Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H.L.A. Hart. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact." According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century. After his death, the Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein said Dworkin was "one of the most important legal philosophers of the last 100 years. He may well head the list."
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and a partial reading of Max Weber, and were strongly influenced by the writings of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory and more generally of universal history. But the theory remains a controversial model.
The concept of reflexive modernization or reflexive modernity was launched by a joint effort of three of the leading European sociologists: Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash. The introduction of this concept served a double purpose: to reassess sociology as a science of the present, and to provide a counterbalance to the postmodernist paradigm offering a re-constructive view alongside deconstruction.
Ronald F. Inglehart was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He was director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 100 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 90 percent of the world's population. The first wave of surveys for this project was carried out in 1981 and the latest wave was completed in 2019. From 2010 Inglehart also was co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow and St Petersburg. This laboratory has carried out surveys in Russia and eight ex-Soviet countries and is training PhD-level students in quantitative cross-national research methods. Inglehart died on 8 May 2021.
Juan José Linz Storch de Gracia was a German-born Spanish sociologist and political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Yale University and an honorary member of the Scientific Council at the Juan March Institute. He is best known for his work on authoritarian political regimes and democratization.
Adam Przeworski is a Polish-American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics. He is Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics of New York University. He is a scholar of democratic societies, theory of democracy, social democracy and political economy, as well as an early proponent of rational choice theory in political science.
Carole Pateman FBA FAcSS FLSW is a feminist and political theorist. She is known as a critic of liberal democracy and has been a member of the British Academy since 2007.
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. 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.
Preselection is the process by which a candidate is selected, usually by a political party, to contest an election for political office. It is also referred to as candidate selection. It is a fundamental function of political parties. The preselection process may involve the party's executive or leader selecting a candidate or be some contested process. In countries that adopt Westminster-style responsible government, preselection is also the first step on the path to a position in the executive. The selected candidate is commonly referred to as the party's endorsed candidate.
Self-expression values are part of a core value dimension in the modernization process. Self-expression is a cluster of values that include social tolerance, life satisfaction, public expression and an aspiration to liberty. Ronald Inglehart, the University of Michigan professor who developed the theory of post-materialism, has worked extensively with this concept. The Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map contrasts self-expression values with survival values, illustrating the changes in values across countries and generations. The idea that the world is moving towards self-expression values was discussed at length in an article in the Economist. Expressing one's personality, emotions, or ideas through art, music, or drama, is a way to reveal oneself to others in a way that is special to them.
Christian Welzel is a German political scientist at the Leuphana University Lueneburg and director of research at the World Values Survey Association. He is known for the model of cultural dimensions which measures emancipative values and secular values.
Joni Lovenduski, is Professor Emerita of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London.
Jane Jebb Mansbridge is an American political scientist. She is the Charles F. Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
The Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world is a scatter plot created by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel based on the World Values Survey and European Values Survey. It depicts closely linked cultural values that vary between societies in two predominant dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values on the vertical y-axis and survival versus self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis. Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from traditional values to secular-rational ones and moving rightward reflects the shift from survival values to self-expression values.
Lisa Hill is Professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She has previously held positions at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University.
Helen Zerlina Margetts, is Professor of Internet and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford and from 2011 to 2018 was Director of the OII. She is currently Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, and has published over a hundred books, journal articles and research reports in this field.
The Electoral Integrity Project is an academic project based at Royal Military College of Canada and the University of East Anglia, England, which seeks to quantify the integrity of elections worldwide. The project freely publishes its Perceptions of Electoral Integrity dataset for scholarly use. It also organises international conferences and workshops. The most recent data and report release, Electoral Integrity Global Report, covers 480 elections in 169 countries from mid 2012 to the end of 2021. It is directed by Holly Ann Garnett and Toby S. James. It was founded by Pippa Norris.
Nic Cheesemanis a British political scientist and professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham, working on democracy, elections and African politics. He is also a columnist for the The Africa Report and South Africa’s Mail & Guardian and the editor of the website Democracy in Africa. A regular commentator in the media, he is sometimes referred to by his Twitter handle, @fromagehomme.
Vicky Randall was a professor of political science and feminist scholar.
