Ruud Koopmans

[1] A native of Uithoorn, Ruud Koopmans studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), where he obtained a MA in 1987.

In 1992, he received a PhD from UvA for his dissertation on the post-war social movements and political system in West Germany, which he wrote under the supervision of Hanspeter Kriesi.

[2] Ruud Koopmans' research fields include immigration and the integration of migrants, ethnic inequality and ethno-cultural conflicts, religious fundamentalism, the politics of globalization, social movements and evolutionary sociology.

Together with Hanspeter Kriesi, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Marco Giugni, Koopmans has extensively studied the relationship between the structure of political opportunities and the mobilisation patterns of social movements in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.

[18] Finally, turning to the Dutch far-right, Koopmans – along with Jasper Muis – has analysed the rise of Pim Fortuyn and the LPF in 2002, finding that discursive opportunities significantly contributed to Fortuyn's success with regard to gaining voters' support and his ability to mediatize his claims, which then induced further feedback loops.

[22] In further analysis of immigrants' mobilisation, Koopmans finds that immigrants are highly engaged in public debates on issues relevant to them the more inclusive the local incorporation regime is, though cross-local differences are dwarfed by differences between nations, suggesting a continuously strong role for the nation-state regarding political integration.

[26] Moreover, in a comparison of the socio-cultural integration of naturalised and non-naturalised immigrants in the Netherlands, France and Germany, Koopmans and Evelyn Ersanili find that limited conditions for naturalisation in terms of cultural assimilation may promote integration, as shown in Germany and France, but also that allowing immigrants to hold dual nationalities doesn't have substantial negative effects.

Together with Jessica Erbe, Koopmans finds that whether and how political communication is Europeanized varies substantially between policy fields, with differences strongly depending on whether the policy mandate lays with governments or with the EU, suggesting that a further transfer of competencies to the EU would also entail the Europeanization of further parts of the public sphere.