Prof. dr. Ingrid van Biezen Professor of Comparative Politics
From the 1st of May, Prof. dr. Ingrid van Biezen will be the new professor of Comparative Politics at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden. She studied at Leiden University and received her PhD from the same university. After her PhD she started lecturing in Comparative Politics at the University of Birmingham. She has been a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore and a research fellow at Yale University and the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests lie primarily in the field of comparative politics, political parties and party systems, and democratisation and institutional development.
Recently van Biezen has started to concentrate more explicitly on the various empirical and normative dimensions of party regulation and its implications for modern party democracy. To this end, she currently leads two research projects. One is funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council and focuses on the constitutional regulation of political parties in post-war European democracies. This research involves a comparative analysis of the different modes of regulation of political parties by national constitutions, and addresses the question what the constitutionalisation of parties suggests about the different normative conceptions of political parties and modern party democracy. This project runs from December 2007 to November 2009.
A second and related project, Re-conceptualising party democracy, concentrates on an empirical and normative re-conceptualisation of European party democracy. This project analyzes the relationship between political parties, society and the state, by examining the place of political parties in public law. It investigates how and to what extent the nature and activities of political parties in modern democracies are prescribed by law and on which underlying ideal typical models these legal regulations are founded. The research furthermore aims to explore the different types of party regulation and corresponding conceptions of party in relation to the various existing normative theories of democracy. This project is funded by the European Research Council will run for five years (2008-2013).
Ingrid van Biezen is the author of, amongst others, Political Parties in New Democracies and Financing Political Parties and Election Campaigns.