Cristina Parau is an Associate Member of the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University specialising in Comparative Politics. She is also a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She obtained her university degrees from Sibiu and Brunel Universities, and she received a PhD in Government from the London School of Economics. She holds further postgraduate certificates from LSE and the University of Oxford.

Her research extends to the field of transnational public policy making and supranational regimes, especially the Council of Europe and the EU. Her monograph Transnational Networks and Elite Self-Empowerment: The Making of Judiciary in Contemporary Europe and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2019) concerned the judiciary’s role in democracy and how and why ideas about its design had filtered into Europe from the US until they became the norm. Her latest research focuses into the evolution of non-majoritarian institutions under the influence of transnational elite networks, and their effects on majoritarian institutions.