معرفی
Sofie Marien is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven, Belgium. She is affiliated with the LEGIT research group which focuses on understanding legitimacy challenges in contemporary democracies and how these can be addressed. Her work contributes to making democracies more resilient, inclusive, legitimate, and fair.
Dr. Marien's research focuses on democratic legitimacy, democratic innovations, political trust, citizen engagement, deliberative democracy, participatory democracy, and political communication. Her work examines how legitimate political decision-making processes are perceived by citizens, whether participatory and deliberative procedures can increase citizens' perceptions of legitimacy, and how political decision-making processes should be designed to foster losers' consent and reflective well-informed opinions of citizens.
Her extensive publication record reveals consistent engagement with deliberative democracy, political communication quality, and democratic legitimacy. The research trajectory shows increasing focus on mini-publics and their effects on political legitimacy, the relationship between political communication quality and trust, and how democratic innovations can address legitimacy challenges. Recent work demonstrates sophisticated experimental approaches to understanding citizens' reactions to democratic norm violations and the contextual factors that influence legitimacy perceptions.
Dr. Marien serves as Promotor for several significant research projects including "Climate change and the legitimacy challenge" (2022-2023), "They are not like us" (2022-2025), "On Silver Tongues and Silver Linings" (2019-2023), "Minipublics in the hot seat" (2019-2023), and "Meeting Great Expectations Through Democratic Innovations" (2018-2023). Her research is generously funded by the European Research Council, FWO - Research Foundation Flanders, Excellence of Science EOS, and the University of Leuven.
She is actively involved in the European network on democratic innovations and collaborates with various international institutions including the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra, the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics at the University of Pennsylvania, and several European universities. Dr. Marien also engages with civil society actors, media, and policy makers to bridge academic research with practical democratic innovations.
