Thread by @CasMudde

With this bang on the gong 22 scholars, including me, were officially inducted into the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science or @_knaw , joining roughly 600 others. Sadly, I had to do it online.

An enormous honor after a not very traditional career. A quick #thread 🧵

1. I never thought about, or wanted to, become an academic. I never excelled at, or enjoyed, school and even had to repeat 5th class in high school. I mainly entered university to avoid military service (then still compulsory in the Netherlands).

2. I graduated high school with five 6s and two 7s (out of 10) and profited from the fact that universities in the Netherlands are not competitive and allow anyone with the proper high school degree to enter (irrespective of their grades). 🙏

3. After my first year I had various pinball records at my student club @LVVSAugustinus but passed only one-third of my courses. After my second year, I still missed two courses of my first year and received my military service call-up. Fortunately, I passed in my 6th attempt!

4. I changed Public Administration for Political Science and started to enjoy university much more when I took advanced courses from the truly amazing faculty at @PolSciLeiden at that time.

5. Along the way, Joop van Holsteijn saw something in me (which I didn't see) and made me his RA. This changed my life. I not just became a better student but also started to do research with him. His incredibly sharp and critical mind and generous mentoring still shape me today.

6. I was always mostly interested in political parties and party ideologies and studying at Leiden was a pure blessing. The late Peter Mair almost randomly expressed interest in my proposed MA research and shaped me into an international scholar. I miss him very much today. 💔

7. I wrote an MA thesis on the ideology of a specific group of far-right parties, so-called "national democratic" parties in Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. I took an extra semester just to make it as good as I could. An article version was later published in @EJPRjournal

8. It was because of the RA-experience, the support of Joop and Peter, and the MA research that I wanted to pursue a PhD. It was mainly because I felt I had wasted the first 3-4 years of my undergraduate time and I wanted to study more. I had no strong ideas about academia yet.

9. I choose to do a more theoretical and elaborate study of party families. For opportunistic reasons I choose the "extreme right" - at that time it was already a hot topic in the Netherlands and almost no one studied them. I also knew quite a lot about it.

10. I was extremely LUCKY to get a PhD position. I failed at NWO and only got a place in Leiden because of a barter deal and because a better candidate didn't want to use all 4 years of funding. Again, Joop played a major role in backing me.

11. It was during my PhD period that I started to think that academia was for me. I worked obsessively (something I no longer encourage or recommend) and published quite a lot for a PhD student in the 1990s.

12. Because te far right was still a marginally studied phenomenon, I could get fairly central in its study at a young stage in my career.

In the end, my PhD was published by @ManchesterUP and is now available Open Access! 👇

library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.…

13. Unfortunately, at that time, the far right was seen as fairly marginal and while many colleagues loved to talk with me about my research, they didn't value it as very central to political science. Hence, it was hard to find an academic job.

14. Without job opportunities in the Netherlands, I reluctantly left my country in December 1997. I took a 6 month position at @ceu in Hungary, something I wouldn't have considered if I didn't have a gf in the region at that time.

15. CEU was amazing but for personal reasons, I moved to Scotland and later to Antwerp. Working in different countries and departments definitely made me a broader and more complete scholar. Learned so much from people like Kim Hutchings and Stefano Guzzini.

16. Moreover, at all these places my teaching load was relatively low and institutional support for travel (at least) was fairly generous. In other words, I had a supportive research environment, unlike most colleagues!

17. After my divorce, and 2.5 years of being department chair, I decided that I would probably want to leave Antwerp and needed to be competitive. I decided to write a second book on far-right parties, as that would give me my best bet at a prominent publisher.

18. This opportunistic choice led to my book "Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe", which later would win the Stein Rokkan Prize -- again, support of Peter was crucial, as I would never have thought about submitting the book.

cambridge.org/core/books/pop…

19. A short time later I met @MarEGallagher and decided to follow her to the US. It took me 4 years, and over 400 applications, to find a TT position (in the wake of the Great Recession). It also meant another step back in my career. But it was worth it.

20. I have worked on various topics for shorter periods, like civil society, democratization, Euroscepticism, but always returned to the far right and its role within liberal democracies. In my first 7 years in the US, this was a hot topic in Europe and a non-topic in US.

21. Everything changed in 2016, with Brexit and Trump, and the shift in interest of mainstream political science, particularly in the (far too) dominant) US, for "far right" and "populism." Just like the media, scholars like me got a huge "Trump Bump".

22. Why do I write all this? Partly because I am overwhelmed in gratitude to all the people who have encouraged and supported me over my career. Partly to give clearer insight in at least my career to young or aspiring scholars.

23. This is NOT a rags-to-riches story! I had several hurdles to overcome but I also started with a lot of privileges, not just as straight white man but also as someone who went to university in the Netherlands in the late 1980s and 1990s.

24. My lesson is not, if you do your thing, you will also succeed. My career was full of LUCK (some at the expense of liberal democracy 😉). Moreover, it also came with sacrifice (depression, having to leave my country, etc.).

25. My main lessons are:

- Do what YOU want to do, because you will do better, be happier, and never know what will be "hot" in 5-10 years anyway.

- Success is always partly based on LUCK!

- ALWAYS choose personal over professional! Your citations won't love you back! #TheEnd