Welcome!
I am a Professor of Politics & Governance at the Utrecht University School of Governance (USG) of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where I co-chair the Public Governance group of USG. Previously, I served as the program co-director of the two-year master program Research in Public Administration and Organisational Science (2021-2025), member and (technical) chair of the USG’s Executive Board (2019-2021), among other roles. For more information about my previous positions, please have a look at my Curriculum Vitae page.
My research and teaching interests are in judgment and decision making by politicians, comparative welfare state research, and political methodology (especially Qualitative Comparative Analysis [QCA]). Since 2023, I’m directing the 5-year ERC Consolidator project RadiUnce, funded by the European Commission, which examines how politicians respond to different types of uncertainty (radical, resolvable) in four countries with different opportunities and constraints of responding to uncertainty: Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. More information is available here (in English) and here (in Dutch).
The focus of my completed NWO VIDI-project HIGH-RISK POLITICS was among other things on how politicians make judgments, exploring under which conditions they use cognitive rules of thumb (heuristics) like “the rest of us” . Overall, my research provides new knowledge of how policy decisions come about that may (not) effectively solve key societal problems.