Roni Küppers

Hello!

I am a Lecturer in Politics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Previously, I was a PhD researcher in the Department of Methodology at the LSE and a Fellow of the La Caixa Foundation. You can check out here my Google Scholar. Before my PhD, I worked as a researcher in different projects.

My work centres broadly on understanding democratic life from the standpoint of ordinary citizens. This work revolves around debates on democratic crisis, democratic malaise, or democratic deficit that have been central in Western political science since the 1960s, but which have acquired a new significance in a context of momentous shift. In short, what is it that explains systemic discontent with how democracies work, and what paths are open for us to rethink collective sovereignty? These questions are important not only because they have evident implications for the betterment of democratic institutions that are technically “consolidated” yet deeply aching. It is also critical to make sense of new political movements and trends that seem to work for democratic renewal, but which can also serve to further reactionary or even anti-democratic agendas.

On the one hand, this research agenda comprises the study of political discontent and apathy. On the other, it explores the productive dimension of democratic crises: that is, the possibilities for democratic renewal contained in the political aspirations and innovations of ordinary citizens. Particularly, my current research focuses on the role that collective identities play in this process and how they explain our capacity (or, incapacity) to imagine and enact political change. Indeed, in a context of mounting systemic challenges spanning structural inequalities to the climate crisis, the need for change is increasingly related to rethinking the political foundations: who we are, how we are, and what we aspire to be, with crucial implications for politics in the 21st century.

At present, I develop this work in the fields of populism, nationalism, and gender, and with a focus on West Europe (particularly, Spain and Portugal). I employ qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches.

My doctoral thesis, now a book project, studies peoplehood and populism from the perspective of ordinary citizens in Spain and Portugal. This research stemmed from an intriguing puzzle in recent years concerning two countries that have been widely regarded as "comparable" societies. Yet despite similar contexts, the “populist decade” has seen rising populism and severe instability in Spain, while political disengagement and politics-as-usual have been the norm in Portugal. Employing extensive original data from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, the book explores this empirical puzzle by explaining the meaning and implications of how populism takes shape in different contexts, showing how institutional participation made sense to discontent citizens in Spain but not in Portugal as a way of addressing democratic ills. Building on these findings, the book contests and informs more broadly established theories about what populism is and how it shapes political behaviour, specifically by proposing a structural theory of how populism is rooted in taken-for-granted aspects of modern democracies. To do so, I developed an innovative approach to populism that seeks to push beyond gaps in existing scholarship. Overall, the objective of innovating how we think about populism is to better explain populist politics, and also to address two broader questions of critical importance: what is the status of democratic peoplehood in societies of growing complexity? And does rising populist discontent contain the potential for renewing democratic politics?

My work has been supported by the La Caixa Foundation, the LSE, and the Humanitarian Trust.