Congratulations on completing your TMF Starting Grant, Arjan Schakel!

Arjan Schakel has worked on the topic of regional democracy together with a team of two PhD students, one post doc and several master students. He came to Bergen in 2019 from a position as Assistant Professor in Research Methods at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Before this, Schakel had studied at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and worked as a Newton International fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Schakel was appointed to full professor at UiB in 2022. When planning his research project Strengthening Regional Democracy – Contributing to Good Democratic Governance for the TMS Starting Grant, Schakel looked at the ongoing transformation of political power in European nation states: Power is shifted from national governments “upwards” to the European Union and “downwards” to regions within countries. These regional governments in EU countries are responsible for one third of public spending, two thirds of public investment expenditure and more than half of public employment – but political scientists knew very little about the voters, their behaviour and about the regional politicians. The aim of Schakel´s  project was therefore to identify the causal mechanisms underlying regional voting and assess how regional representation is affected by regional voting.  Schakel and his research team could make use of the Norwegian Citizen Panel run by the Digital Social Science Core Facility (DIGSSCORE) at the Faculty of Social Sciences and already collected data and set out to gather and harmonise this wealth of data into several extensive datasets that either are already published or will be made available for research in the coming months and years.

In addition to an extensive data collection to establish the comparative regional government dataset and the regional electoral dataset (RED), the team also created the comparative regional voter dataset which currently integrates about 380 regional election surveys from four countries with the aim to increase this number to more than 400 surveys from eight countries. Sharing data with colleagues has always been very important for Schakel who collaborated with several colleagues from the department to create a research cluster on Territorial democracy and reforms, hosted many international visitors, a final conference, a research seminar with international contributors and sent his team members to research stays and conferences in Europe and the US. Schakel was also invited to present his research all over Europe.Together with TMF Starting Grant fellow Professor Yvette Peters he contributed to work with the panel on elected representatives and Schakel’s team fielded six surveys to local (kommune) and regional (fylkeskommune) representatives to understand how they perceive their roles and responsiveness. The Covid-19 pandemic caused delays in hiring and project work, but nevertheless Schakel and his coworkers managed to publish 17 peer reviewed research articles, 12 book chapters and edited 5 special issues. More article manuscripts are currently submitted to academic journals and the group plans a book publication for 2025. The two PhD candidates will graduate in 2024 and 2025 respectively.

In his final report Schakel writes that the Starting Grant gave him the security of a position at UiB, which enabled him to develop and pursue creative research and to strengthen his team leader skills. Schakel´s advice for young group leaders is to carefully study risks in research projects and develop contingency plans. He now feels very much at home in Bergen and within the vibrant research community at his department and he learned to fluently speak Norwegian.

 

The portrait of Arjan Schakel on the frontpage was taken by Melanie Burford.

Facts about the project:

Project title: Strengthening Regional Democracy – Contributing to Good Democratic Governance

PI: Arjan Schakel

Host department: Department of comparative politics, UiB

Project period: 2019-2024

TMF contribution: 10 MNOK

Total Budget: 20 MNOK

Homepage Arjan Schakel