The Chair group offers three four-year scholarships to complete a PhD in Global and Local Governance. The PhD student will be enrolled in the Graduate School of Campus Fryslân (GSCF). PhD candidates can benefit from affiliations at University of Groningen Research Institutes such as the Groningen Centre for Law and Governance (
https://www.rug.nl/research/groningen-centre-for-law-and-governance/), the Faculty of Economics and Business (
https://www.rug.nl/research/som-ri/) and others as appropriate to the PhD Project.
Applications on the following topics are particularly welcomed:
- Globalization and Consensus Politics: For a substantial number of European countries, consensus politics, proportionality and oversized-majority decision making has been the norm throughout the 20th century. The question is to what extent globalization and European integration are presenting favorable or unfavorable conditions for the survival or demise of consensus politics. Empirical reality offers support for both arguments. To what extent does globalization have a different impact in the politics and governance of consensus democracies versus majoritarian polities? What are explanatory factors and what can be said of the future stability of politics and governance in consensus and majoritarian systems?
- The Future of Legitimate Governance: Good governance in democratic systems can be legitimized by a combination of factors: democratic representation (input), due process (throughput) and effective governance (output, outcome). For each type of legitimacy, present social developments pose both opportunities and threats. What are they and how are they playing out in the compound level of government legitimacy in different systems and at different levels of government? To what extent can a deficit on one factor be compensated by a surplus on another factor? What does this teach us for the chances of longer term good governance?
- The Political Economy of Health Care Systems: Public spending on health care has been an ever-growing segment of government budgets. Explanatory factors include an ageing population and advancing medical technology. Predictions are that in the foreseeable future, half of all public spending will be on health care. According to many, the growth of spending is unsustainable, and is happening at the expense of spending in other sectors, mainly the classical government tasks such as safety and security, infrastructure and to some extent education. Various important questions need to be addressed: How exactly did spending on health care develop over the past decades, how does this compare to developments in comparable other countries and what explains greater or smaller growth numbers? To what extent does the increase in health spending pose imbalances in the overall public spending and to what extent does this disrupt basic government tasks as mentioned above? What are effective ways to curb the growth of public spending and what will be the political, ethical, societal and economic implications of such measures?