NIG is research school for PhD-education but is also a research network connecting public administration and political science scholars in the Netherlands and Flanders, aiming to contribute to a lively research community. Apart from PhD-memberships, NIG also offers a senior membership to scholars who have completed their PhDs and are working for one of the NIG-universities. The senior membership offers advantages on both a collective level as on an individual level.

On the collective level the senior membership is integral to how the NIG-universities fund NIG. The senior membership keeps the costs of PhD-memberships, the annual conference and individual courses relatively low as well as stable through the years. This makes the program for accessible for many PhDs and ascertains that larger institutes also carry a larger part of the costs. For these reasons, the costs of senior memberships are incorporated in the annual contributions to NIG by NIG-universities.

On an individual level, the senior membership has the following advantages

• Senior-members participate for free in NIGs annual conferences and other research meetings
• Senior-members – often those still in the start of their careers – can sign up for NIG-courses free of charge (max. 2 senior members for each NIG-course)
• Senior-members can lead research colloquia, facilitating research networks and interactions across universities on shared research interests
• Senior-memberships allow NIG to exist and offer relatively low-cost research networks and PhD-education that add value to the development of PhD-candidates, supervised by senior(member)s
• From 2023 onwards, NIG will develop additional financial instruments to facilitate research collaborations to which (only) senior members can apply
• From 2023 onwards, NIG will develop some peer-to-peer courses and training in which (only) senior members can participate for free