MPs in the Netherlands are first and foremost motivated by their direct environment, i.e. the parliamentary and partisan institutions.

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.

Cynthia van Vonno, political scientist at Leiden University, explains why individual MPs vote according to the party group line.

How many written parliamentary questions does each party put to each minister? Political scientists Simon Otjes (University of Groningen) and Tom Louwerse (Leiden University) studied the practice in Dutch parliament and found that parties use parliamentary questions strategically as part of their ‘permanent…

Political scientists Tom Louwerse, Simon Otjes & Cynthia van Vonno introduce the Dutch Parliamentary Behaviour Dataset, a record of parliamentary (voting) behaviour in the Dutch Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber, House of Representatives) since 1945.

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).

Jan de Vetten brengt zijn promotieonderzoek ook uit in boekvorm. ‘In de ban van goed en fout’ beschrijft voor het eerst - op basis van archiefonderzoek en interviews - op samenhangende wijze de bestrijding van de CP en CD, en ook de reactie daarop van die partijen. Waarom werden ze zo fel werden bestreden?…

Political scientist Cynthia van Vonno’s (Leiden University) 2016 dissertation has been shortlisted for the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Jean Blondel PhD Prize. Her study of party group unity in parliamentary voting was chosen from an exceptionally high number of nominations.

The Leiden Research Profile Area Political Legitimacy organizes a public symposium on the 12th of May 2016 on the legitimacy and future of the Dutch Senate.

On 22 February 2017 political scientist Tim Mickler (Leiden University) defended his dissertation on the structure, composition, and working of parliamentary committees. He was awarded the exceptional predicate 'cum laude'.

Tom Louwerse, lecturer and researcher at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, has been awarded a NWO Vidi grant. This will enable him to conduct research on how government and opposition parties cooperate in parliament and how this affects voters’ party choices and satisfaction with d…

PhD Defence

Conference

Lecture

How did parties as political organizations emerge?

Political scientist Luzia Helfer (Leiden University) empirically tested claims about media-politics relatiopns using unique data from experimental studies with elected politicians and political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

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).

This volume brings together experts on the history of the various revolutionary Sister Republics.

Debates on political legitimacy in Dutch parliament in the 1880s, 1930s, and 1960s

Beyond the immediately visible plenum, parliaments are highly complex institutions. They work through various venues in which decisions are prepared or even taken. The two main institutions in this regard are parliamentary party groups, which comprise legislators who are elected under the same party…

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…

Political scientist Ruud Koole (Institute Political Science, Leiden University) has been appointed to a state commission that will investigate whether the Dutch parliamentary system and the parliamentary democracy need to be reformed.

Lecture

In this programme, you will follow several core courses on topics such as political representation, elections, and political careers.

PhD Defence

The eleven innovative essays in this volume explore the notion that all forms of modern mass politics, including liberal democracies, need such a form of sacralization of politics to function.

The research group on terrorism and political violence studies the phenomena of terrorism-related and other politically motivated violence.

Political scientist Matthew Longo (Leiden University) takes a detailed look at the evolution of border security in the United States after 9/11. Far from the walls and fences that dominate the news, he reveals borders to be thick, multi-faceted and binational institutions that have evolved greatly in…

Political scientist Maurits de Jongh (Leiden University/Sciences Po) argues that political liberalism is self-defeating as a framework of justification for liberal conceptions of justice. He explores how the framework's self-imposed criterion of acceptability in the eyes of all reasonable citizens leads…

This book focuses on policing in city-regions in Europe bringing together experts from across the continent to develop a sociology of urban policing and a unique methodology for comparing different metropolises in the same country.

This project examines the meaning of this historical place, and the way it has been used by the political institutions that have had their seat there.

In what ways do historical and current events affect how we should judge the legitimacy of political authorities?

This volume challenges the idea that the development of ‘democracy’ is a story of rise and progress at all. It is rather a story of continuous but never completely satisfying attempts of interpreting the rule of the people.

Political scientists John Gerring (University of Texas, Austin) and Wouter Veenendaal (Universiteit Leiden) evaluate the political implications stemming from the size of a political unit – on social cohesion, the number of representatives, overall representativeness, particularism ('pork'), citizen…

Why obey the state? Dorota Mokrosińska presents a fresh analysis of the most influential theories of political obligation and develops a novel approach to this foundational problem of political philosophy, an intriguing combination of the elements of natural duty and associative theories.

The faculty collaborates with several partners in The Hague. Below you will find an overview of our partners.

On 27 September 2017 a new book by Prof. Luuk van Middelaar appeared, entitled The new politics of Europe. The book is at the same time a front line account of Europe’s recent crisis years – from monetary turmoil to tensions around Ukraine, from refugee crisis to Brexit – and an analysis of the Union’s…

The Leiden Political Economy Group (L-PEG) is a multi-disciplinary network of scholars with a research interest in (comparative / global) political economy based at Leiden University. Our members belong to various institutes and faculties across Leiden University, and from other universities across…

The Centre for the Study of Political Parties and Representation (CSPPR) is an interdisciplinary platform for scholars of Leiden University focusing on the historical and contemporary operation and functioning of political parties, with a particular emphasis on the causes and consequences of the changing…

This dissertation offers a reconstruction of the propositional contents of the writings of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt while bringing these into discussion with their performative meanings, such as polemical forms of reasoning, analogical and metaphorical uses of language, and hidden…

The aim of this project is to study what makes an act or form of violence a specifically political reality.

Lecture

This book concentrates on the regulation of political parties in the EU post-communist democracies, and on Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, in particular.

The research group Politics, Culture and National Identities 1789-present investigates a wide range of national political cultures in Europe and the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of only analyzing high politics (the acts of governments and political parties), the research group focuses…

Political scientist Rebekah Tromble (Leiden University) and computational sociolinguist Dirk Hovy (University of Copenhagen) analyse how much hostility and sexism Clinton faces on Twitter, as well as who seems to be behind such attacks.