Mariken van der Velden is an Associate Professor of Political Communication in the Department of Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
She received her PhD in Political Science from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Before joining the Department of Communication Science, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich, and visiting researcher of the Departments of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the University of Oxford.
Her research interests comprise the areas of political communication, political behavior, and computational social science. Her work is motivated by key societal challenges that face democracies today, such as the crisis of representative democracy and increasing political fragmentation. Specifically, she apply advanced computational approaches to study the communication and rhetoric of politicians, and how this affects political decision making and its electoral consequences in multi-party systems. In her current work, she examines the legitimacy of political decision-making. In one project, she studies the electoral ramifications of (un)compromising politicians. This research project is funded through a Innovation Grant (VENI) by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). In another project, she looks at the perceived legitimacy of government communication, which is funded through a National Science Agenda Grant. Moreover, as part of the OPTED H2020 consortium funded by the European Research Council, I work on methods to compare textual data in multilingual settings.
