Toine Paulissen

Parkstraat 45 - box 3602

3000 Leuven

Belgium

toine.paulissen@kuleuven.be

I am a postdoctoral researcher, currently at the KU Leuven Voting & Democracy Research Group, and from October 2026 at Maastricht University as part of their Disinformation & Democracy Sector Plan.

In my new role, my research agenda will focus primarily on disinformation as narratives (rather than isolated falsehoods), asking how recurring storylines shape political judgement in democracies and what role AI might play in this. Other research interests include (affective) polarization, electoral behavior, direct democracy, and political finance.

I wrote my PhD on party behavior in referendum campaigns (read a summary here) at the KU Leuven, and my work has been published in Party Politics, European Political Science Review, Journal of European Integration, and Politics, among others.

I am mainly a quants person, working primarily with R, but also have experience in mixed-methods approaches. I am also a firm believer in open science practices and always strive to make my data, code and research as widely available as possible.

Finally, I am passionate about creating impact with my research, having contributed to a policy project on democratic participation as an alumnus of the European Scholars Programme while also writing contributions to the London School of Economics’ blog on European Politics and Policy, and UK in a Changing Europe’s blog.

selected publications

Journal Article

What Ends Justify the Means? Explaining Party Spending Intensity in Referendum Campaigns in Europe

Toine Paulissen and Bart Maddens

European Political Science Review, Mar 2026

Abs DOI PDF

This study investigates expenditure of European parties in referendum campaigns. Previous work exploring why parties initiate referendums hints at the importance of subsequent campaigns to parties, but theoretical insights regarding party behavior in campaigning contexts are fragmented and limited. We argue that party expenditure indicates the extent of their engagement, and identifying explanatory factors can offer insights into underlying strategic goals driving parties in their behavior. Drawing on referendum instrumentalization literature and existing empirical studies, we propose a framework with three strategic factors and corresponding hypotheses. These are tested using official expenditure data for 47 parties campaigning in 24 referendums in eight European countries through bivariate and multivariate analysis. Our findings mainly suggest that parties see referendum campaigns as avenues for image building, spending more on average when they initiate them and when referendums are publicly salient. Additionally, parties seemingly prioritize elections, while spending limits are ineffective in curbing expenditure.
Journal Article

Why Do Parties Participate in Referendum Campaigns? Evidence from Switzerland

Toine Paulissen

Party Politics, 2026

Abs DOI PDF

This study examines how political parties engage strategically with referendum campaigns, a less-explored aspect of their broader referendum involvement. Building on referendum instrumentalization studies as well as cognate literatures, an analytical framework identifies five potential strategic factors that might explain why parties participate in referendum campaigns and formulates corresponding hypotheses regarding their effect. The framework is applied to 33 recent Swiss referendums, using social media and newspaper advertisements as a proxy for party participation. Binomial logistic regression reveals that public attention for a referendum, its issue’s salience to a party, and (to a lesser extent) a party’s initiator status significantly favor the likelihood of campaign participation, suggesting that Swiss parties primarily leverage referendum campaigns for policy-seeking and image-building strategies. This study therefore contributes to understanding of the interplay between referendums and party strategies in contemporary political contexts, and allows for the expansion of instrumentalization perspectives to include non-initiating parties.