Dieter Stiers publicly defended his doctoral dissertation “Quality of the Vote Choice. Accountability and Congruence in Electoral Democracies” in May 2020 at the University of Leuven. Dieter was co-supervised by Marc Hooghe and Ruth Dassonneville. Dieter is now is a postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the University of Leuven (Belgium). His research focuses on elections, electoral behaviour, and more specifically on the causes and consequences of electoral volatility. In his PhD project he uses quantitative methods to investigate the democratic costs and benefits of rising volatility.