Principal investigator

Torbjörn Bergman (Ph.D., Umeå, 1995)

Professor of Political Science at Södertörn University and Umeå University. He has contributed to a number of international book-projects and has been published widely in academic journals, including The European Journal of Political Research, Scandinavian Political Studies and The Journal of European Public Policy. Bergman is editor, with Wolfgang C. Müller, and Kaare Strøm, of the special issue of the European Journal of Political Research (vol. 37, no. 3, 2000) on ‘Parliamentary democracy and the chain of delegation’ and two books on Oxford University Press: Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (2003) and Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining (2008). With Kaare Strøm he is editor of a recent publication on Nordic and Scandinavian politics: The Madisionian Turn (The University of Michigan Press, 2011).

Co-investigators

Staffan Andersson is Associate Professor of Political Science, Linnaeus University.
Together with Dr. Ersson, Andersson has been responsible for updating the data for all of Europe. In particular he led the research team’s effort to update and document the data for Western Europe after 1999.

His research interest is mainly concerned withs comparative politics and public administration with a particular interest in the functioning of democracy:, how power is organized and why institutions work well or badlypoorly. The main part of his publications (, for example in Political Studies and, Public Integrity and Scandinavian Political Studies), concern pertains to corruption;, understanding risks and what promotes and or hinders corruption, and how to measure corruption. Andersson was the principal investigator for the recently published book (2012), by Transparency International Sweden, about the strength of the control systems against corruption in Sweden. He has also been a member of a research project (Tillit och korruption i lokalpolitiken) addressing issues of trust and corruption in local government sponsored by the Swedish Research Council.

Dr. Svante Ersson is widely published and for decades his work has been in the forefront of research in comparative politics. One of his publications, co-authored with Jan-Erik Lane, Politics and Society in Western Europe is used throughout the world as a standard reference in comparative politics. Four other examples of his recent and internationally well-known publications include Democracy a Comparative Approach (Routledge 2003), Culture and Politics: A comparative approach (Ashgate 2002), Government and the economy: a global perspective (Continuum 2002) and The New Institutional Politics: Performance and Outcomes (Routledge 2000). In his many years as a successful researcher, Dr. Ersson has established numerous academic contacts. Of particular important to this project is that his contacts include scholars in the post-communist democracies of East and Central Europe, where he has several times visited in teacher exchange programs. As a researcher, he has tremendous experience in both constructing databases and analyzing data.

Advisory board

The seven members of the Advisory Board are, in alphabetical order by last name:

Dr. Sten Berglund, professor of Political Science, Örebro University. Dr. Berglund is a former chair of the Nordic Political Science Association and a leading scholar on East and Central European politics and society. He is an internationally known expert in this field and his experience pre-dates the fall of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. He has long-term working relationships with faculty members in universities in Bulgaria, Germany, and in several other countries of importance for the project.

Dr. Gabriella Ilonszki is professor of political science at Corvinus University of Budapest and heads the Centre for Elite Studies there in the framework of the Political Science Institute and is also responsible for the PhD program at the University. She served for six years in the Executive Committee of the ECPR where she was in charge of CEE political science affairs. She was a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame and a Fulbright Professor at SUNY, Albany. She has been involved in numerous international projects on parliamentary government and representation. She publishes on parliaments, representatives, and gender issues in Hungary and comparatively in Central Europe. Dr. Ilonszki is a former member of the editorial board of Party Politics and a current member of the editorial board of Parliamentary Affairs.

Dr. Wolfgang C. Müller is professor (Lehrstuhl) of Political Science at the University of Mannheim. He previously taught at the University of Vienna and has been a guest researcher/professor at the University of Oxford, the University of Bergen, the Humboldt University, Berlin, the University of California, San Diego, and during the academic year 2002/03 he was Joseph A. Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard University. He has published widely on Austrian and comparative politics, particularly on political parties and political institutions. He was co-chair of the CCPD-project.

Dr. Hanne Marthe Narud, professor of Political Science, Oslo University. Dr. Narud is currently deputy chair of her department. She has previously worked as a researcher in Norwegian Program of Election Studies at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). Dr. Narud is currently serving as editor of the Norwegian Journal of Social Science Research, and in 2001-2002 she was a member of both the SNS Democratic Audit of Sweden and the Norwegian Commission for the Evaluation of Parliamentary Control of the Executive. Her main fields of research are comparative politics, elections and public opinion, government formation, political representation, and media campaigning.

Dr. Benjamin Nyblade, assistant professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver and Core Faculty of the UBC Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Dr. Nyblade served as the methodological (statistical) expert for the CCPD project. His research focuses on political institutions and parties in Western Europe and Japan, with a particular interest in how institutions influence the electoral incentives facing parties and politicians. His dissertation focused on the dynamics of party government duration and change, involving both cross-national statistical analysis and comparisons of dominant party systems in established parliamentary democracies (in particular Japan and Scandinavia). Dr. Nyblade?s other research interests include party competition, empirical political theory and research methodology.

Dr. Kaare Strøm is professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego and a senior research fellow at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. Previously, he has been on the faculties of the University of Bergen, Michigan State University and the University of Minnesota. Professor Strøm won the UNESCO Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Social Science Research in 1994. He has published widely on parliamentary democracy and political parties, and his work is regularly published in the most prestigious journals in the field of political science. Dr. Strøm was co-chair of the CCPD-project.

Dr. Stefan Svallfors is professor of Sociology at Umeå University. His research field is the comparative study of attitudes and values and their links to social structure and institutions. He is involved in two major comparative attitude research programs: the International Social Survey Program (ISS) and the European Social Survey (ESS). His current research focus is class differences in attitudes in Western countries. He has been a visiting scholar in London, Sydney and at Oxford. In recognition of scholarly achievement and to encourage and enable further research success, Dr. Svallfors has been awarded a long-term, leading-researcher grant from the Swedish Research Council.