Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies.
In this discussion, four experts and political scientists from Denmark, Italy, Sweden, and the United States will shed light on the results of the recent elections in Europe. This will include discussions on the transformations of European social democratic parties, the rise of right-wing populism, and how these impact European Union politics. This discussion will provide insights
into the current European political developments in EU member-states and the possible directions of their futures.
Speakers:
- Prof. Jae-Jae Spoon (Moderator) is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh and a former director of the European Studies Center. She is co-editor Research & Politics (R&P). Her research focuses on comparative electoral behavior primarily in Europe. She is interested in understanding political party strategies and their outcomes for the party, its elected officials, and voters, and how party type and size, institutions, and context influence parties’ decision‐making at both the domestic and European levels. She has a particular interest in the behavior of new and small political parties. Professor Spoon received her PhD from the University of Michigan. Before coming to Pittsburgh, she taught at the University of Iowa and the University of North Texas and was a visiting researcher at the University of Mannheim.
- Prof. Rune Stubager is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interest is political behaviour with a particular emphasis on electoral behaviour. He is one of the principal investigators in the Danish National Election Study. He is the author (with Kasper Møller Hansen, Michael Lewis-Beck and Richard Nadeau) of The Danish Voter: Democratic Ideals and Challenges (2021 University of Michigan Press). His work investigates also the continuinuos social and political importance of social class to citizens of advanced democracies.
- Prof. Andrea Ceron is Associate Professor at the Unviersity of Milan, where he teaches Italian Political System, Polimetrics and Multivariate Analysis. He has been visiting scholar at Harvard University, co-founder and board member of Voices from the Blogs Srl, an academic spinoff in the field of sentiment analysis. He is currently principal investigator of the PRIN project “DEMOPE: Democracy under Pressure” and editor of the Encyclopedia of Technology and Politics. He has published 8 books and 50 articles in international peer-reviewed journals.
- Prof. Timothy Hellwig is Professor of Political Science and Academic Director of the Europe gateway at Indiana University. His interests include comparative and international political economy, mass political behavior, and reaserch methods. He is a team member on the Executive Approval Project and an author of Democracy Under Siege? Parties, Voters, and Elections after the Great Recession (with Yesola Kweon and Jack Vowles, 2020 Oxford) and Globalization and Mass Politics: Retaining the Room to Maneuver (2014 Cambridge). He teaches courses on comparative elections, political economy, European politics, the EU, world politics, and quantitative methods.
- Prof. Maria Solevid is an Associate Professor in Political Science and Vice Head of Department in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. She is a member of the Swedish National Election Studies Program (SNES), and the Gothenburg Research Group on Elections, Public Opinion and Political Behavior (GEPOP). Her research interests are voter turnout, electoral behavior, political participation, political trust, and survey methodology. She has a particular interest in how individuals’ political behavior is influenced by the surrounding context. Her ongoing research projects investigates perceptions of electoral integrity and voter turnout in the 2022 Swedish national election, how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level affects social and political trust, and how voters’ social ties matter for economic voting.