Veni grant for Caspar van den Berg
Caspar van den Berg, researcher and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration, has been awarded a prestigious Veni grant of 250,000 euros from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NOW) for his international comparative research on politicization of top civil servants.
NWO announced this today. Van den Berg is “incredibly happy” with the award, which allows him to devote the large majority of his time to scientific research for the next four years.
In the study, he focuses on whether a strong political influence on the work of top civil servants has a positive effect on policy and administration, or if a neutral and impartial top civil service leads to more effective governance. How can we explain the fact that civil servants in some countries and policy sectors are more strongly politicized than in others? These questions emerged from his doctoral research "Transforming for Europe: The reshaping of national bureaucracies in a system of multi-level governance", which was awarded the Van Poelje Prize in 2013.
The NWO grant will enable Van den Berg to systematically examine these questions in a comparative study in 14 countries in Europe, North America and East Asia.
The NWO awards Veni grants each year to outstanding young researchers.