Jana Belschner

Jana Birke Belschner is originally from Germany and came to Norway in 2017 to take a PhD at the Department of Comparative Politics at UiB.

After completing her doctorate in 2021, she was employed as a researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and as a post-doc at UiB.

The TMF Starting Grant project aims to understand how politics can become more long-term, and under what conditions citizens and politicians are willing to exchange short-term costs for long-term benefits: There is a striking tension between the steady aging of European voters and the growing necessity of long-term policy outcomes, for example in terms of climate change. The project will investigate these questions in a number of European countries, including Norway.

The project examines the entire sequence of political representation and will ultimately formulate political recommendations on how representative democracies can ensure a good balance between different age groups.

Belschner is building a research group on political demography, which will promote interdisciplinary research on age, political participation and representation. The project will also link the Department of Comparative Politics and UiB to an international network of political scientists and economists in universities on 3 continents and 10 countries.