Nicolien Janssens

Personal information

I am a PhD candidate at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) under the supervision of Dr. Frederik van de Putte and Prof. Jack Vromen, and part of the VIDI ENCODE project "Explicating Norms for Collective Deliberation". Since October 2024, I am a visiting PhD student in Prof. List's group on Action and Decision Theory. Before, I did a Bachelor in Philosophy and a Master in Logic at the University of Amsterdam. Apart from my research, I have a passion for science communication, and I serve as an editor for the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics.

Research interests

I am interested in democratic innovations, and in particular the ones that deal with online deliberation. As such, one of the things I study in my PhD are Deliberation and Decision Making Platforms: websites that are designed with the goal to enhance democratic participation and deliberation. My question is: how to design them in such a way that they are in line with their democratic and deliberative aspirations?

Selected publications

• Grossi, D., Hahn, U., Mäs, M., Nitsche, A., Behrens, J., Boehmer, N., Janssens, N., ... & Van De Putte, F. (2024). Enabling the Digital Democratic Revival: A Research Program for Digital Democracy. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.16863.
• Janssens, N. & Van De Putte, F. (2025) Ranking Proposals on Online Deliberative Platforms: a Critical Review. (Manuscript)
• Janssens, N. (2025) Disentangling Diversity: Two Dimensions of large-scale online deliberation. (Manuscript)