Rate My Professor Maurits Meijers

Maurits Meijers is a Research Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science within the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Antwerp, where he began his position in June 2025. He earned degrees from KU Leuven, the London School of Economics and Political Science (MSc in European Studies, 2012), and a PhD summa cum laude from the Hertie School in Berlin, defending his dissertation 'Contagious Euroscepticism: The Impact of Eurosceptic Challenger Parties on Mainstream Party Attitudes toward the European Union' in 2017. Prior to his current role, Meijers was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research centers on political representation and party competition in European democracies, exploring elite-citizen interactions, populism, Euroscepticism, political disinformation and deception, bias perceptions in public institutions, reputational costs of party policy change, and strategies for defending democracy against autocratization. As principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant-funded DEMO-LIES project (2025-2030, €1.5 million), he investigates trends in political lying accusations, citizen perceptions, and their consequences for democratic trust and engagement across 20 European countries using multi-method approaches including automated text analysis, surveys, and experiments.

Meijers has made substantial contributions to the field through co-developing the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA), with data waves in 2018 and 2023 covering over 250 parties in 28-31 countries, enabling comparative analyses of party populism, ideology, democratic commitment, and climate positioning. His influential publications include 'Measuring Populism in Political Parties: Appraisal of a New Approach' (Comparative Political Studies, 2021, with A. Zaslove; 353 citations), 'Contagious Euroscepticism: The Impact of Eurosceptic Support on Mainstream Party Positions on European Integration' (Party Politics, 2017; 314 citations), 'Do Populist Parties Increase Voter Turnout? Evidence from over 40 Years of Electoral History in 31 European Democracies' (Political Studies, 2021, with A. Leininger; 129 citations), 'MEP Responses to Democratic Backsliding in Hungary and Poland' (JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2019, with H. Van der Veer; 110 citations), and 'Populist Democrats? Unpacking the Relationship Between Populist and Democratic Attitudes at the Citizen Level' (Political Studies, 2024, with A. Zaslove; 101 citations). Awards include the ERC Starting Grant (2024), NWO Veni Grant for 'Credible or Capricious? The Reputational Cost of Party Policy Change' (2019), and the KNAW Early Career Award (2020). He serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of Politics of the Low Countries and supervises bachelor theses in political science.