Claudia-Y. Matthes is a Senior Lecturer of Comparative Politics and Democracy Studies and has specialised as well on EU policy-making, German domestic politics and regional cooperation in Europe. She is the author of numerous publications on political and social change in Central and Eastern Europe and regularly contributes to the Bertelsmann Transformation Index and the Sustainable Governance Indicator on democratic developments in Poland. Currently, she runs the Jean Monnet Module ‘EU4Law’, focusing on the decline of rule of law within the European Union and its member states, funded by the European Union. As the Director of the International MA programmes she is in charge of her Department’s international collaborations and regularly contributes to teaching at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara/Turkey, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and others.