S. Verhaegen

Soetkin Verhaegen is Assistant Professor in European Politics at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Political Science, at Maastricht University. She is associated researcher at ISPOLE at UC Louvain. Previously, Soetkin was Postdoctoral researcher at UC Louvain (2019-2020), Stockholm University (2017-2019), and KU Leuven (2016) where she also received her doctoral degree for her thesis on the development of European identity (2015).

Soetkin’s research inquires questions about how citizens relate to governing institutions at the local, regional, national, European and global level. Specifically, she is interested in (il)legitimacy beliefs.

Focussing on attitudes about regional and international government and institutions, her work is situated at the crossroads of political sociology, comparative politics and international relations. Furthermore, Soetkin’s research interests include European identity, youth, socialization, political participation and elites. She is specialized in survey research and focus groups. 

Soetkin is co-PI of the GLOBPOL project (with Virginie Van Ingelgom), part of the ENSURED Horizon consortium, and collaborator in the Jean Monnet project EUDemocracy: Engaging Young Citizens.

At FASoS, she is coordinator of the research cluster 'European Politics and Society in Numbers'.

Soetkin was visiting scholar at the LSE, Gothenburg University, the University of Münster, and senior research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research. Previously, she was scientific advisor at Karel de Grote Hogeschool, and teacher for Europe House Ryckevelde.

Soetkin coordinates the courses 'Survey Research' and 'Great Expectations', has been teaching courses on European politics, quantitative research methods, comparative politics, political participation, political sociology, and has been supervising numerous thesis projects (BA, MA and doctoral level).