Biography

One of the key concerns in democratic theory is whether policy outputs are related to public preferences. My dissertation examines the relationship between public opinion and government policy in the United Kingdom on the left-right scale from 1976 to 2006.
It shows that representation has two pathways, one indirect, the other direct. More specifically, a right-wing public elects the Conservative Party to power, which in turn implements its right-wing election promises. Alternatively, controlling for government partisanship, a rightward shift in public opinion pushes government policy in the same direction a year later. These findings are forthcoming in Political Studies and the British Journal of Political Science.
My general research interests are in comparative politics, political behaviour, democratic theory, and populism.
I studied for a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Leiden from 2002 to 2005. My undergraduate thesis analyzed to what extent support for the populist right across Western Europe is traceable to the institutional framework of countries. This work is published in Acta Politica (co-authored with Christel Koop).
My graduate education has taken place at Nuffield College, Oxford, where I studied for an M.Phil. in Comparative Government and transferred to the D.Phil. in Politics in 2007.
For most of 2008, I was a visiting lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the University of Leiden, where I taught the course ‘Democracy and Political Institutions’ in the B.A. and ‘Theories and Methods’ in the M.A.