Professors 2022
Klarita Gërxhani – Full time Professor of Sociology, Department of Political and Social Sciences
Klarita Gërxhani is Professor and Chair in Sociology at the Department of Political and Social Sciences. She received her M. Phil and Ph.D. in Economics at the Tinbergen Institute and the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Amsterdam. She continued her academic career as a post-doctoral researcher in Economic Sociology at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies and the Amsterdam School for Social science Research at the University of Amsterdam. Professor Gërxhani has been co-director of the programme group ‘Institutions, Inequalities and Life Courses’ at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, and Chair of Board of Examiners of the B.A. and M.A. in Sociology at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam.
Research interests: (Micro)-Economic Sociology, Institutional Theory, Social Norms, Labor Market and Organizations, Social Status and Gender Inequalities, Social Capital, Informal Economies and Tax Evasion, Field Surveys and (Laboratory) Experiments.
Jeffrey T. Checkel – Full-time Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences
Jeffrey T. Checkel joined the Department of Political and Social Sciences in January 2020, as Chair in International Politics, moving from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where he held the Simons Chair in International Law and Human Security. He had previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Oslo.After a first degree from Cornell University in applied physics, Checkel received a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A consistent theme in his scholarship has been to bridge divides of discipline, epistemology, and subfield. After a start in Sovietology and arms control, Checkel turned to the study of institutions and norms; to European politics and identity; to transnationalism, civil wars and political violence; and – most recently – to international institutions and the populist backlash against them.Checkel’s research interests include international relations theory (domestic-international linkages, international institutions, constructivism, governance), conflict studies (civil war), European integration (Europeanization, identity) and qualitative methods (process tracing, bridging positivist-interpretive techniques).He has published broadly on these topics, including four books from Cambridge University Press and one volume from Yale University Press. At EUI, he offers seminars on international-relations theory; civil wars; the liberal order and identity politics; international institutions; qualitative methods; and philosophies of social science.
Research interests: Conflict and Peace, International Relations, Identity, Internal Institutions.
Simon Hix, Full-time Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences
Simon Hix joined the EUI on 1 September 2021 as Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics.Simon holds a Ph.D. in Political and Social Science from the European University Institute (1995), and was for many years a Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include comparative political behaviour and institutions – in particular political parties and party systems, public opinion and voting behaviour, electoral system design, and legislative behaviour – as well as the study of political behaviour and institutions in the European Union. Simon mainly uses quantitative and experimental methods in his research, and is also interested in historical political science/political economy, particular the impact of constitutional and electoral system designs on the evolution of political behaviour. His work has been published in, among other places, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, European Journal of Political Research, and Comparative Political Studies. He has won prizes for his research from the American Political Science Association, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Simon is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Research interests: Political Behaviour (parties, elections, voting), Political Institutions (electoral systems, constitutional design, legislative politics), EU Politics (public opinion, European elections, European Parliament), Historical Political Science (early democratic elections, electoral reform, constitutional design), Experimental Methods in Political Science
Filip Kostelka, Full-time Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences
Filip Kostelka holds the Chair in Political and Social Change while on leave from the Department of Government at the University of Essex, where he is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor). Filip earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences Po, Paris (2015) and held predoctoral and postdoctoral appointments at the College of Europe, Bruges, University of Montreal and University of Barcelona.His research interests cover the fields of political behaviour, party politics, and regime change. Among other topics, he studies why and when citizens (don’t) vote or protest, and how different political and contextual factors (e.g. political regime change, institutional reform, etc.) affect citizens’ behaviour and attitudes (e.g. democratic satisfaction).Geographically, Filip focuses on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, comparing them with polities in Western Europe and other regions. He mostly uses quantitative research methods, including time-series cross-section data analysis, survey data analysis, and experimental methods. His research has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, or World Politics; and publicised in media outlets such as Le Monde, Washington Post, Radio Canada, France Inter, or Euroactiv.
Research interests: Political Behaviour (parties, elections, voting), Political Parties, Quantitative Methods, Central and Eastern Europe, Regime Change and Democratisation, Western Europe
Ellen M. Immergut – Head of Department and Full-time Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences
Ellen M. Immergut joined the EUI as Chair in Political Science in September 2017. She is on leave from her position as Chair in Comparative Politics at Humboldt Universität Berlin and has previously held professorships at the University of Konstanz and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her BA, MA and PhD degrees from Harvard University. She is currently Scientific Programme Coordinator for the transnational research programme Welfare State Futures (WSF), launched by the New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe (NORFACE). The WSF programme features a Europe-wide network of researchers gathered around fifteen large projects comprising 60 principal investigators and more than 200 researchers designed to ask, and answer, fundamental questions about the design, delivery and experience of welfare in the 21st century from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. She delivered the State of the Union address at the 2018 State of the Union Conference on “Solidarity in Europe”.
Research interests: The impact of electoral and political competition on welfare state reforms; policy responsiveness and policy feedback effects; health politics in Europe; and the consequences of right-wing populism for social policies. She has published on Health Politics, Pension Politics, and more generally on welfare state reform, and institutionalist theory.
Arnout van de Rijt, Director of Graduate Studies, Full-time Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences
Arnout van de Rijt joined the Department of Political and Social Sciences in September 2019. Van de Rijt received his PhD in Sociology from Cornell University in 2007 and worked until 2016 as Assistant and Associate Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University, where he co-founded and -led the Center for Computational Social Science. Since 2016 he has been Professor of Sociology at Utrecht University. He is president of the International Network of Analytical Sociology and elected member of the European Academy of Sociology. Van de Rijt received the Lynton Freeman (2010) and Raymond Boudon (2017) early career awards.
Research interests: Collective Action, Stratification, Social Stratification, Social Networks, Computational Social Science and Mathematical Sociology