Two PhD Positions: 'Social Policy Preferences, Vote Choice and Trust'

The Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam is hiring two PhD-students in a research project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), titled ‘Social policy preferences, vote choice and trust’. Both PhD-projects are co-supervised by dr. Gianna Eick, dr. Armen Hakhverdian, and prof. dr. Wouter van der Brug.

Public opinion research reveals that large majorities of citizens in advanced democracies are in favor of more economic equality. And yet, in many countries parties who champion redistribution from the rich to the poor have fallen on hard times. The mismatch between public preferences for more egalitarian politics and the decline of parties with more egalitarian agendas has received ample scholarly attention. Some argue that the electoral decline of the left is due to the adoption of Third Way politics in the 1990s, while others focus on the politicization of socio-cultural issues such as immigration.

The NWO-project consists of two PhD-projects, one focusing on social policy preferences as the dependent variable, and one on vote choice as the dependent variable. Both PhD-projects cover Western European countries with a specific focus on the Netherlands. The PhD-candidates work within the overall framework of the project but are expected to develop their own ideas for data collection and analysis. Both PhD-projects will field original (panel) surveys with embedded experiments. The surveys will also contain batteries of items related to specific welfare arrangements, which allow for more precise measurement of our key concepts. Both projects will pay particular attention to the effects across different social status groups, including class, income and education, and generational differences, since previous research has, for different reasons, found that welfare attitudes are weakly structured among economically marginalized and younger populations.