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Tom van der Meer is associate professor (universitair hoofddocent) in Political Science and director of the Research Master Social Sciences, both at the University of Amsterdam.
He specializes in political trust, electoral behaviour, (ethnic diversity and) social cohesion, and research methods.

Phone / Telefoon

020 - 525 5304

(ook buiten kantooruren) 

Background

Tom van der Meer (1980) received his M.A. in Political Science from the University of Leiden , the Netherlands , and his PhD (cum laude) in Social Sciences from the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands . He also holds a B.A. in History ( University of Leiden ).

His dissertation, entitled States of freely associating citizens: cross-national studies into the impact of state institutions on social, civic, and political participation, studies how citizen participation is shaped by the state institutional environment in western liberal democracies. It shows that state institutions matter. They stimulate social and civic participation by offering collective resources (like social security and civil rights), and reduce participatory inequality within countries by redistributingindividual resources (like time and money). State institutions stimulate political participation by raising the incentives to participatethrough decisive elections and high political stakes.  

Between September 2008 and December 2009 Van der Meer worked at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, focusing on public opinion (political trust), citizen participation and ethnic diversity. Since January 2010 he works at the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam as a member of the IMES.

In 2010 Van der Meer obtained two research grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research NWO. The first, in the programme 'Omstreden Democratie' (Contested Democracy), was awarded for research on the individual level sources of electoral volatility in trust and party preferences. The research project runs until September 2011 is executed by Erika van Elsas and Rozemarijn Lubbe, with Van der Meer and prof.dr. Wouter van der Brug. The second grant, part of the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme Veni, is used to study the politically and scientifically contested relationship between ethnic diversity of social environments and social cohesion.

Van der Meer has published in national and international journals and edited volumes (see publications).

Research interests

• Political trust
• Electoral volatility
• Party systems and party system change
• Ethnic diversity and social cohesion/social capital
• Citizen participation in associational and political life Quantitative methodology; specifically multi-level research,robustness analyses and factor analysis

Teaching areas

• Research methodology
• Measurement models
• Social capital
• Political trust