Antoaneta Dimitrova, Professor Comparative Governance at Leiden University, Honorata Mazepus, Assistant professor at Leiden University and Dimiter Toshkov, Associate Professor at Leiden University, together with three other authors researched which aspects of state capacity might contribute to opening…

Political scientist Tom Louwerse (Leiden University) and a team of international researchers have been awarded a NWO ORA grant. They are going to investigate political representation in an era in which voter alignment with political parties is steadily decreasing.

Grabovski spoke in various media on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January 2022.

How can historical archive sources by non-elite groups help us understand modern-day politics in South Asia? This is one of the main themes of Prof. Nira Wickramasinghe’s inaugural lecture on 14 March.

This paper sheds light on how better monetary-fiscal coordination can be expected to play out across very different political-economic contexts.

Paolo Sartori is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. In Leiden he will deliver one guest lecture on Twilight of the Persianate: The Vernacularization of Central Asia (18th - early 20th Centuries) on 12 April and a masterclass on How can we…

No evidence found that increasing migration leads to an increase in politically and ideologically motivated criminality. Migration flows have, however resulted in increased polarisation in the Netherlands.

In September 2013 I moved to Leiden from the UK to take up the position of Assistant Professor covering politics and international relations on the BA Russian Studies and International Studies programmes and the MA Russian and Eurasian Studies.

The chief aim of this study is to explore how classical Persian poetry and the Persian mysticism that is interwoven with the poetry have been used in the new politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially during the Iran-Iraq war.

Will the association agreement between the EU and Ukraine lead to a new ‘Cold War’ between Russia and the West? That was one of the questions posed to the expert panel which discussed the referendum on the EU-Ukraine association agreement. While many people are still unsure what this referendum is really…

The Patriot behind the pot tells the story of pottery, people and politics in the Netherlands during a time of great revolutions -revolutions both in a political and industrial sense.

Two researchers from the Institute of Political Science were recently awarded prizes. Claire Vergerio received the Francesco Guicciardini Prize for her book on the historical origins of the primacy of the state in international law ('best book in the historical international relations category'). In…

The starting hypothesis of the project is that secrecy is not always inimical to democratic governance as conventional wisdom has it.

It has been crackling within the European People's Party (EPP) for months, but is it also going to explode? Michiel Luining, lecturer at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University, gives an explanation of the suspension of Fidesz, the party of the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán,…

On 29 January 2019, CBC News, Canada’s largest news broadcaster, interviewed Dr. Joris Larik about the status of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada.

Diana Dávila Gordillo, PhD candidate at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science does field trips to her native Ecuador.

The level of congruence between parties and their voters can vary greatly from one policy issue to another, which raises questions regarding the effectiveness of political representation. We seek to explain variation in party–voter congruence across issues and parties.

In ‘Dimensions of Free Speech’, Devrim Kabasakal Badamchi (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) offers a new theoretical framework for free speech by critically analysing the major justifications for free speech. Kabasakal Badamchi argues for a justification: namely the double-grounded…

Lecture, Global Questions Seminar

Political scientist Corinna Jentzsch (Leiden University) explains why Mozambique is not (yet) a success story.

In Poland the commemoration of acts of resistance is being misused to distort the history of the Holocaust. That is what Cleveringa Professor Jan Grabowski said in his inaugural lecture on 26 November. In her lecture, the second Cleveringa Professor, Barbara Engelking, pointed to the often indifferent…

Political scientist Simon Otjes (Leiden University) receives a grant from The Dutch Research Council (NWO). The grant is part of the SGW Open Competition XS, which aims to stimulate innovative scientific research within the Social Sciences and Humanities domain. Otjes receives the grant for his research…

In the upcoming Dutch general elections, the focus of the party campaigns is on national issues. Luuk van Middelaar, Professor of Foundations and Practice of the European Union and its Institutions, argues in a column in Dutch newspaper NRC that foreign policy should also be on the agenda.

