Arjan H. Schakel

Arjan H. Schakel is researcher at the Department of Comparative Political Science and principal Investigator of the project ‘Strengthening Regional Democracy: Contributing to Good Democratic Governance’. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from the Free University Amsterdam in 2009 and he was a Newton International Fellow at the University of Edinburgh between 2009 and 2011. Before moving to Bergen in 2019, Arjan was assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at Maastricht University.

Over the past decade, Arjan Schakel has studied elections, parties, and authority in more than 400 regions in 23 European countries. Arjan’s research team will identify the causal mechanisms underlying voting in regional elections and will assess the impact of regional voting on regional parliaments and executives. His team’s mission is to study the conditions under which regions contribute to good democratic governance and to understand when institutional reform improves representative democracy.