Eefje Steenvoorden is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science. She studies and teaches social divisions in public opinion and political behavior, and specializes in political trust and societal pessimism. In 2020, she received an NWO VENI grant to study the meaning and consequences of political trust across social groups.
Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the UvA and an Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She obtained her PhD at the University of Amsterdam (2016), in cooperation with The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP). Her dissertation examined the conceptualization, causes, correlates and consequences of societal pessimism. It was awarded with the Jaarprijs Politicologie 2017, a prize for the best dissertation in political science written by a Dutch or Flemish researcher abroad or a researcher at a Dutch or Belgian university. During her PhD project, she was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and American University, for which she received a Fulbright grant (2013). After a MSc. Sociology (VU), she started her career as a researcher of public opinion at The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP).