Alumna Nadia Kadhim started in 2017 as a corporate lawyer implementing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) at one of the companies where she volunteered. By late 2022 she had received both a Most Inspiring Women in Cyber Award and was on the Forbes 30 under 30 list with her legal start-up…

PhD defence

Under #TheCode European media report about Martijn Nouwens’s research on the secretive EU Code of Conduct Group which is tasked with tackling harmful tax competition in Europe. The stories expose to the wider public for the first time how this diplomatic high-level working group of EU Member States…

What does a 19th-century exhibition of traditional utensils from the province of Zeeland tell us about the current rise of populism? A lot, Ad Maas will say in his inaugural lecture.

October and November not only bring a number of proud Political Science graduates, it is also the season to determine who wrote the best bachelor’s thesis. For 2021-2022, fifteen theses were nominated. During the various graduation ceremonies the two final winners were announced: Essi Maria Teresia…

Few details, relatively few words. The coalition agreement presented is one of the shortest in the past 20 years, Arco Timmermans knows. Consequently, the outlines were not negotiated for very long, which has its advantages and disadvantages. 'Over the next few weeks, we are mainly going to see the…

Education, Organisation

PhD defence

It was challenging to get civil servants from the first Trump administration to speak about their work experiences, but sociologist Jaime Lee Kucinskas succeeded. The picture that emerged from her findings, she says, is far from positive. 'The more I spoke with them, the more emotions I saw. They were…

In September 2013 I moved to Leiden from the UK to take up the position of Assistant Professor covering politics and international relations on the BA Russian Studies and International Studies programmes and the MA Russian and Eurasian Studies.

In her dissertation, political scientist Alessia Aspide explores how public attitudes toward fiscal policy are formed. Her key finding: fiscal preferences are not shaped in a vacuum, but are deeply embedded in institutional, political, and societal contexts.

The Economist published an article about a working paper about the effects of democratic elections on satisfaction with democracy. The paper was written by Dimiter Koshkov, Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Administration and Honorata Mazepus, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security…

Americans are electing a new president in November but they also have other choices to make in the polling booth. Alumnus Sanne Rijkhoff works at a Texas university and is trying to help make students more aware of the elections.

Our constitutional democracy is under pressure. Politicians are increasingly bending rules and institutions to their will, often in small steps. PhD candidate Jorieke Manenschijn warns that through a combination of subtle changes we can cross a line without realising it.

Our banking, DigiD and sensitive medical data: what if our entire digital infrastructure can no longer be trusted? Jelle Don has this question permanently in mind as he goes about his research. And that is no bad thing because without new digital security measures, our society will be extremely vuln…

After almost a year of working from home during this Covid pandemic, Scientific Director Paul Nieuwenburg conveys how the Institute of Political Science is sailing through waves and lockdowns: from transformation to bi location to 'non location', from teaching on the beach to teaching to 'black cubes'…

The antibiotic EVG7, developed in Leiden, has proven capable of fighting the dangerous gut bacterium C. difficile with only a minimal dose. What’s more, the bacterium is far less likely to return, a major issue with existing antibiotics. The research was published in Nature Communications.

Contrary to what one might expect, societal actors influence China’s foreign policy. PhD candidate Sabine Mokry investigated how Chinese academics and think tanks impact the authoritarian leadership’s views on what constitutes the country’s national interest in the international arena. On 14 November…

University Lecturer Andrew Gawthorpe discusses on The Conversation how Trump's Greenland proposal overlooks the historical discrimination faced by Indigenous Alaskans.