Bitter-Sweet Democracy?

François Randour is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political, Social and Communication sciences, University of Namur and associate researcher at ISPOLE, UCLouvain. His research and teaching interests focus on EU decision-making processes, regional, national and European parliaments, multi-level governance, federalism, citizen attitudes and political discourse analysis. He has been a visiting fellow at Sciences Po Paris, Manheim University and at the University of Antwerp and an invited professor at UCLouvain, the University of Antwerp, Sciences Po and UNamur. He has published in internal journal, such as Discourse & Society, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies and Journal of Legislative Studies.

Heidi Mercenier is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) and the Université catholique de Louvain. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Université Saint-Louis–Bruxelles (USL-B). Heidi Mercenier’s main research interest lies in citizens’ relationships with politics, especially towards the EU, as well as how current digitalization processes affect such relationships. She has been publishing in leading political science journals such as the Journal of European Public Policy and Politique européenne, and she has co-edited two books (Bruylant and Université de libre de Bruxelles). She completed her Phd at the Université Saint-Louis–Bruxelles (USL-B) and she worked as a lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and as a visiting fellow at the Center for European Studies (ARENA) of the University of Oslo.

Karen Celis is full professor affiliated to the VUB Department of Political Sciences and co-director of RHEA (VUB Centre of Expertise Gender, Diversity, Intersectionality). She conducts theoretical and empirical research on the democratic quality of political representation from an intersectional perspective. She was co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics (2013), the Routledge book series Gender and Comparative Politics, (2017-2020) and founding editor of European Journal of Politics and Gender (2018-2020). Her most recent book with Sarah Childs is Feminist Democratic Representation (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Virginie Van Ingelgom is a F.R.S. – FNRS Senior Research Associate and Professor of political science at the Institut de Sciences Politiques Louvain-Europe, UCLouvain. Her research interests focus on the issue of democracy and legitimacy at the subnational, national, European and global levels, on citizens’ attitudes towards European integration, on policy feedbacks and in qualitative and mixed methods. Her previous work has been awarded with the Jean Blondel Ph.D. Prize by the European Consortium for Political Research (2012) and with an ERC Starting Grant (Qualidem, 2017-2023). She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, Sciences Po Paris, Université de Montréal and at the European University Institute and an invited Professor at Sciences Po Bordeaux, and at the Graduate Institute Geneva.