Tradition has it that at the end of each academic year, the best master’s thesis in Political Science is awarded a prize. For 2021-2022, the jury is considering six nominations. All of great quality, but on different topics. These range from political party bans to questions regarding commitment within…

The thesis is a major milestone for master students graduating in Political Science. It demonstrates their ability to conduct research independently and to provide a thorough, objective and sound analysis. That requires instruction, discussion, thinking and hard work. Lots of it. In some cases this…

As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world.

Rick van Well has won the 2018 Thesis Prize of the research master’s programme Political Science and Public Administration. Offering an insight into the hiatus of the literature on government-parliament relations, as well conducting an extensive empirical study on the working of local councils, Van…

Robert Pee, William Michael Schmidli (Eds.) This book posits that democracy promotion played a key role in the Reagan administration’s Cold War foreign policy.

As a Leiden University’s master’s student in Political Science you conduct independent research and report your findings to fellow academics and, who knows, to a larger audience. Your thesis is a showcase of your academic skills and personal interest, and perhaps even passion. Easier said than done,…

Students from Londen, Amsterdam and Leiden visited presentations and talked to students, tutors and alumni to find out more about the Master’s Programmes Leiden University has to offer.

Lecture, Livestream

Find out how to apply for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Leiden University by following our step-by step guide.

Leiden University’s Political Science and International Studies programmes have consolidated their firm academic reputation. In the 2017 QS World University Rankings, Leiden ranks 26th among the most valued institutes worldwide. Within the Netherlands, Leiden has retained the first position.

Leila Demarest, Assistant Professor of African Politics at Leiden University, has recently been awarded with a Leiden University Fund research grant to study adolescents’ political attitudes and inter-group tolerance in Lagos, Nigeria.

In this blog post, Paweł Surowiec and Ilan Manor draw on insights from their edited volume Public Diplomacy and the Politics of Uncertainty.

Opera, more so perhaps than most other forms of art, is deeply intertwined with philosophy and politics. For some composers this was explicitly so. Think of Wagner’s relation with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer or Verdi’s role in Italian unification. But almost any opera raises, and tries to grapple with,…

Law and peace in the work of Hans Kelsen. A re-evaluation of Kelsen’s legal philosophy: legal pacifism as tacit meaning of his Pure Theory of Law

Gisela Hirschmann, lecturer and researcher at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, has been awarded a 2-year grant of € 170.000 by the German Fritz Thyssen Foundation to study how international organisations react to budget cuts, membership withdrawals and systematic non-compliance by…

It is a full classroom: more than 30 pupils from 5 and 6 vwo are present to listen to political scientist Leila Demarest's lecture. She gives a brief introduction on the topic she is about to discuss: democracy in the global North and South. At first, the group seems a bit quiet, but when she asks questions…

Adina Akbik has been appointed as a new member of the Young Academy Leiden (YAL) as of 1 September 2024. Akbik is Senior Assistant Professor of European Politics at Leiden University. YAL serves as a platform for early career academics, and Akbik is keen to promote the needs and interests of young researchers…

Beatrice Penati is Assistant Professor of History at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan). Dr Penati will deliver a guest lecture on Monday, 10 October and a masterclass on Thursday, 13 October within the Central Asia Initiative at Leiden University.

Monday 5 September 2016, the political science bachelor’s and master’s programmes kick off. We are looking forward to meeting our new students. And we will happily help them to find their way around.

The latest book by political scientist Matthew Longo came out this spring: 'The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain'. In addition to its many favourable reviews, the book received the prestigious Orwell Prize this summer, which highlights exceptional books on politics.

Jan Erk, political scientist at Leiden University, has been selected as the 2016-2017 Smuts Memorial Fellow at the University of Cambridge. During his residency at the renowned British academy, he will work on his research project ‘The Enduring Impact of Africa’s extinct kingdoms and invisible chief…