Stefaan Walgrave is a professor in political science at the University of Antwerp. His research interests are media and politics, social movements and protest, elections, and how elected elites represent. Within the RepResent project, Walgrave acts as the project coordinator. He is co-responsible for the first work package dealing with substantive representation looking into the policy preference congruence between electorates and parties. To what extent is democratic dissatisfaction driven by policies not matching people’s preferences?

Email: stefaan.walgrave@uantwerpen.be

Jonas Lefevere is part of the Antwerp team of RepResent. His interests concern the impact of election campaigns on electoral behavior, with a special interest in the role played by political issues. He also investigates the communication strategies of political elites during campaigns. He has published on these topics in Political Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly and Party Politics, amongst others. Within RepResent, he works on the substantive representation package, investigating to what extent voters’ perceptions of parties’ issue positions and reputations affect their electoral preferences.

Email: jonas.lefevere@gmail.com

Isaïa Jennart is interested in electoral campaigns, voting behaviour, Voting Advice Applications and political knowledge. He studies citizens’ knowledge of parties’ issue positions. His supervisor is prof. Stefaan Walgrave. Jennart is part of the EOS RepResent consortium, a partnership between five Belgian universities (UA, UCL, ULB, VUB, KUL). This consortium researches resentment among the Belgian electorate during the 2019 general elections in Belgium. The team from the University of Antwerp will focus on substantive representation and how this relates to resentment among the public.

Email: isaia.jennart@uantwerpen.be

Patrick van Erkel is post-doctoral researcher at the department of political science at the University of Antwerp (UA). His work focuses on political and electoral behaviour, elections, political trust and polarization.

Email: patrick.vanerkel@uantwerpen.be

Emilie van Haute is Principal Investigator for the ULB team of RepResent. Her research interests focus on party membership, intra-party dynamics, elections and voting behavior. Within RepResent, she works on the procedural representation package, investigating more specifically voters’ perceptions of the role of parties in the democratic process.

Email: evhaute@ulb.ac.be

Jean-Benoit Pilet is professor of political science at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He works on elections, political parties, and democratic reforms. He has recently co-authored Faces on the Ballot. The Personalization of Electoral Systems in Europe (OUP, 2016, with Alan Renwick) and The Politics of Party Leadership (OUP, 2016, with William Cross).

Email: jpilet@ulb.ac.be

David Talukder is currently working within the ULB team under the supervision of J-B Pilet. His research topic is linked to the attitude of disadvantaged groups toward representative democracy and their demands for procedural reforms. He is interested in democracy, more specifically in democratic reforms, and democratic innovations (VAA, deliberative democracy, referenda).

Email: david.talukder@ulb.ac.be

Maria Jimena Sanhueza is a PhD Researcher at the CEVIPOL, ULB where she examines “Citizen Critiques to Representative Democracy in Belgium”. Before joining CEVIPOL, she worked as research assistant for the EU-HORIZON 2020 project TransSol in Sciences Po Paris. Also, she worked as research assistant for the European-funded project Pathways to Power where she studied immigrants’ representation in France; and performed research on African democracies to Prof. Sigman at the Naval Postgraduate Institute. Her research is devoted to understanding representation and public opinion in Belgium. In the context of her academic engagement Maria Jimena is preparing several publications focused on citizenship, representative democracy and electoral behaviour.

Institutional link: http://cevipol.ulb.ac.be/fr/users/msanhueza
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MariaJSanhueza

Email: mariajimena.sanhueza@ulb.ac.be

Thomas Legein his research focuses on political parties, their organization and more broadly on their links with representative democracy. For his thesis, he is specifically interested in intra-party reforms. He uses a QCA to produce a systematic comparative and cross-country study on the question of knowing the exact conditions under which parties are led to reform themselves. Involved in the research project RepResent, he is also part of the Political Party Database (PPDB) research network.

Email: thomas.legein@hotmail.com

Benoît Rihoux is full professor in comparative politics at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium), where he chairs the Centre for political science and comparative politics (CESPOL). His substantive research interests comprise among others political parties, political behavior, organizational change, social movements, gender and politics, and professional ethics. He plays a leading role in the development of configurational comparative methods and QCA (Qualitative Comparative Analysis) and co-ordinates the interdisciplinary COMPASSS global network (www.compasss.org) in that field. He is also strongly involved in research methods training as joint Academic convenor of the ECPR Methods School.

