I am a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Comparative Political Science at Radboud University. My work asks a simple question with big consequences: how can democracies defend themselves when incumbents try to increase their power and weaken checks and balances? I study the roles of democratic elites and citizens using surveys, experiments, and interviews.

I earned my PhD cum laude at Radboud University, Nijmegen (October 2025). My dissertation, Beautiful Spark of Democracy ( , Radboud University Press), feeds into articles in the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, European Political Science Review, and Democratization. I have been a Visiting Researcher at the V‑Dem Institute (University of Gothenburg) and I teach research methods in the BSc/MSc Political Science programmes. I regularly engage in the public debate about (Dutch) democracy with contributions to the Dutch Election Studies, public lectures, and advice to politicians and policy-makers.

Outside of working hours (and occasionally during) I play cello, enjoy reading novels (with a preference for over-the-top and completely predictable spy novels), and running through the woods (training for marathons).

I study autocratization and democratic defence: when and how democratic elites and citizens resist incumbent-led democratic recession. Substantively, my work sits in Comparative Politics and Political Behaviour; methodologically, I use survey and field experiments, quantitative computational methods, and interviews (with a commitment to open and reproducible science).

Current projects

Currently, I am working on several individual projects, including survey experiments fielded in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain.

DIY Deepfakes

With an NWO SSH-XS Grant dr. Michal Mochtak and I are developing a replicable pipeline for researchers to construct their own deepfake videos as a research tool. As part of the project, we include a lab experiment to establish the effects of such deepfakes and create a framework for ethical and effective debriefing.

PhD Project

In my PhD dissertation, Beautiful Spark of Democracy, I ask when democratically elected leaders autocratize, and specifically when and by whom they are opposed. I call these opposition actors “democratic defenders”, and research under what circumstances they stand up to defend democracy against these threats from the inside. In the dissertation, I use a multi-method approach to tackle this question from different angles, relying on in-depth casestudies, elite interviews, computational methods, and survey experiments. My dissertation is available Open Access .