The first edition of the ILS Lunch Seminars 2018-2019 in retrospect
On Thursday 13 September 2018, the first ILS Lunch Seminar of this academic year took place. Geerten Waling and Michael Klos kicked off the ILS Lunch Seminars-series by presenting on their particular research topics.
Geerten Waling presented first on “All politics is personal? The ‘personalisation’ trend in Dutch politics”. In his very insightful presentation, he focused on three research questions: How can we analyze personalization as it happens? What strategies do these politicians choose? And: what are the upsides and downsides of personalization for political parties? Waling explained how the personalization of Dutch politics causes both centralization and decentralization, visible by the attention shift to individual party leaders and in the increasing popularity and success of individual candidates/MPs. Because of the distinct Dutch electoral system and political culture, The Netherlands form an ideal laboratory for research in this particular field.
The second speaker was Michael Klos, who presented: “Sovereignty and internet intermediaries: should nation-states be able to censor undesirable content?” Although Klos is only in an early phase of his PhD research, his very interesting presentation focused on his early findings on the meaningfulness of state-sovereignty in censoring information on online (social media) platforms. By talking about cyberstates and the so called ‘splinternet’, Klos explained the difficult position nation-states find themselves in nowadays. State influence on the internet is always controversial, but digitalisation brings frustration for state governments who need to tackle the problems which arise from this interesting subject. To be continued, for sure!
The next ILS Lunch Seminar will take place on Thursday 11 October 2018, from 13:00 - 14:00 hrs in KOG A0.08. This seminar will feature presentations from Hans-Martien ten Napel on "Modern Constitutional Practice and the Ideal of Self-Government" and Mark Leiser on “A principle-based response to the #FakeNews crisis”. There is no need to register and lunch is provided.
Would you like to present yourself and your research? Do not hesitate to contact our ILS student assistant! More information can be found on our website.