After the end of their parliamentary mandate, some Members of Parliament (MPs) directly transition into attractive positions in sectors in which they were previously involved as policymakers. This creates the perception that MPs use their time in parliament to advance their own career opportunities. But is this perception justified? Using a large-scale quantitative analysis of Dutch MPs, this project provides insight into the relationship between the political experience and network that MPs built up during public service and the chances of obtaining particular post-parliamentary positions. The results provide empirical evidence regarding the public debate on parliaments as career stepping stones.

Why are small states significantly more stable than large ones, despite the weakness of political institutions and the prevalence of personalistic politics? Which factors contribute to the absence of major political crises and violence in small states? And who are the key actors involved in these processes? The personalization of politics, the decline of political parties, and the weakening of ideologies in large democracies are considered to undermine political legitimacy and to produce instability. Yet despite having extremely personalized systems with non-ideological parties or no parties at all, small states around the world maintain significantly higher levels of political stability than larger ones. This research investigates the effects of smallness and personalized politics on political stability, which is defined as the absence of major political and social crises, violence, or state failure. While existing explanations of stability focus primarily on the impact of political structures, this research explicitly zooms in on informal dynamics and personal relations to explain political stability in small states. The project hypothesizes that personalized competition at the elite level does not jeopardize broader stability, while the pervasiveness of patron-client linkages creates stable relations between citizens and politicians. The research combines a large-N analysis of elite relations in small states with a comprehensive small-N analysis of four case studies. This methodological design allows me to first assess the broader characteristics of elite interactions in small states, while I will conduct in-depth field research to expose the specific informal dynamics that produce political stability. Small countries are structurally excluded from comparative political research. This project, however, aims to show their significance to ongoing debates about decentralization and democratic transition and consolidation. The project builds on existing international research on small states, and provides critical insights to various actors involved in democracy promotion, decentralization debates, and small state politics.

The main objectives of this project are to measure and explain government-opposition cooperation and to study its consequences for democratic legitimacy and vote choice. Choice is essential to democracy; in modern representative democracies that choice is provided by opposition and governing parties competing in elections. If the choice is to be meaningful, opposition parties have to be distinct from government parties. Previous studies have looked at parties’ distinctiveness in the electoral arena, but what happens in parliament has been overlooked. Among scholars as well as the general public, there are increasing concerns regarding the distinctiveness of opposition and government parties in parliament. Scholars have argued that there is a process of opposition blurring in parliament, but the evidence is largely anecdotal and based on single-country studies. This project is the first to provide longitudinal indicators of parliamentary cooperation between government and opposition in four countries. The analysis compares established parliamentary democracies with very different political systems: The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Denmark and Canada. Applying innovative content analysis methods to assess parties’ actual parliamentary behaviour and speeches, I will map patterns of parliamentary cooperation between 1945 and 2018. Explanations of those patterns will be based on quantitative data and elite interviews. The effect of government-opposition cooperation on democratic satisfaction, electoral turnout, and vote choice will be studied through analysis of survey material as well as multi-country conjoint survey experiments. The knowledge generated in this project is utilised by involving stakeholders throughout the project through practitioner meetings, improving online voter tools, blogs and media.

Cultural stereotypes are pervasive in European Union (EU) governance, creating conflicts between national governments and fuelling anti-EU sentiments among voters. Yet while stereotypes have been studied in political rhetoric and media coverage, we know little about their impact on the behaviour of public officials. Based on vignette experiments, TRAPS explores the feasibility of researching the effect of cultural stereotypes in EU governance. The project is the first of its kind because it studies stereotypes among street-level bureaucrats who work in EU border and police cooperation. The ambition is to establish an original research agenda on cultural stereotypes in transnational bureaucracies.

The climate crisis is often seen as a product of human hubris and humanity’s domination of nature. Confronting the need to reimagine the human-nature relationship, many political theorists argue that humans are not special and call for humility. But humility is an indeterminate value that can lead to political domination. How can humans relate to nature modestly while remaining free? In this project I use the history of political thought to develop a new theory of the human-nature relationship suited to the climate crisis in which humans are both part of and distinct from nature and humbled yet nevertheless free.