When close contacts share information, women can be empowered to participate in politics. But relationships also convey social pressures that can discourage or encourage participation. We explore whether these competing processes explain persistent gender gaps in participation. To understand the conditions under which women participate, an experimental encouragement invites already-surveyed citizens to a public meeting. Varying the gender of the invitee and an encouragement to bring others, we distinguish the relative importance of information from social pressure. If informed women participate, and mobilize other women too, this is a strong signal of how networks empower women to participate in politics.

Numbers increasingly govern public services. Both policymaking activities and administrative control are increasingly structured around calculations such as cost-benefit analyses, estimates of social and financial returns, measurements of performance and risk, benchmarking, quantified impact assessments, ratings and rankings, all of which provide information in the form of a numerical representation. Through quantification, the public services have experienced a fundamental transformation from “government by rules” to “governance by numbers”, with fundamental implications not just for our understanding of the nature of public service itself, but also for wider debates about the nature of citizenship and democracy. This project scrutinizes the relationship between quantification, administrative capacity and democracy across three policy sectors (health/hospitals, higher education/universities, criminal justice/prisons) and four countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, UK). It offers a cross-national and cross-sectoral study of how managerialist ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted and how they mattered. More specially, it examines (i) how quantification has travelled across sectors and states; (ii) relations between quantification and administrative capacity; and (iii) how quantification has redefined relations between public service and liberal democratic understandings of public welfare, notions of citizenship, equity, accountability and legitimacy.

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.

This project examines multistakeholder global governance as a new way of handling the big planetary challenges of our time, such as climate change, pandemics, and digital technologies. Whereas old-style international organisations like the United Nations involve cooperation among states, multistakeholder institutions assemble diverse actors that have a stake in a problem (such as business, civil society, government, and technical experts). This project looks at three major global multistakeholder initiatives: FSC for environment, Global Fund for health, and ICANN for internet governance. By assessing the capacity, effectiveness, and legitimacy of these institutions, the project suggests better care of critical global problems.

News media are a central player in contemporary western democracies. Yet their political influence is poorly understood and the ways politics and media interact require deeper investigation. Studies of the ways media set the political agenda have given insights into aspects of the relationship between media and politics. Problematically, however, this literature hardly ever treats the relationship as a reciprocal one, wherein both journalists and politicians influence one another. The aim of this project is to map out and explain how politicians and journalists interact and how they influence each others? work. Using a comparative research design, I will study how the interactions between politicians and journalists are shaped by systemic and institutional factors related to both political institutions and media systems in different countries. Key questions to be addressed are: Under what circumstances do the news media influence political actors? And how often is the news determined by political pressure or spin? The project will look from different angles at the same negotiating process between politicians and journalists to enhance our understanding of the relationship and its consequences. To disentangle this political media complex the project consists of three subprojects: (1) a comparative large N-analysis of parliamentary questions and media content, (2) a survey among political elites and journalists in three countries and (3) a number of in-depth case studies of the media?s role in the Dutch process of policy making. The broader aim of this study is to contribute to a theory that can explain why, when and how political actors influence and are influenced by the news media.