This book continues the editors' work (started in the volume “Masters of Political Science”) of highlighting and re-evaluating the contributions of the most important political scientists who have gone before.
Its basis is the belief that the future development and sophistication of the discipline will benefit from a critical understanding of the works of early political “giants” whose contributions are presented and analysed: Gabriel A. Almond, Raymond Aron, Philip Converse, Maurice Duverger, Stanley Hoffmann, Paul Lazarsfeld, Arend Lijphart, Elinor Ostrom, William H. Riker, Stein Rokkan and Susan Strange.
The editors review and consider the contributions of these maestri to the study of contemporary democracy, political culture, electoral systems, political communication, the transformation of capitalism and state formation in Europe. Maestri of Political Science is aimed not only at a new generation of political scientists but is a valuable opportunity for established scholars to see new light through old windows.
(In this book )...The objective is less to trace their intellectual biography (like in the volume edited in 1997 by Hans Daalder concerning Comparative European Politics. The Story of a Profession) than to invite the reader to take into account the wealth of works initiated during the founding era of Western political science. Therefore the book will be of interest to students eager to follow a still lively intellectual tradition as specialists of the various subjects covered (democratic theory, state genesis and formation, political communication...). -- 'French Political Science Journal'
Martin Bull is Professor of Politics and Associate Dean for Research & Innovation at the University of Salford. Former Director of the European Consortium of Political Research (2013-201) he is a specialist of Italian and comparative politics. His most recent work includes: ‘The Italian Communist Party in the 1980s and the Denouement of the Party System’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, No. 2, 2023; ‘The Italian Government Response to Covid-19 and the Making of a Prime Minister’, Contemporary Italian Politics, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2021; and ‘The Radical Left since 1989: Decline, Transformation and Revival’, in Eleni Braat and Pepijn Corduwener (eds), 1989 and the West: Western Europe since the End of the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2020). He was Editor-in-Chief of the Italian Political Science Review (2019-2022) and currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies and Founding Editor of the ECPR’s political science blogsite, The Loop.
Donatella Campus is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University
of Bologna. She is the author of L'elettore pigro. Informazione politica e
scelte di voto (Mulino, 2000); L'antipolitica al governo (Mulino, 2006); Comunicazione
Politica: Le nuove Frontiere (2008).
Gianfranco Pasquino is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Bologna and Senior Adjunct Professor at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University. Fellow of the Accademia dei Lincei, his most recent books are Italian Democracy. How It Works (Routledge 2020), Libertà inutile. Profilo ideologico dell’Italia repubblicana (UTET 2021), Tra scienza e politica. Una autobiografia (UTET 2022) and Il lavoro intellettuale (UTET 2023). He has co-edited The Oxford Handbookeonardi of Italian Politics (Oxford University Press 2015) and the Dizionario di Politica (UTET-De Agostini 2016, 4a ed., revised) and co-authored (with Riccardo Pelizzo), The Culture of Accountability. A Democratic Virtue (Routledge 2022).
Eugenia Baroncelli is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna (Italy), where she teaches Politics of the World Economy, and has previously worked at the World Bank (Washington DC). She is the author of a book on the political roots of globalisation Alle radici della globalizzazione (2010). Her current research interests include the political economy of democratic transitions and EU-World Bank relations.
Daniele Caramani is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. He translated from English into Italian, Stein Rokkan’s State Formation, Nation-Building and Mass Democracy in Europe, edited by Peter Flora et al. (2002). For his book The Nationalization of Politics: The Formation of National Electorates and Party Systems in Western Europe (2004) he has been awarded the 'Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences'. He has also authored the entry 'Rokkan, Stein' for The Encyclopedia of Political Science.
Robert Elgie is Paddy Moriarty Professor of Government and International Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland. He received his BA from Oxford University and his PhD from the London School of Economics. He is the author of Political Institutions in Contemporary France (2001) and is the co-editor, with Andrew Appleton, of the journal French Politics (Palgrave Macmillan). He has published extensively on the theme of semi-presidentialism, recently, Semi-Presidentialism: Sub-Types And Democratic Performance (2011), has written several articles in journals such as the Journal of Democracy and edited or co-edited four books on this subject.
Jocelyn Evans is Professor of Politics at the University of Salford. He is the author of Voters and Voting (2004) and has recently edited, with Kai Arzheimer, Electoral Behavior (2008) in the Sage Library of Political Science, as well as authoring numerous articles on various aspects of voting and party competition in Northern Ireland, France and Europe. He is co-editor of Parliamentary Affairs, and series editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s 'French Politics, Society and Culture' series. He is currently working on a series of forecast models for French and European elections, as well as a project on candidate profile effects on voter choice.
Daniela Giannetti is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna. Her research interests focus on rational choice theory of political behaviour and institutions. She recently co-edited two books: Intra-Party Politics and Coalition Governments (2009, with Kenneth Benoit) and A Natural Experiment on Electoral Law Reform: Evaluating the Long Run Consequences of 1990s Electoral Reform in Italy and Japan (2010, with Bernard Grofman).
Hans Keman is Professor and Chair in Comparative Political Science at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has been co-editor of the European Journal of Political Research and of Acta Politica – an international journal for political science. He has published widely on political parties and party government and policy formation – mainly regarding the Welfare State, as well as on methodology and institutional politics. Among his most recent books are Comparative Democratic Politics (2002) and Doing Research in Political Science (2006).
Stephen Launay is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Université de Paris Est. His fields of investigation are political thought and international relations. He is the author of La Pensée politique de Raymond Aron (1995), La Guerre sans la guerre: Essai sur une querelle occidentale (2003), Chavez-Uribe, deux voies pour l´Amérique latine? (2010), and many articles in English, French and Spanish about political life and thought in Europe and the Americas.
Michael D McGinnis is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is co-author, with John T. Williams, of Compound Dilemmas: Democracy, Collective Action, and Superpower Rivalry (University of Michigan Press, 2001) and editor of three volumes of readings on governance issues written by scholars associated with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, of which he is the Director. He was co-editor of International Studies Quarterly (1994–98).
Martin A Schain is Professor of Politics at New York University. He is the author of The Politics of Immigration in France, Britain and the United States: A Comparative Study (2008), co-editor and author of Comparative Federalism: The US and EU in Comparative Perspective (2006) and Shadows Over Europe: The Development and Impact of the Extreme Right in Europe (2002). He is the founder and former Director of the Center for European Studies at NYU and former chair of the European Union Studies Association. He is co-editor of the transatlantic scholarly journal, Comparative European Politics.
