Abstract
The authors study in a systematic way the kinematics and dynamics of closed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmologies in the presence of a gauge sector, with an arbitrary gauge group. For this purpose they complement the SO(4)-invariant ansatz for the metric with SO(4)-symmetric ansatze for the matter fields. The dynamics of the resulting Lagrangian system with a finite number of degrees of freedom is studied for the case of Einstein-Yang-Mills-Higgs theories with an SO(N) gauge group.