Welcome to my homepage! I am a Research Professor at the University of Bergen. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at Maastricht University (2011-2019) and a Newton International Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (2009-2011). I received my PhD-degree in 2009 at the VU University Amsterdam.

I am the principal investigator of Strengthening Regional Democracy - Contributing to Good Democratic Governance which is funded by a Starting Grant from the Trond Mohn Foundation and the University of Bergen. Together with my team we form the Centre on Regional Democratic Governance which is a research centre that conducts cutting-edge research on regional democracy and that actively engages with policy-makers to improve regional democracy. We maintain the Observatory on Regional Democracy which is a web portal for anyone who is interested in political, social, and economic data at the regional level. I have collected a swathe of regional-level data which you can also find in the Observatory on Regional Democracy.

My research and teaching interests span the topics of federalism, territorial politics, methodology, regional government, regional elections, multilevel governance, and regionalist parties. My work can be characterised by its comparative and quantitative nature with a strong focus on the collection of data and the development of new measurements which are subsequently used to advance theory. I have developed several indicators to measure congruence between national and regional elections, nationalisation of party systems, parties, and regions, and vote share swings between regional and previously held national elections. Scores on these indicators can be downloaded on the Territorial Heterogeneity in the Vote section which also features 23 country excel files with data on congruence between national and regional elections, congruence between national and regional governments, turnout in national and regional elections, vote share swings between national and regional elections, and regionalist party strength in national and regional elections for the period 1945 until 2015.

I am co-chairing the Standing Group on Regionalism and Federalism of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) and I am editor of the Annual Review of Regional Elections of Regional & Federal Studies and of the book series on Comparative Territorial Politics published by Palgrave Macmillan. Find out more about my publications on my Google Scholar profile