Four FASoS researchers awarded NWO XS grants

How do lobbyists use disinformation to sway policymakers? Who gets to shape the historical narrative of occupation and violence? Does growing inequality change the way citizens think about politics? And how have politicians defended “truth” across a century of media revolutions?

These urgent questions lie at the heart of four FASoS projects that have just been awarded prestigious NWO XS grants. The grants fund daring, early-stage research with the potential for transformative impact. This year’s winning projects tackle some of society’s most pressing challenges – from democratic resilience and political cognition to the legacies of occupation and the hidden mechanisms of lobbying.

About the projects

Lobby-Lies: Disinformation in Interest Group Politics by Iskander de Bruycker

Lobbying is often portrayed as a neutral exchange of expertise, but what happens when misinformation becomes a strategic tool? Iskander de Bruycker’s project breaks new ground by developing the first conceptual framework for lobbying disinformation. Through Brussels-based case studies, it aims to map how misleading narratives shape policy debates in fields from tobacco to climate and tech. By bringing these strategies to light, the project lays the foundation for more transparent policymaking.

The House of Occupation: Bureaucratic Expertise, Legal Discourse, and the Making of Perpetrator History in Post-War West Germany by Camilo Erlichman

How do perpetrators of war crimes, mass violence, and genocide shape the ways in which their own history is written? Camilo Erlichman examines how former Nazi officials used legal and bureaucratic expertise to influence academic, public, and political discourse after 1945. Drawing on the untapped archives of the Institut für Besatzungsfragen, the project exposes the networks and strategies that allowed perpetrators to shape understandings of the crimes in which they were involved by positioning themselves as historical witnesses, experts, and scholars. 

The Political Mind under Inequality: Do Economic Disparities Make Nuanced Political Information Harder to Grasp? by Michele Fenzl

Why does rising inequality weaken democracies? Michele Fenzl proposes a new explanation: inequality may distort the way people process political information itself. Through a large-scale survey experiment and a controlled lab study, the project investigates whether economic disparities impair cognitive performance and increase biased political reasoning. The findings could offer a novel understanding of the link between inequality and disinformation.

The History of Truth in Dutch Democracy: How Politicians Perceived and Protected Truth in the Face of Media Revolutions (1880–1980) by Betto van Waarden

Is the struggle over “truth” really a new phenomenon? Betto van Waarden’s project looks back a century to see how Dutch politicians navigated truth-telling amid the rise of the mass press, radio, and television. Using archival materials, parliamentary debates, and party documents, the project traces how successive media revolutions reshaped ideas of factual, moral, and personal truth – offering vital historical lessons for today’s debates on democratic resilience.

About the funding instrument

The NWO SSH-XS grants are available for projects with a maximum budget of €50,000 to enable proposals for curiosity-driven, innovative research in the research fields covered by the NWO Domain Social Sciences and Humanities.