Université catholique de Louvain

Graduate Student, Institut de Sciences Politiques Louvain - Europe (ISPOLE)

PhD candidate

Thesis Title: Parties' Preferences for Electoral Rules: Disentangling Partisan and General Interests in Post-1945 Western Democracies

About

I'm a last-year PhD candidate at the Louvain-Europe Political Science Institute of the University of Louvain (Belgium) and a a junior researcher at the Belgian Scientific Foundation. In my dissertation, I comparatively and critically examined the rationality of parties' decision to support electoral system change. More specifically, I emphasized the importance of vote-seekingstrategies challenging the conventional wisdom on the dominance of seat-maximization reasonings. In parallel, I've worked on electoral behavior in Belgium and on the improvement of a new set of techniques for data analysis called QCA and Fuzzy Sets. My main research interests are parties' strategies and elections in European countries.

My work appeared in West European Politics, the European Journal of Political Research, German Policy Studies, and in various edited books. I took part at many international conferences and I recently spent visiting periods at the Canadian Research Chair in Electoral Studies of the University of Montreal (Canada), the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the European University Institute (Italy), and the Department of Comparative Politics of the University of Bergen (Norway).

Since 2010, I've been teaching graduate students about institutional design at the University of Louvain, and assisting various professors for short and long courses on QCA and Fuzzy Sets in several graduate programs across Europe.

Visit my Website : perso.uclouvain.be/damien.bol

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