Carolien van Ham

I am a fourth year PhD student in Political Science at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. From January to April 2010, I’ve spent a semester at the Harvard Kennedy School as a visiting research fellow. My key research interests are comparative democratization, electoral processes and electoral fraud.

In the context of my PhD I work on the following research topics:

1. Beyond Electoralism: The Quality of Elections in Third Wave Democracies from 1974-2009 (working title)
Investigates the increasing number and variety of elections around the world, asking what makes elections substantively meaningful as instruments of representation and accountability and how this variation affects subsequent prospects for democratization. Concretely, the project: (1) defines and measures the quality of elections in 95 third wave democracies from 1974-2009, (2) explains variation in election quality across countries as well as over time, and (3) investigates the consequences of this variation in "quality" of elections for government accountability and responsiveness.

2. De-politicized democracies? Voter perceptions of policy choices in national elections in European democracies.
Investigates to what degree voters perceive policy differences between political parties, how institutional and party system complexity affects these perceptions, and how such perceptions subsequently influence voting behavior.

3. The Embarassment of Riches? A meta-level review of individual level research on voter turnout. (with Dr. Kaat Smets) Review of empirical research on individual level determinants of voter turnout based on research published in 10 top-journals in political science from 2000-2010. Research supported by a grant from the European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) on Public Opinion.

4. Downs and the Third Wave: Voter turnout in new democracies. Aggregate level analyses of determinants of voter turnout in third wave regimes (data on 95 regimes between 1974-2009).

I hold a Master of Migration and Ethnic Minorities from the University of Utrecht (cum laude) and a Master in Political Science from the University of Leiden (cum laude), and receive PhD scholarships from NUFFIC and UACES. Before coming to EUI, I worked as a management consultant for national and local governments in the Netherlands, as a researcher for the Dutch Parliamentary Commission on Integration Policy (Commissie Blok), and as a researcher at the Instituto de Estudios sobre Migraciones (IEM) in Madrid, Spain.