Populist opposition parties are less likely to engage in policy-making behaviour (participating in or directly influencing legislative production) and somewhat more likely to engage in scrutiny behaviour (monitoring and criticising government actions).

Towards the graduation ceremonies, you sense an increasing nervousness. Not only because all the tradition and glamour surrounding the event, also because that will be the day that the winner of the Political Science master’s thesis award will be announced. For 2022-2023, the jury is considering seven…

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,…

Bernardo Almeida will give a webinar on Building land tenure systems in Timor-Leste on February 18, 2021, from 15.30 - 17.00. This webinar is organised by the KITLV.

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.

A comparative analysis of legitimation strategies in tree hybrid regimes: Russia, Venezuela, and Seychelles.

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…

A variety of age checks are required, both in order to protect children and to ensure that they can participate online, a new study funded by the European Commission finds. The article on the study, co-authored by Simone van der Hof, Professor of Law and Digital Technologies at eLaw, was published in…

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.

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

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.

In this article, Kuipers and Timmermans analyze the first lady's relationship with policy problems in the period 1945-2013.

Three new ministries have been formed in the Netherlands: Asylum and Migration, Housing and Spatial Planning & Climate and Green Growth. Of course, this is not merely an administrative act. These ministries carry a strong and political charge and play a crucial role in shaping a government's political…

Following the fall of the fourth Rutte cabinet, Dutch Minister of Justice and Security Dilan Yesilgöz addressed the Dutch media about the ‘influx’ of family reunification applications by asylum permit holders. In her view, it would put enormous pressure on Dutch society and could jeopardise security.…

Research & Politics (RAP) is a peer-reviewed open access journal which focusses on research in political science and related fields through open access publication of the very best cutting-edge research and policy analysis. The journal achieved a high score for the impact factor, which puts it in 49th…

Hoye proposes that concerns about virtues of the sovereign are essential for understanding Hobbes's both his political thinking and his political critique.

Computer scientist Tessa Verhoef received a Best Paper Award during the ‘ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility’. The paper emphasised the need for interdisciplinary research in sign language processing. The authors state that linguists and computer scientists should collaborate with…

This study investigates how the tenure of security (proxied by both inter- and intra-party electoral advantage) affects the engagement and political performance of members of parliament.

... together our steps make the journey!

Sharing his passion for sustainability with students—that’s what Thijs Bosker enjoys most about his work. As an environmental scientist, he conducts ecotoxicological research, but next to this he loves teaching. ‘Everyone can make a difference in their own way.’

On 22 May, the Dutch House of Representatives invited one hundred citizens to pose critical questions regarding the Ministries’ annual reports. This followed on from the annual ‘Accountability Day’. Caspar van den Berg, Associate Professor of Public Administration, helped think about how citizens could…

On Thursday 3 March , Prof. Margaret Moore will give the annual Centre for Political Philosophy lecture.

Sarah Giest, Assistant Professor at Leiden Univeristy, researched the topic of regulatory and market structures that affect nudge implementation by private actors, captured by the ‘budge’ idea.

The Dutch State is set to challenge The Hague Court of Appeal's ruling that the Netherlands must stop exporting arms to Israel at the Supreme Court. The government believes that foreign policy falls within the political domain and not within the judiciary. Geerten Boogaard, Professor of Constitutional…

In 2019, Aliaksandr Lukashenka marks a quarter of a century as the first, and so far only president of the Republic of Belarus. This new book by Dr. Matthew Frear, Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies, offers the most up-to-date analysis of government and politics in a country usually…

In this chapter, Kohei Suzuki aims to provide a brief overview of Japan’s local government system.

On Wednesday 27 September a new book by Prof. Luuk van Middelaar will appear, entitled The new politics of Europe. Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s first vice-president, presents the book that evening during a symposium around the same theme.

Dutch right-wing political party Forum for Democracy has repeatedly demonstrated that it has no lower limit when it comes to morals. Should the courts in the Netherlands protect democracy by banning parties like Forum? Several legal experts from Leiden University commented on this question in newspaper…

Xinrong Ma defended her thesis on 13 February 2018

This book brings together contributions on topics related to the Dutch EU Presidency Agenda 2016 from a number of scholars who are affiliated with Leiden University.

Both Europe and Latin America face challenges globally and at home. Conflicts over land and resources have been resurgent in recent years.

Nikoleta Yordanova, a political scientist at Leiden University, will lead an international research consortium funded by the European NORFACE Network to complete a multi-disciplinary project ‘Willingness and Capacity for EU Policy Action in Turbulent Times: Conflicts, Positions and Outcomes’ (EUINACTION).…

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).

It’s impossible to avoid, even in the Netherlands: the US will soon be going to the polls. Where does it come from, this fascination with US elections? PhD candidate Bram Eenink explains.

When we talk about the Kingdom of the Netherlands, it is not just about the Netherlands. On the contrary: our Kingdom consists of no less than four countries, three of which are Caribbean islands. This structure is complex, to say the least. Although all countries are officially equivalent, in practice…

Mateo Cohen (research assistant at the Open University of Israel and PhD candidate at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science) studied arguments articulated by diverse members of the Right-Wing elite in Israel and explains how these views lead to the rejection of a two-state solution and…

The future of Europe as a community of democratic states is deeply uncertain. The European Union, founded to promote ‘ever closer’ integration, aims nominally for peaceful, prosperous cooperation. But this ideal has been battered by a series of bruising crises, and now by war.