Wouter Veenendaal is Associate Professor in Political Science and Research Director of the Institute of Political Science.

More information about Wouter Veenendaal

Wouter Veenendaal is Associate Professor in Political Science. He also serves as Research Director of the Institute of Political Science.

He completed his studies and PhD at Leiden University, and in 2014 his dissertation was awarded the Annual Thesis Prize of the Dutch Political Science Association.

Veenendaal’s research examines the effects of population size on politics and democracy, with a specific focus on politics in small (island) states. He is (co)author of Politics and Democracy in Microstates (Routledge, 2014), Democracy in Small States: Persisting Against All Odds (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Population and Politics: The Impact of Scale (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Between 2014 and 2016 Veenendaal worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), where he studied the six Dutch Caribbean islands as part of the NWO-sponsored project Confronting Caribbean Challenges. In 2016 he acquired an NWO Veni-grant for his research project When Things Get Personal: Explaining Political Stability in Small States (2017–2020).

From 2021 onwards Veenendaal is working on two new research projects. His NWO Vidi-project Downsize My Democracy? The Democratic Consequences of Decentralization (2021-2026) studies the performance of local and regional democracy in European countries. As part of the project Keeping the Powerful in Check (2021-2023), financed by a LUF Snouck Hurgronje-subsidy, he studies how scale affects the performance of democratic checks and balances.

› Curriculum vitae Wouter Veenendaal

PhD supervision

Wouter Veenendaal is available to supervise PhD students and invites PhD research proposals in the areas of:

• democracy and democratization
• small states and territories
• clientelism and informal politics

See for more information on PhD positions:

› Institute of Political Science: PhD

Publications