Dr. Maxime VandenbergheMaxime Vandenberghe is an FWO postdoc at the Department of Political Science at Ghent University.
Dr. Maxime Vandenberghe
Biography
Maxime is a postdoc (FWO) at the Department of Political Science at Ghent University and a visiting professor at the VUB. His main research interests are federalism, ethno-territorial politics, consociationalism, and party politics, with a particular focus on Belgium. In his PhD thesis (FWO, 2023), he used quantitative methods to study the impact of decentralization on ethno-territorial conflicts in Belgian cabinets (1979-2018). He published in high-ranked journals such as Ethnopolitics, Swiss Political Science Review, Regional and Federal Studies, and Acta Politica. In the past, Maxime was a research assistant at the University of Bath (UK). Presently, he is involved in the masters course 'Belgian federalism' at Ghent University and he teaches 'Introduction to Belgian Society & Politics' at the VUB. In his postdoc project, he studies political conflicts across Western democracies (1990-2020) to assess whether certain systems of government (federal/unitary) are more prone to conflict and to check whether the electoral consequences of conflicts differ depending on state structures.