Research team
Expertise
Ine Goovaerts is a postdoctoral researcher in the research group Media, Movements and Politics at the University of Antwerp. Ine's research interests lie in the fields of political communication, public opinion and political psychology. In her PhD, she studied the quality of the political debate, with particular attention to the evolution, determinants and effects of politicians’ use of uncivil and simplistic rhetoric (obtained at KU Leuven). For her PhD, Ine received the Thomas E. Patterson Award for Best PhD in Political Communication, awarded by the Political Communication Division of the American Political Science Association. During her postdoc, she has continued to focus on political communication research while also broadening her agenda to study mechanisms, drivers and consequences of affective polarization. In the coming years, she will moreover study how the emotions of politicians shape and influence their representative behavior, through research conducted with political elites. Since 2021, Ine has been a coordinator of the EOS-project NotLikeUs, a collaboration between seven Belgian universities, studying citizens’ perceptions of differentness and affective polarization. She furthermore teaches courses related to media and politics in the Master Political Communication at the University of Antwerp.