GASPAR goes abroad in 2025
(16-04-2025) Great News! GASPAR is excited to announce that five of our researchers will be embarking on a research stay abroad in 2025. Maxime, Jasmien, Elise, Lisa, and Janne will be joining universities abroad. Discover how this will impact their research!
Maxime Vandenberghe is an FWO-funded postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and a visiting professor in Belgian politics at the VUB. His research focuses on cabinet conflicts and federalism. Currently, and using an original dataset, he is analysing the electoral effects of conflicts in central governments across Europe (Who benefits?), with a particular focus on regionalist parties. Additionally, he studies the role of ethno-territorial diversity and decentralization levels in explaining conflict levels and their impact.
As a participant of the yearly Winter School, Maxime has already joined the EURAC Institute for Comparative Federalism in the early years of his PhD study. He looks forward to rejoining EURAC this fall (September- October 2025): "The expertise I obtained and the debates we had at EURAC were extremely valuable to strengthen my PhD study when it was little more than a two-page Word file. Having collected new data, I'm excited to present, discuss, and finetune my research at EURAC again. The team is known for its strong expertise, comparative focus and interdisciplinary approach. But first and foremost, they are extremely amicable people. Hence, there's no doubt that the research stay will be as pleasant as useful."
Jasmien Luypaert is a post-doctoral researcher funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), affiliated with both GASPAR (Ghent University) and KU Leuven. Her current postdoctoral project (2024–2027) investigates two key questions: (1) how parties’ social group appeals in their manifestos across Western Europe have evolved over time (1960–2024), and (2) what the electoral consequences of these appeals are—both on their own and in combination with policy appeals.
As part of the first work package, she is spending Spring 2025 at the University of Innsbruck to collaborate with Prof. Dr. Hauke Licht. Together, they are developing an algorithm to automatically detect, categorize and analyse the sentiment of social group references in political texts. This research stay provides an opportunity for methodological innovation, international collaboration, and the preparation of a joint publication.
She mentions the following on her research stay experience in Innsbruck:
“The University of Innsbruck offers the perfect bridge between theoretical political science knowledge and methodological practice. Working together with someone who originated a novel computational approach has been very inspiring and enriching for my current research project!”
Elise Storme is a TA and PhD candidate and her research focuses on representation, political communication, and violence against women in politics. For her dissertation, she examines whether and how politicians communicate differently on social media based on their gender, and how these differences influence the electorate. In 2024, she also contributed to a project mapping sexism against politicians during the national elections, commissioned by the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men and in collaboration with the ULB.
In the fall of 2025, she will join the AISSR at the University of Amsterdam for two months, under the supervision of Daphne van der Pas. As a member of her doctoral advisory committee, she has already been a great source of constructive and insightful feedback over the years. Reflecting on her upcoming research stay at AISSR, she says: "The team is known for their robust thematic expertise and valuable methodological knowledge. It is the perfect environment to advance my research on gendered political representation and online political discourse. When I'm not immersed in research, I'll be out running the Amsterdam half marathon."
Lisa Janssen is a PhD candidate and her primary research interests lie at the intersection of political psychology, political behaviour, and comparative politics, with a particular focus on understanding citizens’ commitments to democratic procedures and principles. In her dissertation, she examines how affective polarization influences citizens’ willingness to prioritize political gain over democratic values. Methodologically, she employ a range of quantitative techniques, including experiments, panel data analysis, and cross-national surveys. As a political scientist, Lisa is committed to interdisciplinary research and open science principles.
Lisa is currently undertaking a research stay at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. During her time there, she will collaborate with Dr. Andres Reiljan, a leading scholar in the field of affective polarization in Europe. Their joint project focuses on the emerging phenomenon of issue-based affective polarization, with particular attention to the extent to which climate change has become a source of affective division among European citizens.
Janne Ingelbeen is a PhD researcher spending mid-March to the end of May in Switzerland for a research stay at the University of St. Gallen. Under the supervision of Professor Eri Bertsou and her PhD students, Amber Cloé Zenklusen and Pradeep Krishnan, she is contributing to the Varieties of Expertise project. This refers to a large-scale European research initiative that introduces a new theoretical and empirical approach to studying expert involvement in democracies from a citizen perspective.
This experience not only provides her with new methodological and theoretical insights but also directly contributes to her own research. Janne studies the role of expert democracy in Belgium, focusing on three key questions: how experts are involved in the policymaking process, under what conditions they exert influence, and how citizens, politicians, and experts themselves perceive this involvement. Specifically, she will further develop her latest research question through a vignette experiment, which she will present in St. Gallen and refine in collaboration with local experts.
Reflecting on her stay, she says: “The University of St. Gallen is diverse - both in terms of researchers, methods, and theoretical approaches. This is not only enriching for my own project but also refreshing for future work and collaborations.”
