Professors
Filip Kostelka
Full-time Professor and SPS Summer Academy Convenor, 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 PhD 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 partiesQuantitative methods, Central and Eastern Europe, Regime change and democratisation, Western Europe
Waltraud Schelkle
Full-time Professor – Joint Chair, Department of Political and Social Sciences;
Full-time Professor – Joint Chair, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
Waltraud Schelkle is Joint Chair for European Public Policy at the Department for Political and Social Sciences and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. Before joining the EUI, she was Professor in Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Schelkle’s research interests are, first of all, in the area of political economy of monetary integration, understood as a form of inter-state risk sharing. Her book on “The political economy of monetary solidarity: understanding the experiment of the euro” has been published with Oxford University Press in 2017. This work will now be continued in an ERC-funded research project on ‘Policy crisis and crisis politics: Sovereignty, Solidarity and Identity in Europe post-2008’. This research compares the politics of risk-sharing in different crises. She has also an interest in the impact of financial markets on policy-making.
Research interests: European Monetary Union, European integration, United Germany, Financial markets, Social policy
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
Hanspeter Kriesi
Part-time Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences
Hanspeter Kriesi was born in 1949 in Bischofszell (Switzerland). He studied sociology at the Universities of Bern, Zurich and Chicago. He obtained his PhD in sociology at the University of Zurich (1976), where he also did his Habilitation in sociology (1980). In 1984 he became a professor for collective political behaviour at the University of Amsterdam. In 1988, he went to the University of Geneva, where he taught as a professor of comparative and Swiss politics until 2002, when he took up the chair for comparative politics at the University of Zurich. He was the Stein Rokkan Chair holder at the Department from 2012 to 2020. He is now part-time professor in the Deparmtent and Principal Investigator of the SOLID project, in collaboration with Maurizio Ferrera and Waltraud Schelkle.
Research interests: Sociology, Collective political behaviour, Comparative politics, European Union
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
Ellen Margaretha Immergut
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: Impact of electoral and political competition on welfare state reforms, Policy responsiveness and policy feedback effects, Health politics in Europe, Pension politics, Welfare state & welfare state reform, Institutional theory & institutionalist theory