Evidence-informed policy-making is crucial for good governance. Yet, despite the abundance of evidence from research and evaluation available to decision-makers, we know little about the actual influence of evidence on government policies. The ‘Power of Evidence’ (PoE) research programme, directed by…

On 28 February 2019, Kabir Duggal defended his thesis 'Principles of Evidence in Investor-State Arbitration, Burden, Standards, Presumptions & Inferences'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. E. De Brabandere.

On 9 November, Jonathan Hak defended the thesis 'Non-textual evidence in international criminal prosecutions: discovering the best practices for audiovisual materials in a digital age'. The doctoral research was supervised by Carsten Stahn and Jens Iverson.

This project maps the policy of ‘Paz Total’ (Total Peace) and ongoing peace negotiations between non-state armed groups and the government of Colombia under the presidency of Gustavo Petro (2022-2026).

Governments and public sector organisations consider evidence-based or evidence-informed policymaking as one of the pillars of good governance. That is to say: policies that are informed by scientific knowledge, expertise and evidence. In the research programme 'Power of Evidence', Valérie Pattyn and…

Leiden Law School has a strong tradition of research in the field of fact-finding and evidence in criminal cases.

Development of an aggregated impact indicator to measure decoupling.

In this article, Kuipers and Timmermans analyze the first lady's relationship with policy problems in the period 1945-2013.

ERC StG SAFE and SOUND has the ambition to connect the policy cycle with data generated in robot testing zones to support evidence-based policymaking for robot technologies.

A selected group of unpublished amulets from various collections in the world will be studied and edited.

Generally the data from remote sensing surveys - the scanning of the earth by satellite or aircraft in order to obtain information about it - is screened manually in archaeology. However, constant monitoring of the earth's surface causes a huge influx of data of high complexity and high quality. To…

What is the effectiveness of (booklet or online) self-help programmes for people with somatic stressors and depressive symptoms? What works best for whom? How to improve motivation and adherence?

The aim of this project was to estimate emissions from lead products-in-use for the past, the present and the future and assess the development of toxicological risks associated with these products.

Promotor: H.S. Overkleeft, Co-Promotor: B.I. Florea

Assessing the risks of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) solely on the basis of experimental assays is time-consuming, resource intensive, and constrained by ethical considerations (such as the principles of the 3Rs of animal testing). The adoption of computational toxicology in this field is a high p…

Did early farmers deliberately use animal manure on their fields?

The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) has published the 2017 issue in their Civil Society and Disarmament series, titled Voluntary, Non-Binding Norms for Responsible State Behaviour in the Use of Information and Communications Technology: A Commentary. The series aims to provide…

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.

Our previous meta-analysis (Swart et al., 2019) had shown that feedback targeting text comprehension given when students perform a reading task positively influences learning from text. So far, differences in the effects of feedback were explained by design features, such as the timing and richness…

How can video on professional practices in university courses be used in a valid and useful way for assessment and feedback?

Jaroslaw Kantorowicz and Rok Spruk examine the contribution of institutional reforms to economic growth.

In order to analyze the challenges linked to data use in the context of nexus governance, Giest & Mukherjee use a policy design lens and more specifically the perspective of organizational policy instruments to look at the Mediterranean region.

How can we understand the implementation of EU policy and what challenges are involved?

The European Council and the European Commission have a similar role in agenda setting. Both place issues on the EU agenda. However, these institutions have distinct designs. They have different political attributes (the European Council has considerably more political authority) and information-processing…

Money laundering, fraud, DNA testing: current affairs is key in this master’s programme. 'Forensische Criminologie' provides specialist expertise related to the criminal justice system - from forensic psychiatry to criminalistics.

Think tanks have proliferated in most Western democracies over the past three decades and are often considered to be increasingly important actors in public policy. Still, their precise contribution to public policy remains contested.

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.

During times of domestic turmoil, the use of force abroad becomes an appealing strategy to US presidents in hopes of diverting attention away from internal conditions and toward a foreign policy success.

The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900 presents a new perspective on the uses of justice between 1600 and 1900 and confronts prevailing Eurocentric historiography in its examination of how people of this period made use of the law.

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.

Develop a tool to assess land tenure, access to land and, and land tenure conflict in Timor-Leste

Harm reduction in practice: a comparative analysis of the Dutch and Brazilian approach towards drug users.

In September 2021 the CWTS open science policy came into effect. This policy deals with open access publishing, open research data, and open source software. All research projects carried out at CWTS are subject to the CWTS open science policy.

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.

This research paper was requested by the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. It was published by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague. Leiden University is one of the participating institutes in this publication and our researcher…

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'.

PACES is an innovative, inter-disciplinary and multi-level research project that asks, How do changes in society, individual life experiences and migration policy shape decisions to stay or to migrate over time and across countries? And how can this knowledge inform future migration policies and gov…

In February 2023, the International Institute of Air and Space Law and the Kalshoven-Gieskes Forum for International Humanitarian Law organised a seminar on the topic of 'The optimisation of the use of satellite information in the humanitarian domain – Legal and space-related developments' at Leiden…

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

INFLUEX examines the influence of experts on public policy, aiming to define, measure, and explain their role in democratic policymaking

Kohei Suzuki is Assistant Professor at Institute of Public Administration. This study carries several important implications for understanding the policy impacts of a graying population and for studies of the welfare state, in general.

In this policy brief, Dennis Broeders, Els De Busser and Patryk Pawlak discuss attribution of in cyberspace from three different perspectives: criminal law, international law and policy. Published together with EU Cyber Direct.

The government is digitalizing and making use of ‘big data’ in its decision making processes. But the expectations of digitalization are often overly optimistic, according to Bram Klieving, Professor Digitalization and Public Policy. Klievink is about to start with multidisciplinary research looking…

The relationship between academia and democracy is a complicated one. Should policy makers listen to scientists or to citizens? That is the dilemma Valérie Pattyn and Johan Christensen will discuss with a panel of experts during the academic conference EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF).

An international comparative study of the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.