Maarten Bouwmeester, LL.M., awarded Culture Fund scholarship for research stay in Australia

Maarten Bouwmeester, PhD candidate at our Faculty’s Department of Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Public Administration, has been awarded a Cultural Fund grant for a research stay. He will be spending three months in Australia next year thanks to the scholarship to work on his doctoral research ‘System failure in the digital welfare state’.

Three months in Australia

Bouwmeester has been awarded the Culture Fund Scholarship in the amount of €3,000 to conduct research in four different locations in Australia from March to June 2025. He will travel to research centers in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane. There he will interview scientific and professional experts, give presentations at conferences and organize a one-day symposium.

Checks and balances in the field of social security

Bouwmeester’s research residency is part of his doctoral research titled ‘System failure in the digital welfare state’. His research focuses on the functioning of checks and balances in the domain of social security. It combines insights from constitutional and administrative law, social security and the literature on automated decision-making. Bouwmeester is studying two specific cases: Robodebt (Australia) and the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (Netherlands).

Bouwmeester's research runs from July 2022 to June 2026 and is part of the Public Trust & Public Law research program. He is supervised by Prof. Gijsbert Vonk (promoter), Prof. Heinrich Winter (co-promoter) and Dr Barbara Brink (daily supervisor).

This article was published by the Faculty of Law.