Ruben VAN SEVEREN

Bio

Dr. Ruben Van Severen is political psychologist currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at both the Department of Social Psychology and the Department of Public Governance and Management at Ghent University. He holds a Master in Theoretical and Experimental Psychology and obtained his PhD in 2025 with the dissertation Representative democracy at a crossroads: Unpacking citizen preferences for alternative policy-making models. He is a member of the interdisciplinary research consortium Changing Local Democracies (link).

His research explores how citizens perceive and engage with representative democracy and with alternative ways of making political decisions. These alternatives can take different forms: giving citizens more influence through direct democracy, shifting power to experts in technocracy, or moving in a less democratic direction under autocracy. He studies how individual traits such as political cynicism and ideology, together with contextual factors such as crises and issue polarization, shape the ways people evaluate and respond to these models.

Due the interdisciplinary nature of his topic, his work has been published in journals from various disciplines including Social Psychology, Policy Studies, Political Research Exchange, European Journal of Political Research, Policy & Politics, and Government Information Quarterly.

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Areas of research