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prof. dr. Ben Crum

Full Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Political Science and Public Administration

Full Professor, Research Programmes - Social Sciences, Multi-layered governance in EUrope and beyond (MLG)

Personal information

Ben Crum is Professor of Political Science, Head of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, and co-Director of the R&I Lab on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Governance at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Crum studied political science at the University of Amsterdam and the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD from the European University Institute Florence. Before joining the Vrije Universiteit in 2004, he worked at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, at the University of Twente, and at policy consultancy firm Research voor Beleid in Leiden. He also has held a secondment at the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy in The Hague and visiting positions at the University of Victoria (Canada) and Harvard University.

From 2014 to 2016 he was co-director of the VU-UvA Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies. From 2017 to 2019 he held the research portfolio in the board of the VU Faculty of Social Science. From 2019 to 2021 he was the director of the VU School of Governance.

Research

Ben Crum's research focusses on contemporary democratic politics and the challenges that it faces from internationalisation, populism, economic inequality and digital technology. He is the author of Learning from the EU Constitutional Treaty (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor (with John Erik Fossum) of Practices of Inter-Parliamentary Coordination in International Politics. The European Union and Beyond (ECPR Press, 2013) and (with Alvaro Oleart) of Populist Parties and Democratic Resilience: A Cross-National Analysis of Populist Parties’ Impact on Democratic Pluralism in Europe (Routledge 2023). Articles of him have been published in, among others, the Journal of Common Market Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, West European Politics, Global Constitutionalism, and the European Law Journal. He regularly writes political commentaries, comments on political affairs in the media and has advised ministries, parliamentarians and political parties.

Grants

Most recently, Crum was a work package leader and member of the coordination team in the H2020 RECONNECT project (‘Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and Rule of Law’, 2018-22). Before that, he was co-director of ACCESS EUROPE (the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies), co-director of the ERASMUS-network PADEMIA on parliamentary democracy in Europe (2013-16), and work package co-leader in the FP6 project ‘Reconstituting Democracy in Europe’ (2007-11). Furthermore, he has held and successfully concluded two PhD-grants from the Dutch Science Council (NWO).

Ancillary activities