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).

IBL-researcher Katharina Riebel, together with international collaborators, published a remarkable finding in Nature Communications on the prevalence of female birdsong.

Chaider Bamualim defended his thesis on 9 September 2015

This volume offers an innovative analysis of Roman political culture in Italy from the first to the sixth century AD on the basis of seven case studies.

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

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.

Early hominins probably lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before using fire to alleviate the winter cold, to cook or to make tools. It was only in the period betwen 300,000 and 400,000 years ago that the first finds were made that indicate that people had the ability to control fire…

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

Antoaneta Dimitrova, Professor Comparative Governance at Leiden University, Honorata Mazepus, Assistant professor at Leiden University and Dimiter Toshkov, Associate Professor at Leiden University, together with three other authors researched which aspects of state capacity might contribute to opening…

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…

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.

Within the space of a few months, the Heritage Quest citizen science project, whereby volunteers scan elevation maps of the Veluwe area for burial mounds and other prehistoric remains, has already led to groundbreaking new insights. Hundreds of burial mounds have been found, as have a huge number of…

The chief aim of this study is to explore how classical Persian poetry and the Persian mysticism that is interwoven with the poetry have been used in the new politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially during the Iran-Iraq war.

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…

Research within the centre is broad and pluralistic, ranging from the history of political thought to contemporary analytic and continental political philosophy and critical social theory. Members of the CPP also participate in the Research Profile Area on Political Legitimacy. The Centre is the proud…

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 opening of the academic year, true to tradition the LUC Teaching Prize will be awarded to the University's best lecturer. Get to know the nominees. This week: Florian Schneider.

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…

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).

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…

Lecture

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…

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.

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.

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.

Xinrong Ma defended her thesis on 13 February 2018

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

Robbert Visser has won the Political Science Master’s Thesis Prize 2017. His study in the field of Political Theory is the latest milestone along Visser’s (in his words) ‘long road to the master’s title’. The jury was impressed by his work: 'Deeply engaging, providing a critical and balanced analysis,…