Ekaterina R. Rashkova is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the Public Governance and Management unit at Utrecht University School of Governance. She earned her PhD in Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, in 2010 for a dissertation entitled ‘Political Learning and the Number of Parties: Why Age Matters’, which won the UniCredit and Universities Foundation Best CEE PhD Thesis Award in May 2011. She received a Bachelor in Economics and a Master in Political Economy and Public Policy from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to taking her post at Utrecht, Ekaterina worked at the Sussex University, University of Innsbruck and Leiden University. During the 2015-2016 academic year, she was won the prestigious EURIAS Junior Fellowship Grant, with which she spent a year at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) conducting research on the effect of electoral regulation on party competition.

Her research interests lie in the study electoral and party systems, the strategic behavior of political actors, and representation. She is interested in how institutions shape decisions and therefore outcomes. She studies party system development, electoral and party regulation and representation, with a focus on gender and immigrants. Her current research interests include the political integration of non-citizen residents in host countries, as well as the connection of national political parties to their diaspora abroad. Her work compares new and established democracies and has appeared among others in Comparative European Politics, West European Politics, European Political Science Review, International Political Science Review, Party Politics, Political Studies, Representation as well as in several edited book volumes. At the moment she is working on a project broadly termed 'the party abroad', which investigates how national political parties interact (or not) with their diaspora abroad and how immigrants are included (or not) in electoral processes in their host country. Together with colleagues, she is also examining the effects of Covid-19 on party system development, in particular on the success of new political parties and electoral accountability and the measurement of substantive representation of marginalized groups. Between 2015-2022 she served as editor of the European Political Science journal. 

Ekaterina is the Governance Board Member of the interdisciplinary Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) bachelor - PPE College Utrecht - which was launched in September 2018. Together with the other 3 board members, Ekaterina manages PPE College Utrecht, which involves, among other things, day-to-day steering of the program, development of the curriculum, and vision and creativity on positioning PPE College Utrecht within the wider span of the University, as well as among similar proagrams internationally.  Additionally, she serves as Chair of the Admissions Committee and leads the admissions process. In the past, she was responsible for the Extra-Curricular Program.