Conservative Parties and the Stability of Democracy in Times of Economic Crisis

A Max Planck Sciences Po Center (MaxPo) event in the series Seminars and Colloquia On Ökonomie, Politics and Society (SCOOPS),

Guest speaker: Daniel ZIBLATT, Harvard University

Discussant: Jan ROVNY, Sciences Po, CEE / LIEPP

 

Daniel ZIBLATT is Professor of Government at Harvard University, and in Spring 2014 is interim director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

 

He is the author of Structuring the State: the Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), as well as co-editor (with G. Capoccia) of The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies (2010). He is currently completing a book under contract with Cambridge University Press that analyzes how old regime elites cope with democratic institutional changes, entitled Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe, 1848-1950.

Ziblatt is the director of a new historical geospatial data collection project, the “Comparative History of Elections Program” housed at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. His work has won numerous prizes and serves on the editorial board of several prestigious journals.

 

Jan ROVNY is an assistant professor at Sciences Po. After studies in Canada and Belgium, he received his PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught in Belgium, the United States, the Czech Republic, Germany and Sweden. His research concentrates on political competition in Europe with the aim of uncovering the ideological conflict lines in different countries. His projects address the interplay between political issue dimensionality, party strategies and voter responses. He’s also one of the principal investigators of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey on party positioning — the most comprehensive survey assessing ideological placements of political parties in Europe.