💁 I am a postdoctoral researcher at the KU Leuven Voting & Democracy Research Group (in Dutch) and a part-time lecturer at the Dublin City University School of Law and Government where I teach two (very interesting) undergraduate modules in the Economy, Politcs and Law program.

🔬 My research focuses mainly on how political elites (read: parties and their politicians) behave in direct democratic contexts, and how this affects voters. As such, I am interested in the wider fields of political communication, political finance, party behavior, and electoral behavior. Beyond that, I also dabble in and have published on comparative and European politics, as well as interest representation.

🤔 Currently, I am mainly looking into how party rhetoric in referendum campaigns affects affective polarization among citizens towards parties and their leaders.

🌌 I am a quants person and work with the R programming language, but also have experience in qualitative methods and mixed-methods approaches. I am also a firm believer in open science practices and always strive to make my data, code and research as widely available as possible.

💙 In my spare time, I enjoy homelabbing, baseball (go Phils ⚾), football (COYG ⚽), and metal.

Selected Experience

Research

📓 You can find my work in Party Politics, European Political Science Review (soon!), Journal of European Integration Politics and Governance, Politics, the European Journal of Higher Education, and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies, among others. I have also published two book chapters on European politics.

🔢 I also contributed to a project examining the concurrent 2024 elections in Belgium for the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute.

Outreach

📢 I have presented my work at 16 major international conferences organised by APSA, IPSA, EPSA, ECPR and others in multiple European cities, as well as Los Angeles (APSA 2023) and Seoul (IPSA 2025). I also chaired two panels, and acted as paper discussant over ten times.

✒️ I have written six opinion pieces/blog posts in national and international mediums, such as De Standaard (paywall, in Dutch) and Knack (in Dutch) (two of the largest news publications in Belgium), the London School of Economics’ blog on European Politics and Policy, and UK in a Changing Europe’s blog. These focused both on outreach of my research as well as commentary regarding current affairs on referendums and politics

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss my research, or my hobbies! 😁