The aim of these informal meetings is to provide an opportunity to hear about colleagues' research projects, questions, and methods. The dean hopes that this meeting will see the same fruitful interdisciplinary interaction as the previous ones. The presentations and discussions will be in English.

At this fifth lunch the speakers were:

Eric van Dijk (Psychology, Unit Social and Organisational Psychology): Economic and Social Decision Making: The Fun and Use of Playing Games

How do people bargain? How do people decide whether or not to contribute to public goods? Questions like these are addressed in related disciplines like economics and social psychology. For this purpose, participants are often presented with game-like situations that capture the interdependent nature of social decision making. In this talk I will illustrate the potential benefits of this approach with findings from our research programme on the psychology of economic behaviour.

Ingrid van Biezen (Political Science): Political parties and constitutional democracy: from voluntary associations to public utilities?

What is the relationship between political parties and constitutional democracy? Historically, the constitutions of liberal democracies have typically refrained from prescribing the role of political parties in the democratic system. Today, parties are constitutionally codified as necessary, valuable and indispensible institutions in virtually all contemporary European democracies. As a consequence, parties are now defined less as the traditionally voluntary associations belonging to the private sphere but instead are being identified increasingly as public institutions. This talk concentrates on the place of political parties in post-war constitutions across Europe, and examines the question what the constitutional codification of parties suggests about the underlying normative conceptions of party democracy.