SHORT CURRICULUM VITAE

In September 2008 Joost van Spanje will take up a four-year postdoc position at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. Four years earlier, Joost was selected for admission to the doctoral programme of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He was an exchange PhD student in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University (NYU) in 2006. Before this, he finished his Law (2001) and Political Science (2004) studies at the University of Amsterdam.

During his studies, Joost worked in the Dutch national parliament and at the University of Amsterdam. In the Dutch national parliament, he was a personal assistant to MP Otto Vos. At the University of Amsterdam, he was a lecturer at the Law Department and participated in several research projects. This and other research resulted in a number of publications in leading national and international journals such as West European Politics (WEP), Party Politics (PP) and the European Journal of Political Research (EJPR). Other research contributions were presented at various international conferences, including the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Uppsala (2004) and Helsinki (2007), the ECPR General Conferences in Budapest (2005) and Pisa (2007) and the 2006, 2007 and 2008 MPSA Annual National Conferences in Chicago. See below for a link to a more elaborate version of Joost's CV, and for a link to the "EUI Party Politics Working Group," which he started in 2005 together with Simon Toubeau.

PROJECTS

Joost has recently finished his PhD project, which is called "Pariah Parties". This is a cross-national comparative analysis of the political and legal repression of political parties in established democracies. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in this study, which addresses questions concerning the origins and the consequences of the repression of 46 communist and anti-immigration parties in 15 Western European countries. The supervisors of this project are Peter Mair (EUI) and Cees van der Eijk (University of Nottingham). The thesis committee will also include Mark Franklin (EUI) and Michael Laver (NYU).

At the University of Amsterdam, Joost will be working on projects in the framework of the PIREDEU project ("Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in the European Union"), funded by the European Union, and on Professor Claes de Vreese's VICI project called "Communication and the Future of Europe," funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

In addition, together with Nicole Bolleyer (University of Exeter) Joost is working on the project "New Parties in Government", an empirical-comparative study on the effects of incumbency on the organization of new parties in 13 Western European countries.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

These three projects more or less reflect Joost's research interests. His research focuses on comparative political behaviour and political communication. Political actors that are of special interest to him are the members and elites of political parties. Finally, Dutch politics receives Joost's permanent attention.

LINKS

Curriculum Vitae

EUI Party Politics Working Group

CONTACT

As of 1 September 2008 Joost can be contacted at j.vanspanje(at)uva.nl