Email: benoit.rihoux@uclouvain.be

Virginie Van Ingelgom is a Research Associate Professor F.R.S. – FNRS at the Institut de Sciences Politiques Louvain-Europe, UCLouvain. Her previous work has been awarded with the Theseus Award for Promising Research on European Integration (2010), the Best Dissertation Prize in “Comparative Politics” of the French Political Science Association and Mattei Dogan Fondation (2011), and the Jean Blondel Ph.D. Prize by the European Consortium for Political Research (2012). She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University (2009 and 2011), at Sciences Po Paris (2006-2010 and 2017) and at Université de Montréal (2010). Her current teaching commitments include courses at the UCLouvain Master in Political Sciences and at the ECPR Summer and Winter School in Methods and Technics (Focus Groups). Awarded with an ERC Starting Grant (2017-2022), Van Ingelgom recently developed – with Prof. Claire Dupuy – a new research program that offers a qualitative (re)appraisal of citizens’ (dis-)affection towards politics relying on the core argument of the policy feedback literature: attitudes and behaviors are outcomes of past policy.

Email: virginie.vaningelgom@uclouvain.be

Pierre Baudewyns is a professor in political science at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain). His research interests are political behavior among voters, candidates and elites and survey methodology. Results have been published in different journals and books. Within RepResent, he is collaborating to the work package on procedural representation.

Email: pierre.baudewyns@uclouvain.be

Laura Uyttendaele is a PhD researcher under the supervision of Prof. Benoît Rihoux (UCLouvain) & Prof. Stefaan Walgrave (UAntwerpen). Her research interests include Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), experimental methods, Youth & Politics, political attitudes and behaviours. For her thesis she focuses on the effects of VAAs on pre-voting citizens.

Email: laura.uyttendaele@uclouvain.be

François Randour is part of the UCLouvain team of RepResent. His current research focus on political discourse analysis of political elites – regional and national members of Parliaments – as well as of citizens. In particular, he concentrates on topics such as Belgian institutional reforms and EU decision-making processes. He has published in journals such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, The Journal of Legislative Studies and in the International Review of Administrative Sciences. Within RepResent, he works on the symbolic representation package, investigating the resentment of disadvantaged citizens towards politics using both focus groups and survey methods.

Email: francois.randour@uclouvain.be

Ramon van der Does is part of the UCLouvain team of RepResent. His main research interests are deliberative democratic theory and political communication among citizens. He also investigates various democratic innovations such as mini-publics and participatory budgeting. His work has so far appeared in Journal of European Public Policy, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Res Publica. Within RepResent, he uses focus group discussions to examine how citizens (a) talk about political issues and (b) relate to democratic innovations.

Email: ramon.vanderdoes@uclouvain.be

Soetkin Verhaegen is Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on public opinion about international and regional organizations. Hence, her work is situated at the crossroads of political sociology and international relations.

Additionally, Soetkin is affiliated to CESPOL at UCLouvain and to the RepResent – Representation and Democratic Resentment – project. Here, she uses focus groups and surveys to study citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy, alienation and resentment in the context of multilevel governance.

Previous work inquired the development of European identity, and its role as an explanation for citizens’ political orientations and behaviour towards the EU. Other research interests include youth, socialization and political participation.

Email: soetkin.verhaegen@statsvet.su.se

Prof. dr. Karen Celis is research professor at the Department of Political Science, and co-director Research of RHEA (Centre of Expertise Gender Diversity and Intersectionality) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She conducts theoretical and empirical research on political representation of groups, equality policies and state feminism. In her more recent work she investigates the political representation of groups from an explicit intersectional perspective. On these topics she currently supervises 6 ongoing PhD researchers (7 defended PhDs 2012-2018).

Email: karen.celis@vub.be

Kris Deschouwer is emeritus professor of Political Science. His main research interest are party organizations and party strategies, voting behavior and comparative regionalism and federalism.

Email: kris.deschouwer@vub.ac.be

Eline Severs is a professor in political science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research interests fall within the field of democratic theory. She is especially interested in democratic representation, the relationships between civil society and democratic governance, citizens’ conceptions of democracy, and what it means to include historically disadvantaged groups in contemporary politics. Her recent work focuses on forms of representation located outside of representation and how representation is performed, with particular attention to its affective and theatrical aspects. Eline has published on these topics in a wide range of scientific journals, including: Parliamentary Affairs, Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, Politics and Governance, Representation: Journal of Representative Democracy, Res Publica, and Politics, Groups, and Identities.

Institutional link: https://researchportal.vub.be/en/persons/eline-severs

Email: Eline.Severs@vub.be

Guillaume Petit is postdoctoral researcher in political science (UCL, Ispole – VUB, POLI) and doctor in political science (Unviersity Paris 1). His work addresses the sociology of democracy, the social conditions of participation and the logic of political representation. He is interested in demands for participation and participatory engagement, through the production and reception of democratic innovations. As part of the EoS project, he is working on a qualitative section that focuses on the social logics of critics of democratic representation.

