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.

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).

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.

What is the role of local Caribbean individuals and communities in creating and perpetuating archaeological heritage? How has archaeological knowledge been integrated into education plans in different countries?

In this article, Marco Cinelli, assistant professor at Leiden University College The Hague, examines proper and improper uses of Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods in energy systems analysis.

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…

A platform to research memory and culture in the Muslim world. This programme explores the ways modern memory studies methodologies can be applied to pre-modern Muslim societies to reveal the uses of the past and senses of tradition in diverse contexts of Muslim thought.

Governance is a complex puzzle of organisations, people and divergent interests. Academic research in this field furthers our knowledge of the role of public administrators, of different organisational structures, of the people who work at such organisations and of how these organisations implement…

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

In this dissertation, electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural measures are used to investigate how allophonic tonal variants and sub-phonemic features are processed during Mandarin and Dutch speech production, visual processing of written words and reading aloud.

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.

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.

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…

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…

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

Development of an aggregated impact indicator to measure decoupling.

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'.

How can teachers be motivated by their students’ data in making stepwise changes to their teaching practices?

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.

Assessment of teaching is currently becoming more and more common practice. As such assessment is generally based on complex, qualitative data from multiple sources (e.g., lesson plans, video-taped lessons, written reflections of the teacher on his or her performance), the overall quality of the assessment…

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

Civil service systems are often targets of criticism globally. This article seeks to fill an evidence void about government performance and meritocracy

European policy affects our lives: from air quality to the frequency of a bus service. Leiden researchers analyse how the European Union functions, how countries apply European policy and whether this policy actually provides solutions and delivers.

In this research note, Van der Does & Kantorowicz aruge that citizens that tend to experience political exclusion are often more supportive of direct and participatory forms of decision-making.

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…

How is Indian foreign policy made? This special issue of the journal India Review, edited by political scientists Nicolas Blarel (Leiden University) and Avinash Paliwal (SOAS University of London) features a number of interesting case studies that bridge the gap between Foreign Policy Analysis and India’s…

The decades around 1800 constitute the seminal period of European nationalism. The lin­guistic corollary of this was the rise of standard language ideology, from Finland to Spain, and from Iceland to the Habsburg Empire. Amidst these international events, the case of Dutch in the Netherlands offers…