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.

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).

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.

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

The historiography of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 is dominated by the personal clash between the principal negotiators, Harry Dexter White of the United States and John Maynard Keynes of Britain.

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

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.

During the Latin American Studies Master's programme you will focus on key social, political, linguistic and cultural developments which are currently shaping the complex reality of Latin America.

Introducing prof. Scott Nelson, the Legum Professor of the Social Sciences at William and Mary, and on the spring exchange at the University of Leiden.

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.…

The word bureaucracy does not have negative connotations for Ken Meier. Meier, Professor of Bureaucracy and Democracy, has a clear grasp of the relationship between elected politicians and bureaucracy, or the civil service. Inaugural lecture on Monday 20 May.

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

Social Citizenship & Migration (SCM) is one of the nine interdisciplinary programmes launched by Leiden University in 2020. It is led by the Faculties of Governance and Global Affairs, Law, Humanities, and Social Science.

On this page we have listed the most frequently asked questions about the Pre-University Classes for you. Is your question not listed? Then please send us an e-mail!

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.

This is the 2017 paperback release of William Michael Schmidli's The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere, which won the 2013 Foreign Affairs Magazine Best Book of the Year.

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…

This study addresses and explains the issue of negative descriptions of the Arab Other in modern Iranian thought.

What invertebrates live in the fields and edges? Do the populations change with landscape complexity?

Leiden University has been promoting studies on Latin America and the Caribbean for a long time.

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.

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.

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).

If idioms employed in codes of conduct could be as idiosyncratic as examples suggest, then to what extent did early modern language of vice, too, persist in this genre?

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.

Niels van Willigen (Institute of Political Science, Leiden University) puts Dutch participation in UN peacekeeping into an historical context. He analyses the reasons for the Dutch withdrawal from the 1990s onwards, and explores the obstacles and opportunities for a structural return. Van Willigen argues…

The smallness of Suriname, according to political scientist Wouter Veenendaal (Leiden University), strongly affects and shapes the nature of democracy in the country. On the one hand, clientelism ensures that members of each ethnic group included in power-sharing arrangements have access to state resources…

This dissertation focuses on the production and consumption of a mediation show in China that collaborates with the local Justice Bureau and broadcasts on an entertainment channel—exploring answers to questions raised from the mentioned entertainisation, social and political, and cultural issues.

How to explain variation in the extent to which parliamentary voting behaviour follows the government–opposition divide? Party Politics article by Tom Louwerse et al.

This study explores regional variation in the use of utterance-final particles by analyzing spoken Taiwan Mandarin data recorded from spontaneous conversations.