Research
Video on research
Fast Facts produced a short - 3 minutes - video about my research in their members of The Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie) series. You can find the video (in Dutch) here: A selection of my research projects are listed below. HIGH-RISK POLITICS: Explaining and improving political actors' decision-making on electorally risky issues [2012-2017] This program's overall aim is to advance and test a theory of political decision-making under risk that holds on the individual level (politicians), the meso level (parties), and the macro level (governments). My team and I draw on and develop prospect theory, which predicts that people take risk-averse decisions when facing gains while they are risk-seeking or acceptant when confronting losses. Objective 1, which was executed by Jona Linde, is to experimentally test to what extent (groups of) politicians display the same attitude towards risk as "normal" individuals do, i.e., whether prospect theory's predictions hold. Objective 2, on which Mariken van der Velden works, is to establish empirically why some political parties risk turning their constituency away by changing their policy position on salient topics, but others do not. Objective 3, executed by Dieuwertje Kuijpers, is to assess empirically why some governments take decisions involving substantial electoral risks with regard to military intervention, while others do not. We answer the research questions through a series of quantitative, qualitative and experimental techniques in this program that runs from November 2012 to November 2017. The program is financed with a VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, grant nr. 452-11-005). Comparative Welfare State Politics: Development, Opportunities, and Reform [completed] This book, a monograph written jointly with Kees van Kersbergen that has been published early 2014 by Cambridge University Press, discusses and explains the political opportunities and constraints of contemporary welfare state reform. For a proper understanding of this, we need to appreciate where the welfare state came from, why we have different worlds or regimes of welfare, how these regimes functioned, what the pressures in favor of reform are, why reform is so difficult and politically risky, and why it nevertheless happens. To our knowledge, this book is the first to offer such a broad perspective. We expect the book to be of interest to established welfare state scholars and researchers already well informed in the field. But it would also be of particular interest for relative newcomers, such as upper level undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars arriving at this topic from another research area. For endorsements by Klaus Armingeon and Gosta Esping-Andersen, and for ordering the book, please visit the Cambridge UP website. Politics of Risk-Taking: What Drives Governments' Decision-Making in Welfare State Reform? [completed] This project examined the factors that influence governments' decision-making in welfare state reform. Why do some governments pursue reforms that may lose them votes, whereas others do not? Moreover, why do some governments implement reforms that offer no avenues for reaping electoral benefits, whilst other do not? Drawing on prospect theory - a psychological theory of choice under risk - this project's central argument was that governments' attitude towards risk, and thereby their willingness to pursue different types of reforms, depends on whether they face losses or gains. The empirical focus was on the cross-national and cross-government variation in policy output (i.e., legislation) and policy intentions (i.e., the proposals introduced in parliament or the media) of different types of welfare state reform in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom between 1979 and 2007. I established the extent and type of reform by quantitative and qualitative data. To reveal the factors explaining governments' risk-taking, I employed fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA). By investigating governments' risk-taking in welfare state reform, this project allowed both for a better understanding of the politics of such reform and provided insights into governments' decision-making in general. The project ran from 2009 to October 2012 and was financed with a VENI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, grant nr. 451-08-012).