Tom van der Meer is Professor in Political Science, in particular Legitimacy, Inequality and Citizenship at the University of Amsterdam.
He specializes in political trust, electoral behaviour, (ethnic diversity and) social capital, and research methods.
Tom van der Meer (1980) is full professor in Political Science, and co-director of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study (since 2015) and first director of the Dutch Local Election Study. Van der Meer has published in a wide variety of national and international journals and edited volumes on themes such as political trust, electoral volatility, social capital, citizen participation, and quantitative research methods (see publications). He is co-editor of the Handbook on Political Trust (with Sonja Zmerli) that was published in 2017 by Edward Elgar Publishing.
Van der Meer is co-founder, co-editor, and regular contributor of the Dutch political science weblog www.stukroodvlees.nl, that relates daily political affairs to insights obtained from political science research. In 2017 he published his book 'Niet de kiezer is gek', a highly critical reflection on the supposed crisis of Dutch democracy and the remedies against it.
Van der Meer is a member of the Dutch state committee that studies the state of the Dutch parliamentary system (Staatscommissie Parlementair Stelsel). The final report (Lage Drempels, Hoge Dijken) was published in December 2018.
Since 2010 Van der Meer worked on a range of research projects supported by grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Currently he is involved in two ongoing NWO-funded research projects and one project funded by the Dutch Ministry of Interior Affairs
Earlier grants include a project on the individual level sources of electoral volatility in trust and party preferences in 2010-2011 (NWO programme 'Omstreden Democratie'/Contested Democracy), and a project on ethnic diversity and social cohesion between 2011 and 2014 (NWO Innovational Research Incentives Scheme Veni).
Van der Meer received his M.A. in Political Science from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, and his PhD (cum laude) in Social Sciences from the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He also holds a B.A. in History (University of Leiden). Between September 2008 and December 2009 Van der Meer worked at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, focusing on public opinion (political trust), citizen participation and ethnic diversity. Since January 2010 he works at the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam as a member of the programme group 'Challenges to Democratic Representation' and as member of the interdisciplinary research group IMES.
General introduction to Political Science
Research methodology (research design: causality; multi-level modeling; measurement models
Social capital