Herbert P. Kitschelt

About

Herbert P. Kitschelt is the George V. Allen Distinguished Professor of International Relations and a Professor of Political Science at Duke University. His academic specialization includes comparative political parties and elections in established and new democracies, comparative public policy/political economy, and 20th-century social theory. Throughout his career, he has authored multiple books and articles on party system changes, social movements, and industrial and technology policy, with early work in German and subsequent research in Western democracies, postcommunist Eastern Europe, and Latin America. His notable publications include 'The Logics of Party Formation,' 'Beyond the European Left,' 'The Transformation of European Social Democracy,' and 'The Radical Right in Western Europe,' the latter of which received the American Political Science Association's 1996 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. In the 1990s and 2000s, he conducted empirical research on the emergence of party systems in postcommunist countries and Latin America, resulting in co-authored books such as 'Post-Communist Party Systems' and 'Latin American Party Systems.' He has also contributed to the understanding of the comparative political economy of advanced capitalism and has ongoing projects examining citizen-politician linkage mechanisms in democracies, with a focus on clientelistic politics, and the transformation of political party systems in postindustrial democracies. Dr. Kitschelt was elected…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Economics
• Business
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Mathematics
• Monetary economics
• Economy
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era

  Politics & Society · 2019-08-10 · 58 citations

  article1st author

  White American voters have realigned among the two dominant parties by income and education levels. This article argues that the interaction of education and income provides a more insightful—and stark—display of this change than treating them individually. Each group of voters is associated with distinctive “first dimension” views of economic redistribution and “second dimension” preferences concerning salient sociopolitical issues of civic and cultural liberties, race, and immigration. Macro-l…

  PublisherDOI

• Analytical perspectives on varieties of clientelism

  Democratization · 2019-11-18 · 50 citations

  articleSenior author

  This article explains the varieties of clientelistic vote exchange in contemporary electoral democracies. It distinguishes two commonly recognized modes of exchange according to their capacity to overcome the problem of opportunism – relational clientelism and spot-market “vote buying” clientelism – and relates them to attributes along which clientelistic varieties have been distinguished. It develops a metric of clientelistic profile differences that characterize parties’ choices of clientelist…

  PublisherDOI

• Political Linkage Strategies and Social Investment Policies

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 21 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Abstract In this chapter, the authors suggest two ways in which clientelism impacts education, specifically secondary school improvements, an important growth-promoting mode of social investment in developing democracies. First, clientelism “crowds out” fiscal educational investment effort in favor of clientelistic expenditures to targeted voters, a more or less common form of political partisan linkage outside most advanced post-industrial democracies. Second, clientelism “degrades” educational…

  PublisherDOI

• Constraints and Opportunities in the Strategic Conduct of Post-Communist Successor Parties

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter argues that historical legacies have provided powerful predictors of communist successor party strategic behavior and organizational reform since the collapse of the old systems in 1989 and 1991. It discusses the formation of newly independent states based on titular ethnic groups that were formerly subjected to a hegemonic imperial-colonial ethnic group creates a new dynamic of political mobilization in which communist successor parties may defy domestic legacies-based predictions…

  PublisherDOI

• 18. Political Participation

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines four fundamental questions relating to political participation. First, it considers different modes of political participation such as social movements, interest groups, and political parties. Second, it analyses the determinants of political participation, focusing in particular on the paradox of collective action. Third, it explains political participation at the macro-level in order to identify which contextual conditions are conducive to participation and the role of ec…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Joanne Gowa

  Cornell University

  106 shared

• Timothy J. McKeown

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  78 shared

• Mark W. Zacher

  74 shared

• John Odell

  74 shared

• Richard Baldwin

  International Institute for Management Development

  74 shared

• G. John Ikenberry

  69 shared

• David Chairperson

  University of Pennsylvania

  49 shared

• Laura D’Andrea Tyson

  49 shared

Awards & honors

• American Political Science Association's 1996 Woodrow Wilson…
• 2000 Franklin L Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002)

Similar researchers at Duke University

• D. Sunshine Hillygush-28
• Jack Knighth-28
• Peter D. Feaverh-28