Since January 2023, I’m enrolled as a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Leiden University. The title of my PhD project is ‘The effect of media exposure to authoritarian discourse on the electoral support for authoritarian parties’.
In my PhD research, I analyze the impact of informational warfare via the spread of authoritarian discourse through media channels affiliated with the Russian state. In other words, I analyze exposure to Russia’s state-affiliated media and how this affects electoral behavior and political attitudes.
In a first paper, I analyze the effect of exposure to Russia’s state-affiliated media on the electoral support for authoritarian parties in post-communist countries.
Van Vliet (forthcoming). Pro-Kremlin narratives in Russia’s ‘near abroad’: the influence of media exposure to authoritarian discourse in post-communist countries.
For my second and third papers (still ongoing), I conducted three survey experiments (Estonia 2025 and 2026, and Latvia 2026) and spent time in both Estonia (May/June 2025) and Latvia (May/June 2026) for interviews with experts and citizens. The survey experiments are pre-registered.
Van Vliet (forthcoming). Pre-Analysis Plan. Retrieved from https://osf.io/mbyz7.
Van Vliet (forthcoming). Pre-Analysis Plan. Retrieved from 10.17605/OSF.IO/QSHK5.
Attended conferences
- ECPR general conference 2022 (Innsbruck)
- EDC (Elections-Democracy-Crisis) 2024 (Warsaw)
- Politicologenetmaal 2024 (Maastricht)
- Council for European Studies 2024 (Lyon)
- Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies 2025