My name is Rozemarijn van Dijk and I am currently a postdoctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Besides being an academic, I am a big fan of bird watching, discovering (and more importantly, eating) cheese, listening to podcasts, and reading books. On this website, I offer a brief overview of my research and various other activities.

I began studying Political Science in 2013 at Leiden University, where I completed my bachelor’s degree cum laude. During my studies, I interned at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, where I discovered my passion for social research. This led me to enroll in the Research Master’s program in Political Science and Public Administration in 2016. I obtained my Master’s degree cum laude in 2019 and went on to pursue a PhD at the University of Antwerp. My dissertation, titled From Admission to Admission. The Recruitment of Women in Politics was supervised by prof. dr. Petra Meier and prof. dr. Joop van Holsteyn.

My research focuses on the underrepresentation of women in politics, with a specific focus on political recruitment. My other research interests are political violence and its (gendered) effects on political participation; gender quotas; LGBTQ+ party wings.

In addition to my research, I am also involved in teaching. I support professors in organizing their courses, give guest lectures on topics such as Gender and Politics and Intra-party Democracy, and teach a seminar on Gender and Politics. Over the past year, I have also supervised bachelor thesis classes on gender and lobbying, as well as LGBTQ+ interest groups.

Since social science research goes beyond academic publishing, I also engage with broader audiences by writing blogs and opinion pieces to share insights from my work.

Dissertation project

My dissertation project was inspired by the puzzle of the underrepresentation of women in parliament. I focused on how political parties select candidates (the demand side of political recruitment) and on the formation of political ambition (the supply side). What rules do parties use to select candidates and how this affect which candidates they select? Is there a gender gap in political ambition among party members? Do inclusive and exclusive selectorates create different candidate lists? By answering these questions I tried to get a grasp on both the supply and demand of political candidates and to examine whether this is gendered.

Other projects

Apart from my dissertation project, I am involved in a couple of other research projects. These projects are about gender quota; candidate selection in the UK (together with Chris Butler); LGBT wings in political parties (together with Michal Grahn and Sofia Ammassari); gendered parliamentary behavior (together with Zeljko Poljak); and (gendered) violence against politicians (together with Joep van Lit).