Daniele Caramani (Milan, 26 June 1968) is a comparative political scientist.
Daniele Caramani grew up in Milan and Paris. He holds a baccalauréat (international option) from the Lycée International de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. After the BA and MA at the University of Geneva, he obtained his Ph.D. at the European University Institute, Florence. He attended the Essex and Michigan methods summer schools. [1] [2]
Caramani started his career in 1991 at the University of Geneva as teaching assistant in methods and comparative politics. He was a researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (1996−1998) and then assistant professor at the University of Florence until 2002. In 2000−2002 he was Vincent Wright Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. [3] In 2002 he returned to Mannheim. In 2004 he took up a position as Senior Lecturer / Reader at the University of Birmingham, UK. In 2006 he became a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Since 2014, he is a professor at the University of Zurich holding the Chair of Comparative Politics. [4] In 2020 he was appointed Ernst B. Haas Chair at the European University Institute, [5] Florence (on leave from the University of Zurich), where he directs the European Governance and Politics Programme [6] at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
He has been a Jemolo Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford University), a visiting fellow at the Stein Rokkan Centre in Bergen, Norway, [7] and a visiting professor at the European University Institute, Florence, and Australian National University, Canberra (2019-2020).
Caramani’s work is comparative and historical with quantitative time series reaching back to the formation of political cleavages during phases of mass democratization, state formation, nationalism and industrialization in the 19th century. It includes research on elections, representation and electoral geography, parties and party systems, methodology, European integration and globalization.
His main work analyses the interplay between territorial and functional cleavages at the national, European and global levels. His book The Nationalization of Politics (Cambridge University Press 2004) [8] was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. [9] His book The Europeanization of Politics (Cambridge University Press 2015) extends the analysis to Europe. [10] Current work analyses global cleavages with an ERC Advanced Grant project (GLOBAL). [11]
Caramani’s empirical approach is based on comparative and quantitative-statistical methods, and has produced datasets and archives. He is the author of Elections in Western Europe since 1815: Electoral Results by Constituencies (Palgrave 2000, with CD-ROM), [12] later expanded into a data archive of which he is Co-Director: the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) has received the APSA award in 2012. [13] The latest release covers historically over 2,025 elections from 180 countries, with GeoReferenced Electoral Districts (GRED) with 167 historical maps from 74 countries. [14]
Other work includes research on political representation [15] [16] and transnational voting rights. [17]
Caramani’s work follows closely Stein Rokkan’s legacy. He also translated into Italian State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe: The Theory of Stein Rokkan (Oxford University Press 1999) [18] [19] and wrote two chapters on Rokkan’s theory. In 2023 he held the Stein Rokkan Memorial Lecture. [20]
On methodology, he authored Introduction to the Comparative Method with Boolean Algebra (Sage, Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences 2009). [21]
For a student readership, Caramani edits the textbook Comparative Politics (Oxford University Press 2023, sixth edition). With unparalleled comparative empirical material, this is the most comprehensive introduction to comparative politics, written by the leading experts in the field. [22]
Books
Edited volumes
Textbook
Articles
Chapters
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or policy goals.
A party system is a concept in comparative political science concerning the system of government by political parties in a democratic country. The idea is that political parties have basic similarities: they control the government, have a stable base of mass popular support, and create internal mechanisms for controlling funding, information and nominations.
Arend d'Angremond Lijphart is a Dutch-American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, elections and voting systems, democratic institutions, and ethnicity and politics. He is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is influential for his work on consociational democracy and his contribution to the new Institutionalism in political science.
Comparative Politics is a field in Political Science characterized either by the use of the comparative method or other empirical methods to explore politics both within and between countries. Substantively, this can include questions relating to political institutions, political behavior, conflict, and the causes and consequences of economic development. When applied to specific fields of study, Comparative Politics may be referred to by other names, such as comparative government.
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. He was president of both the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993). A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.
Comparative history is the comparison of different societies which existed during the same time period or shared similar cultural conditions.
Stein Rokkan was a Norwegian political scientist and sociologist. He was the first professor of sociology at the University of Bergen and a principal founder of the discipline of comparative politics. He founded the multidisciplinary Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, which encompassed sociology, economics and political science and which had a key role in the postwar development of the social sciences in Norway.