Email: guillaume.petit@vub.be

Kenza Amara Hammou is a PhD researcher at the Department of Political Science in Brussels. She studied International Politics at the University of Gent and wrote her Master thesis on poverty-related issues and gentrification in the slums of Rabat (Morocco). After she graduated, she worked for IOM (UN Migration agency) and followed an internship at the European Parliament, where she mainly worked on human rights cases and partnership agreements with African countries, as well as Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP Unit). Now, she is working at the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). The subject of her PhD research is on the representation, or non-representation, of disadvantaged and socially excluded citizens in Brussels. At the moment she is mainly trying to find out how these citizens experience and question representation, and how feelings of being mis and/or unequally represented might affect their responses to representative claims of non-elected actors, such as social workers. At the same time, she is looking into adapting methodological approaches, rethinking research methods to be able to incorporate disadvantaged citizens throughout the research and making their often invisible and silenced voices of society be heard and valued.

Email: Kenza.Amara.Hammou@vub.ac.be

Email: Louise.Knops@vub.be

Sofie Marien is an Associate Professor in Comparative and Historical Political Science at the University of Leuven. Marien is the head of the Democratic Innovations & Legitimacy Research Group. Her research interests are focused on democratic innovations, political behavior, political psychology, political communication and comparative politics. She is interested in participatory and deliberative processes. She studies deliberation in likely places such as deliberative mini-publics but also in more unlikely places such as televised election debates. She is the PI of the EOS Inter-university Project “Represent” that aims to gain insight into political resentment (2018-2021). In 2018 she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant “Meeting Great Expectations Through Democratic Innovations” from the European Research Council.

Email: sofie.marien@kuleuven.be

Anna is assistant professor at the Department of Political Science of Ghent University. She wrote a PhD dissertation on the topic of political participation. Her main research interests are political participation, political equality and political legitimacy. Anna holds a Master’s degree in Comparative and International Politics from KU Leuven and a Bachelor’s degree in Politics and Public Administration from the University of Konstanz (Germany). Her work has been published in high-ranked international peer-reviewed journals such as Party Politics, West European Politics, Social Science Research and Political Behavior. For more information see also www.annakern.eu.

Email: anna.kern@ugent.be

Lisa van Dijk started as a PhD candidate at the Democratic Innovations & Legitimacy Research Group at KU Leuven in January 2019. As part of the Excellence of Science inter-university RepResent project, Lisa focuses on citizens’ support for democratic innovations. In her PhD, she looks into different drivers of citizens’ process preferences and democratic resentment, including winning and losing in elections and substantive representation. Prof. Sofie Marien (KU Leuven) supervises Lisa’s PhD trajectory together with Jonas Lefevere (VUB, University of Brussels). Previously, Lisa obtained a MSc in Public Administration (University of Twente) and a MA in International Relations in Historical Perspective (University of Utrecht). She holds a BSc in European Public Administration (University of Twente). Her master thesis about populist attitudes and political participation was awarded the 2018 H.A. Brasz award for the Best Master Thesis in Public Administration in the Netherlands.

Email: lisa.vandijk@kuleuven.be

Wouter Vanbroekhoven started in October 2019 as a PhD candidate at the Democratic Innovations & Legitimacy Research Group. He obtained a BSc in Political Science, a MSc in International and Comparative politics, and a MSc in Statistics (Quantitative Analysis in the Social Sciences), all at KU Leuven. His research focuses currently on how limitations in (the functioning of) representative institutions can lead to demand for alternative decision making procedures by citizens. Prof. Sofie Marien (KU Leuven) supervises Wouter’s PhD research

Email: wouter.vanbroekhoven@kuleuven.be

Hannah Werner started as a PhD at the Centre for Political Research in September 2015. She holds a MSc from the Research Master Program in Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam and a BA in Communication Studies and Economics from the University of Mannheim, DE. Currently, she is a fellow of the Science Foundation Flanders (FWO) which entails a 4-year personal grant.

She is interested broadly in public opinion and political behavior and the development and decline of perceived democratic legitimacy. As such, she studies concepts like political trust, procedural fairness and democratic innovations. In her PhD project, Hannah investigates the often-stated potential of democratic innovations to reconnect citizens to political authorities and tackle an acclaimed legitimacy deficit with a specific focus on winners and losers of democratic decisions. Her PhD project is a joint-degree supervised by Sofie Marien (KU Leuven) and Wouter van der Brug (UvA).

Recently, Hannah’s work was recognized as the Best Paper of the Democratic Innovations Section at the 2016 General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (with Sofie Marien). Her Master’s Thesis was shortlisted as one of the Top 5 Political Science Master’s Theses in the Netherlands and Flanders in 2016.

Besides her PhD project, Hannah also studies the role of political fact-checking during election campaigns in shaping political trust as well as political consumerism. Methodologically she uses mainly experimental methods and comparative survey analysis.

Email: hannah.werner@kuleuven.be