Matti Ylönen, Academy of Finland Research Fellow (on a leave from University Lecturer, World Politics)

  • PL 54 (Unioninkatu 37)

    00014

    Finland

  • Finland

20062024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research interests

I am an Academy of Finland Research Fellow with a project (2024–2028) titled Seeing Like a Tech Firm: Advocacy in the Era of Platform Capitalism (SEE-TECH). During this time, I am on a research leave from my position as an University Lecturer in World Politics – with a focus on Global Political Economy – a position to which I was selected in 2020. My current SEE-TECH project extends my earlier research project Big Tech and the EU (funded by the Helsingin Sanomat foundation) to study corporate advocacy around European tech regulation across the EU’s entire policy cycle, as well as the EU’s global impact in this field.

An important current of my scholarship has focused on how private actors influence politics at different domains, ranging from the mechanisms of corporate tax planning to the influence of management consultants and Public Affairs companies in governance, from national to global arenas. I have also published several articles and books related to global development policy and its economic governance. I am potentially interested in supervising PhD dissertations in related fields. In addition to Helsinki, I have been doing research in Estonia (Tallinn University of Technology), the United States (Yale University), and as a student in Japan (ICU University, Tokyo).

In Estonia, I was a Marie Curie Widening Fellow at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance at Tallinn Univeristy of Technology. In Tallinn, my reserach focused on the commercialization of residency-related rights, with a specific focus on the Estonian e-residency system. At Yale, I was a Fulbright-Schuman grantee during my PhD studies. I hold a position of a Non-Resident Fellow at Yale.

Outside the Academia, I am the chairperson of Finnwatch, which investigates human rights and climate impacts and tax responsibility of business enterprises; a member of the Parliamentary Development Policy Committee of Finland; and a member of the scientific committee of the Digital SME association in Brussels. (All are unsalaried positions of trust.)

I have been awarded several prizes for my research, including the University of Helsinki PhD Prize and the Amartya Sen Prize granted by Yale University.

Office hours by appointment. Please note that my email address is [email protected] (i.e., there is a letter v in between).

 

Education/Academic qualification

World Politics, PhD

Award Date: 24 Oct 2018

External positions

Visiting researcher, Tallinn University of Technology, Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance

1 Aug 202031 Jul 2022

Fields of Science

  • 517 Political science
  • World Politics
  • Development Studies
  • Policy consultancies
  • Multinational enterprises
  • Evolutionary economics
  • Tax havens
  • Tax governance

International and National Collaboration

Publications and projects within past five years.