union. Politik, Institutionen, Krisen” (C.H. Beck, 2021) will need updating soon.

His service to the academy include a stint as Dean and Deputy Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim (successfully introducing the position of professional Dean to make his own position superfluous and still baffled that his colleagues entrusted a 30-something year old colleague with this task – good times!) and as Director of the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute at LMU Munich (navigating, not quite sinking, the ship through the rough sea that was Covid-19). He was elected member of the Social Science Review Board (Fachkollegium) of the German Science Foundation (DFG). He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of European Public Policy, having been its co-editor, together with the journal’s famous founder, Jeremy Richardson, for over a decade. He is working with a fantastic (and efficient) editorial team (check them out and you will be jealous).

Current Research Interests

Why liberal orders can be their own worst enemies

My research explores the internal dynamics that generate contestation within liberal orders. I argue that the very principles and institutions that sustain liberal orders, including the Liberal International Order (LIO) and the European Union,can also produce destabilizing effects. Some of the most pressing challenges confronting liberal orders are therefore home-grown.

Who gets the blame for EU policy failures?

Blame attribution is often seen as an unsavoury aspect of politics, but it is important for democratic accountability. I am interested in how blame is attributed in complex governance systems, such as the European Union, where responsibility is dispersed across multiple actors and levels.

How do vulnerable states respond to weaponized interdependence?

“De-risking” has become a buzzword in policy debates, yet we know little about how vulnerable actors – the “weaponizees” of interdependence – respond to weaponized interdependence, which strategies they adopt to mitigate vulnerabilities and how their strategy choice can be systematically explained.

Publications

For an extensive list, please consult my Google Scholaror ResearchGate profiles.

Recent Publications (last 5 years)

• Knill, C., Kruck, A., Rittberger, B., Seelkopf, L., & Zangl, B. (2026). Failing through success? How stable liberal orders become self-destabilising. Journal of European Public Policy, 1-27.
• Rittberger, B., Yoon, S. (2026). Integration. In: Stockemer, D., Sawyer, S., Gagnon, A. (eds) IPSA Companion to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-06918-4_153-1
• Bandemer, S., Daßler, B., Rittberger, B., Weiss, M., & Will, K. (2025). Politics of de-risking: How the EU confronts vulnerabilities in critical digital infrastructures. Journal of European Public Policy, 1-29.
• Daßler, B., Bandemer, S., Rittberger, B., & Weiß, M. (2025). Navigating regime complexes in turbulent times—the EU’s interaction with other international organizations in crises. Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 66(3), 599-621.
• Goddard, S., Krebs, R., Kreuder-Sonnen, C., & Rittberger, B. (2025). Liberalism doomed the liberal international order a less legalistic system would help protect democracies. Foreign Affairs Magazine, 28.
• Hofmann, S. et al. (2025). Introducing organizational (dis) entanglements: how scholarship on regime complexity and power dynamics helps make sense of international order-making. International Studies Review, 27(1), viaf002.
• Rittberger, B., Ruffing, E., Weinrich, M., & Wonka, A. (2024). The competence‐control dilemma and the institutional design of European Union agencies. Governance, 37(4), 1413-1431.
• Heinkelmann-Wild, T., Rittberger, B., Zangl, B., & Kriegmair, L. (2024). European Blame Games: Where does the buck stop?. Oxford University Press.
  Ruffing, E., Weinrich, M., Rittberger, B., & Wonka, A. (2024). The European administrative space over time: Mapping the formal independence of EU agencies. Regulation & Governance, 18(3), 740-760.
• Heinkelmann-Wild, T., Rittberger, B., Zangl, B., Kriegmair, L. Varieties of European Blame Games In Flinders, M., Dimova, G., Hinterleitner, M., Rhodes, R. A., & Weaver, R. K. (Eds.). (2024). The politics and governance of blame. Oxford University Press.
• Goddard, S. E., Krebs, R. R., Kreuder-Sonnen, C., & Rittberger, B. (2024). Contestation in a world of liberal orders. Global Studies Quarterly, 4(2), ksae026.
  Heinkelmann-Wild, T., Zangl, B., Rittberger, B., & Kriegmair, L. (2023). Blame shifting and blame obfuscation: The blame avoidance effects of delegation in the European Union. European Journal of Political Research, 62(1), 221-238.
• Rittberger, B. (2023). Democratic control and legitimacy in the evolving EU economic governance framework. (Report Nr. PE 733.742). European Parliament.https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/IPOL_STU(2023)733742
• Rittberger, B. (2022). The European Union: crisis politics and integration. In Handbook on Global Governance and Regionalism (pp. 183-201). Edward Elgar Publishing.
  Kreuder-Sonnen, C., & Rittberger, B. (2022). The LIO’s growing democracy gap: An endogenous source of polity contestation. Journal of international relations and development, 26(1), 61.
• Kriegmair, L., Rittberger, B., Zangl, B., & Heinkelmann-Wild, T. (2022). Dolce far niente? Non-compliance and blame avoidance in the EU. West European Politics, 45(5), 1153-1174.
• Leuffen, D., Rittberger, B., & Schimmelfennig, F. (2022). Integration and differentiation in the European Union. Springer International Publishing.