I am Wouter Veenendaal, and I am a Professor by Special Appointment in Kingdom Affairs, and Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Leiden University. I completed my studies and PhD at Leiden University, and in 2014 my dissertation was awarded the Annual Thesis Prize of the Dutch Political Science Association. My research examines the effects of population size on politics and democracy, with a specific focus on politics in small (island) states. I am (co)author of Politics and Democracy in Microstates (Routledge, 2014), Democracy in Small States: Persisting Against All Odds (Oxford University Press, 2018), Population and Politics: The Impact of Scale (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Ongemak: Zes Caribische Eilanden en Nederland (Prometheus, 2022).
In 2016 I acquired an NWO Veni-grant for my research project When Things Get Personal: Explaining Political Stability in Small States (2017–2020). At this moment I am working on my NWO Vidi-project Downsize My Democracy? The Democratic Consequences of Decentralization (2021-2026), which studies the performance of local and regional democracy in European countries. Since 2024 I hold the Chair Democratic Representation in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which was established by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. In the context of this Chair, I study the relations between the European Netherlands and the six Caribbean islands in the Kingdom. For this Chair I am seconded to the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV-KNAW), where I worked as a postdoctoral researcher between 2014 and 2017 as part of the NWO-sponsored project Confronting Caribbean Challenges.