Arend Lijphart

Arend Lijphart ( ˌaːrənt ˈlɛɪ̯phart ; born August 17, 1936 in Apeldoorn , Netherlands ) is one of the most famous and influential political scientists of our time. He has both Dutch and US citizenship . In 1963, Lijphart received his PhD from Yale , and most recently researched and taught at the University of California, San Diego . There he retired in 2001 .

Lijphart's research area is comparative politics . He was best known in the German-speaking world through his studies Democracies and Patterns of Democracy , in which he differentiates between two prototypical forms of democracy, namely consensus democracy and competitive democracy .

Fonts (selection)

• Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (1977)
• Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (1984)
• Power sharing in South Africa (1985)
• Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences (1986)
• Parliamentary versus Presidential Government (1992)
• Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies (1994)
• Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (1999)
• Thinking about Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice (2007)

Honors

In 1989 Lijphart was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and from 1995 to 1996 he was also the President of the American Political Science Association . In 1997 Lijphart received the renowned Johan Skytte Prize for Political Science . In 2001 Lijphart was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Leiden “for his special scientific merits” .

Web links

• Literature by and about Arend Lijphart in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage at the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego (English)
• Political science biography