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Stefano Bartolini, European University Institute, Florence, has won the 2026 prize for his exceptional scholarly career, marked by achievements that stand out for their originality and analytical power.
Our Lifetime Achievement Award is presented biennially to a scholar who has made an outstanding contribution to European political science.
The Jury found that Stefano's research has been deeply engaged with the development of European political science as a field of study and a scholarly community. In doing so, he has helped bridge national traditions and foster a genuinely European intellectual space, making his influence substantive and institutional.
Across all five judging criteria – scholarly contribution, discipline-shaping impact, European relevance, institution building, and sustained lifetime achievement – Stefano Bartolini received the highest possible evaluation, reflecting the extraordinary breadth and depth of his contributions.
2026 Lifetime Achievement Award Jury
Stefano Bartolini of Emeritus Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute, Florence. He was previously a professor at the Universities of Florence, Trieste, Geneva, the EUI and Bologna, and part-time professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques, (Paris) and at Instituto Juan March (Madrid).
He has served as Joint Director of the Italian National PhD Programme in Political Science, (1985–1988); Head of the Political and Social Sciences Department (1996–2001) and Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute (2006–2013). He was Chairman of the Italian National Committee for the Evaluation of ‘Social and Political Sciences’ research, Rome, MIUR (2004–2005), and a Member of the International Committee for the Evaluation of Norwegian Political Sciences, Research Council, Norway (2016–2017).
Stefano was awarded the Stein Rokkan UNESCO Prize (1990), the Gregory Luebbert APSA Prize (2001), the APSA European Politics Division Prize (2002), and the European Union Studies Association Honourable Mention (2007). He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea. His research interests focus on European comparative politics, political parties, electoral history, European integration, and political theory.
His most recent publications include the ECPR Press monograph The Political (2018); the chapter Cleavages and Divides in Voting and Political Theory in Religious Voting in Western Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2023); and Rule-Making Rules: a Framework for Political Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2023). A monograph on 'Actors and Structures in Politics' is currently awaiting publication.
When I began my doctoral studies in 1976, my doctoral father, Hans Daalder, almost forced me to attend the ECPR Joint Sessions. I did not have the slightest idea of what this was, what I should do, or how I would have made it with decidedly elementary English. I went to Berlin in 1977 with a little paper to present publicly for the first time. There I sat down next to a young Irish researcher, Peter Mair, and met some friends and colleagues with whom I have remained in contact throughout my career. I also met, or simply saw, people whose names I had seen only in printed works: Mogens Pedersen, Jean Blondel, Stein Rokkan, and many others. Berlin 1977 and the following Joint Sessions of the 1980s definitely changed my standards and turned a peripheral Italian student into an international scholar, as they did for hundreds of other young researchers. I feel honoured by an award I would not have achieved without the institution that now bestows it on me.