About Matthijs

I work as an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Before that, I was as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Utrecht University and a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Inequality Studies (AMCIS). I have held visiting positions at the University of Vienna and the University of Padua. I received my PhD from the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR).

I am interested in parties, voters, socio-political divides and public opinion. By means of an interdisciplinary approach (i.e., combining perspectives from the fields of comparative politics, political psychology, political sociology and political communication), I study the transformation of, and challenges to, contemporary liberal democracies. Specifically, I focus on topics such as populism, the far left and right, ingroup-outgroup thinking, political discontent, and polarization.

My research has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, Economic Policy, European Union Politics, Party Politics and Electoral Studies. I co-edited the book Radical right-wing populist parties in Western Europe: Into the mainstream?, which was published with Routledge.

I regularly write about my research for a wider audience. My work has appeared in, for instance, The Guardian, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. In Dutch I have published in, among others, NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant, Trouw, De Correspondent and De Groene Amsterdammer.

I am also: (1) the initiator of The PopuList, an international research collaboration which offers academics and journalists an overview of populist, far-right and far-left parties in Europe; (2) founding co-director of the Hot Politics Lab – an interdisciplinary research group using political psychology and adjacent fields to explain salient socio-political themes; and (3) founding co-editor of, and regular contributor to, the Dutch political science blog Stuk Rood Vlees.

Currently I teach the following courses: (1) Politiek en samenleving; and (2) Understanding politics through psychology. I have also developed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Basic Statistics for the online platform Coursera. You can find the videos here.

Here is my Google Scholar page, this is where I tweet, and here you can find my full CV.