Research Interests for Herbert P. Kitschelt

Professor of Political Science, specializes in comparative political parties and elections in established and new democracies, comparative public policy/political economy, and 20th century social theory. In the 1980s, he authored three books in German about comparative industrial and technology policy and related social movements, with condensed English summaries published in International Organization (1986 and 1990) and British Journal of Political Science. In the late 1980s to mid-1990s, he published several books and a number of articles on the transformation of European party systems, party organization, and party strategies (Logics of Party Formation, Cornell University Press 1989; Beyond the European Left, Duke University Press, 1990; The Transformation of European Social Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 1994; The Radical Right in Western Europe, 1995, in collaboration with Anthony J. McGann). The study of the European New Right received the American Politicial Science Association's 1996 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for best book on government, politics or international relations. His continued interest in the theory of party system dynamics is documented in recent contributions to edited volumes and journal articles, such as in European Journal of Political Research (2000) and Comparative Political Studies (2000). Moreover, he has published a number of articles on the interaction between democratic party competition and political economic reform strategies, such as in the co-edited volume by Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks and John Stephens, Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Paul Pierson (editor), The New Politics of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2000), and a forthcoming volume on the crisis of the German and Japanese political economy edited by Kozo Yamamura and Wolfgang Streeck (Cornell University Press, 2003). Since the early 1990s, the emphasis of his empirical research has shifted to the study of the emerging patterns of democratic competition and policy-making in postcommunist polities and political economies. In addition to a number of articles, the main results of this research are documented in a book, entitled Post-Communist Party Systems. Competition, Representation and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), co-authored with Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski and Gabor Toka. His 1999 APSA paper on accounting for political regime transitions in former communist polities a revised part of which will be published in a forthcoming book edited by Stephen Hanson and Grzegorsz Ekiert (Cambridge University Press, 2002) received the 2000 Franklin L Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for best paper presented at the 1999 APSA Annual Meeting. He has extended his work on postcommunist polities in recent papers and publications on the performance of postcommunist successor parties, diverse trajectories of market-liberalizing economic reforms, and modes of linkage building between citizens and politicians. More specifically, he has empirically studied modes of party competition in Russia on which a first paper, co-authored with Regina Smyth, is scheduled for publication in Comparative Political Studies in 2002, with further articles and a book manuscript planned. He is currently also completing a study of Latin American party systems in the 1990s, co-authored with graduate students and colleagues at Duke, probing into analytical questions of party competition and citizen-politician linkages previously explored in his research on postcommunist politics. In 2002, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS).

Keywords:

Political science

Recent Publications

1. Kitschelt, HP; Rehm, P, Party (system) institutionalization and the institutions of democratic polities, in Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions (October, 2024), pp. 154-173 [doi] [abs]
2. Kitschelt, HP; Rehm, P, Polarity Reversal: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of Partisan Support in Knowledge Societies, Politics and Society, vol. 51 no. 4 (December, 2023), pp. 520-566 [doi] [abs]
3. Yıldırım, K; Kitschelt, H, Analytical perspectives on varieties of clientelism, Democratization, vol. 27 no. 1 (January, 2020), pp. 20-43 [doi] [abs]
4. Kitschelt, HP; Rehm, P, Secular partisan realignment in the united states: The socioeconomic reconfiguration of white partisan support since the new deal era, Politics and Society, vol. 47 no. 3 (September, 2019), pp. 425-479 [doi] [abs]
5. Kitschelt, H, Party systems and radical right-wing parties, in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (February, 2018), pp. 166-199, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780190274559 [doi] [abs]