This project aims to explore, in general, what explains civil servants’ attitudes and behavior, and, in particular, why some civil servants are more committed to professional norms and public service values – such as impartiality, equity, efficiency, and innovation – than others.

What does it mean to do public policy ethics today? How should philosophers engage with ethical issues in policy-making when policy decisions are circumscribed by political and pragmatic concerns? How do ethical issues in public policy differ between areas such as foreign policy, criminal justice, or…

Public policy is often the subject-matter of pervasive and deep moral disagreement. Moral disagreement, understood as the difference and opposition between principled moral arguments, can and does occur between policy professionals, different political parties and individuals or groups that compose…

This study aims to examine how South Korea (hereafter, Korea) and Japan, two neighboring countries in Northeast Asia, have been responding to and mitigating the spread of COVID-19.

This book offers a concise and accessible introduction to debates about expertise, policy-making and democracy. It uniquely combines an overview of recent research on the policy role of experts with discussions in political philosophy and the philosophy of expertise.

The protection of civilians (POC) in armed conflict has become a core strategic objective for the United Nations system and for UN peace operations in particular. The UN, however, is not the sole actor engaged in POC.

CompaRe aims to be a hub in a global network on comparative regional integration. For regional integration is key to meeting the challenges of our globalizing world.

This paper written by Alexandre Afonso, Assistant Professor and Researcher at Leiden University, argues that gender norms and the political strength of the left were important structuring factors regarding why European countries choose migrant labour to expand their labour force in the decades that…

Common challenge: unique circumstances

Ideology and Actions

On 6 June 2019, Edward Donelan defended his thesis 'Regulatory Management Policies and a Universal Model for Public Policy Making, Legislative Drafting and Managing Stocks of Legislation'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. W.J.M. Voermans.

How interest groups, differences in policy issues and institutional differences between countries affect whether public opinion is translated into policy?

When a new tool is selected, it needs to be implemented and managed in a consistent and effective way.

The master's programme Comparative Criminal Justice at Leiden University focuses on criminology, criminal law and their mutual relationship. The programme offers an international comparative perspective, analysing criminal justice systems, legislation and policies in common law and civil law countri…

Are you thinking about studying Comparative Criminal Justice? Learn more and watch the videos

Sarah Giest, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, and Ishani Mukherjee researched the topic of 'Behavioural Insights Teams (BITs) and Policy Change: An Exploration of Impact, Location, and Temporality of Policy Advice'.

Governments are increasingly facilitating the roll-out of so-called “smart meters”, a technology for measuring energy consumption that are able to transmit and receive data using a form of electronic communication. However, implementation has been slow or even stalled.

The research programme Descriptive and Comparative Linguistics brings together LUCL researchers who focus mainly on descriptive and comparative linguistics.

The ‘Locke drawings’ collection and the representation of Brazilian native peoples in global perspective

Reconstructing language history through the study of language change.

Reconstructing language history and prehistory in the context of the Indo-European language family.

Political Scientist Katharina Natter (Leiden University) advances theory-building on immigration beyond the liberal state and demonstrates how immigration politics can provide valuable insights into the inner workings of political regimes. Connecting scholarship from comparative politics, international…

This article provides an all-inclusive overview of public diplomacy literature that relates to a myriad of issues and has been studied from various points of view.

The Rutte-III coalition agreement has been presented and the commentary is flooding in. Public administration experts Arco Timmermans and Gerard Breeman examined the new agreement – as they have done for every coalition agreement since 1963 - and made a systematic analysis of it: it is very much about…

Various departments of the university have worked on developing the institution’s environmental policy plan: het Milieubeleidsplan Universiteit Leiden 2016-2020.

This Global and Comparative Philosophy master’s programme is unique in Europe. It offers comparative perspectives from around the world that will enable you to be part of the next generation of thinkers: someone studying and shaping philosophy for a globalised 21st century.

Almost all languages of Europe and of a large part of western Asia belong to a single language family, which is called Indo-European, and which includes modern languages like English, Dutch, Russian, Farsi, but also ancient ones like Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite and Sanskrit.

How do you decide which master's programme suits you best?

In this article Fisher, Klein & Codjo introduce the FOCUSdate Project and they show how the sentiment data provide unique abilities to analyze Russia's and Iran's reactions to US policies and events and NGO human rights campaigns.

In this paper, Kantorowicz aims to track the persistent effect of former partitioning borders on property tax rates in Poland.

How do crises produce changes in specific European Union foreign policy areas, and how should we conceptualise these policy changes?

Implementing all kinds of change and introducing new structures, far-reaching rules and administrative systems may sometimes seem to distract an organisation from its purpose. Furthermore, there is growing recognition of the need of staff of public organisations to find more meaning in their work: the…

Study information, Online Experience

Read-Urban was a first project to investigate whether policy recommendations can be made with the aid of linked data collections and data science and to gain experience with the success factors for such a process.

A thorough description of the relationships among languages and their social environment in a given context, reflecting an ecological perspective, involves attention to the agency of local actors, and the policies, discourse, and ideologies that surround them.

Valérie Pattyn, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, researched

This paper develops a novel theoretical framework for the conduct of postmortems after major foreign policy surprises for the European Union and its member states.

Dutch coalition parties VVD and CDA want to tighten asylum policy and have launched a plan to grant two types of statuses to refugees. They also intend to partially restrict the right to family reunification. However, this plan is facing strong opposition. With the proposal, the government can expect…