Welcome!
I am a Professor of Politics & Governance at the Utrecht University School of Governance (USG) of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. In this capacity, I co-chair the Public Governance group of USG, serve as a member of USG’s research board and am the program director of the two-year master program Research in Public Administration and Organisational Science. Between 2019-2021, I served as a member and (technical) chair of the USG’s Executive Board. For more information, please have a look at my Curriculum Vitae page.
Before joining Utrecht University, I was a Professor in Political Decision-Making at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. There, I served as the director of research of that department, as Head of Studies Politics of the BSc program Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). I was also a member of the management team of the PPE program’s John Stuart Mill College.
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]). In my current research, I examine among other things how politicians make judgments, exploring under which conditions they use cognitive rules of thumb (heuristics) like “the rest of us”. Like my earlier research, for instance my NWO-funded VIDI project ‘HIGH-RISK POLITICS‘ (2012-2017), this work provides new knowledge of how policy decisions come about that may (not) effectively solve key societal problems.
As of February 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. ore information is available here (in English) and here (in Dutch).