The International Political Science Association (IPSA), founded under the auspices of UNESCO in 1949, is an international scholarly association. IPSA is devoted to the advancement of political science in all parts of the world. During its history it has helped build bridges between East and West, North and South, and has promoted collaboration between scholars in both established and emerging democracies. Its aim is to create a global political science community in which all can participate, most recently it has been extending its reach in Eastern Europe and Latin America. IPSA has consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) and it is a member of the International Science Council, which brings together over 230 science organizations across the world and actively cooperates with partners from the United Nations system, such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Peter Mair was an Irish political scientist. He was a professor of comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence.
Sir David Edgeworth Butler was an English political scientist who specialised in psephology, the study of elections. He has been described as "the father of modern election science".
In political science and sociology, a cleavage is a historically determined social or cultural line which divides citizens within a society into groups with differing political interests, resulting in political conflict among these groups. Social or cultural cleavages thus become political cleavages once they get politicized as such. Cleavage theory accordingly argues that political cleavages predominantly determine a country's party system as well as the individual voting behavior of citizens, dividing them into voting blocs. These blocs are distinguished by similar socio-economic characteristics, who vote and view the world in a similar way. It is distinct from other common political theories on voting behavior in the sense that it focuses on aggregate and structural patterns instead of individual voting behaviors.
Charles C. Ragin is Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
David Collier is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He works in the fields of comparative politics, Latin American politics, and methodology. His father was the anthropologist Donald Collier.
Peter Flora is an Austrian citizen and taught until his retirement in spring 2009 as a professor of sociology at the University of Mannheim. Peter Flora is a son of the Austrian drawer, caricaturist, graphic artist and illustrator Paul Flora.
In social sciences, a cross-cutting cleavage exists when groups on one cleavage overlap among groups on another cleavage. "Cleavages" may include racial, political, and religious divisions in society. Formally, members of a group j on a given cleavage x belong to groups on a second cleavage y with members of other groups k, l, m, etc. from the first cleavage x. For example, if a society contained two ethnic groups that had equal proportions of rich and poor it would be cross-cutting. Robert A. Dahl built a theory of Pluralist democracy which is a direct descendant of Madison's cross-cutting cleavages. Cross-cutting cleavages are contrasted with reinforcing cleavage. The term originates from Simmel (1908) in his work Soziologie.
The Stein Rokkan Memorial Lecture is an annual lecture which is arranged by the Department of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen, Norway. Since 2002, the organising of the lecture has been in cooperation with the UNI Rokkan Centre. The purpose of the lecture is to draw attention to some of the most outstanding exponents of Stein Rokkan’s fields of research; first and foremost political science, sociology and comparative politics.
Harris Mylonas is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and the editor-in-chief for Nationalities Papers, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. He is the author of The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities, which was awarded the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize in September 2013 and the 2014 European Studies Book Award by the Council for European Studies. He has co-authored Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities. and has co-edited Enemies Within: The Global Politics of Fifth Columns as well as The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics. He is currently working on another book project, Diaspora Management Logics. His documentary Searching for Andreas: Political Leadership in Times of Crisis (2018), which deals with the deep causes of the recent financial and political crisis in Greece, premiered at the 2018 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and won two awards at the 2019 International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra.
Stefano Bartolini is an Italian political scientist and professor at European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He is the author of many books and publications.
Techno-populism is either a populism in favor of technocracy or a populism concerning certain technology – usually information technology – or any populist ideology conversed using digital media. It can be employed by single politicians or whole political movements respectively. Neighboring terms used in a similar way are technocratic populism, technological populism, and cyber-populism. Italy's Five Star Movement and France's La République En Marche! have been described as technopopulist political movements.
Critical juncture theory focuses on critical junctures, i.e., large, rapid, discontinuous changes, and the long-term causal effect or historical legacy of these changes. Critical junctures are turning points that alter the course of evolution of some entity. Critical juncture theory seeks to explain both (1) the historical origin and maintenance of social order, and (2) the occurrence of social change through sudden, big leaps.