Political scientists Tom Louwerse, Simon Otjes & Cynthia van Vonno introduce the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset, a record of parliamentary (voting) behaviour in the Dutch Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber, House of Representatives) since 1945.

How many written parliamentary questions does each party put to each minister? Political scientists Simon Otjes (University of Groningen) and Tom Louwerse (Leiden University) studied the practice in Dutch parliament and found that parties use parliamentary questions strategically as part of their ‘permanent…

Beyond the immediately visible plenum, parliaments are highly complex institutions. They work through various venues in which decisions are prepared or even taken. The two main institutions in this regard are parliamentary party groups, which comprise legislators who are elected under the same party…

Akbik and Diessner expand the classic typology of police-patrol and fire-alarm oversight with two new categories: planning bureaus and ambulance chasers.

How can teachers be motivated by their students’ data in making stepwise changes to their teaching practices?

How do individuals make decisions? What determines the quality of group decisions? When and why do people cooperate with others? How does intergroup competition evolve?

How do parliamentarians secure their political future? Are their activities in the legislature connected to their place on the candidate list from one election to the next? Political scientists Tom Louwerse and Cynthia van Vonno examine the Dutch case. Their main finding is that speaking in the plenary…

In science, it is of vital importance that multiple studies corroborate the same result. Researchers therefore need to know all the details of previous experiments in order to implement the procedures as exactly as possible. However, this is becoming a major problem in neuroscience, as animal studies…

Simona Demková, Assistant professor at the Europa Institute of Leiden University, publishes her book ‘Automated Decision-Making and Effective Remedies: The New Dynamics in the Protection of EU Fundamental Rights in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’.

Efficiently responding to others’ emotions has great survival value, especially for social species, such as primates, who establish close, long-term bonds with group members. The closest living relatives to humans are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Studying these species, and comparing them on the exact…

This minor focuses on how our thoughts, emotions and behaviour are influenced by other people, and how we influence other people.

The parliamentary elections in the Netherlands, scheduled for March 2017, are likely to result in a fragmented parliament and a complicated coalition formation process, according to Dutch political scientist Hans Vollaard (Leiden University).

Health inequities, obesity among children, loneliness, performance stress among youngsters. What are the drivers behind such ‘wicked problems’ and how might they be related? This interdisciplinary minor offers you the possibility to work with societal partners to gain a deeper understanding of real-life…

Our project focuses on the analysis of decision-making processes in the European Union (EU) and explores how approaches and tools to understand decision-making found in both the Natural and the Social Sciences can be linked, knowledge between these traditions exchanged and synergies utilized. To explore…

This article explores the concept of issue prioritisation within the context of public administration research, focusing on decision-making processes.

PACES is an innovative, inter-disciplinary and multi-level research project that asks, How do changes in society, individual life experiences and migration policy shape decisions to stay or to migrate over time and across countries? And how can this knowledge inform future migration policies and gov…

We present an extensive study of methods for exactly solving stochastic constraint (optimisation) problems (SCPs) in network analysis. These problems are prevalent in science, governance and industry.

The starting point for this research project is the notion that the human brain is susceptible to all kinds of fallacies and biases that affect our perceptions and influence our reasoning outside of our conscious awareness. Indeed, most people think they are merely observing facts and that they process…

Müller, Braun & Fraussen examine the conditions under which commissioners appear in the news and which communication strategies they pursue.

How do processes of coalition-formation influence patterns of decision-making in the European Union?

As a research project between four Jean Monnet Chairs - two located in Europe, one in Canada and one in the U.S. -- the project DEUBAL has been approved in 2010 for co-financing by the European Commission. DEUBAL aims to study changes in European decision-making due to the Lisbon Treaty, by a combination…

Research in Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science focuses on the dynamics and the interaction of political institutions, individual decision-making, and collective behaviour.

How do cognitive, motivational, and affective processes interact to select actions?

Nadine Raaphorst wrote an chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Administrative Justice about how two notions of fairness are studied in street-level bureaucracy literature and about the factors that influence how bureaucrats behave in this regard.

The focus of the Multicriteria Optimization and Decision Analysis (MODA) group is to develop foundations of methods in multi-objective optimization.

MPs in the Netherlands are first and foremost motivated by their direct environment, i.e. the parliamentary and partisan institutions.

On 20 March 2019, Tim Dekkers defended his thesis 'Mobility, Control and Technology in Border Areas: Discretion and Decision-making in the Information Age'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. J.P. van der Leun en Prof. dr. M.A.H. van der Woude.

Big data promises to transform public decision-making for the better by making it more responsive to actual needs and policy effects. However, much recent work on big data in public decision-making assumes a rational view of decision-making, which has been much criticized in the public administration…

The coronacrisis is emerging as the ultimate test for political leaders. How do national political leaders get ahead or behind ‘the curve’ of fast-changing dynamics. Martin Lodge (London School of Economics and Political Science) and Arjen Boin (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) look…

The Dutch Advisory Council on International Affairs (AIV) recently published its report ‘The war in Ukraine: A geopolitical shock to the system’. On 7 July 2022, the Dutch House of Representatives had asked the Advisory Council to provide an expedited report on the consequences of the war for Dutch…

Promotor: A.P.IJzerman Co-promotor: A. Bender

Cynthia van Vonno, political scientist at Leiden University, explains why individual MPs vote according to the party group line.