Government, Political Parties, and Liberal Democracy in the New Europe

In April 1990, Professor, Jean Blondel, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s tenth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: Government, Political Parties, and Liberal Democracy in the New Europe. Jean Blondel is a French political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is currently Emeritus Professor at the European University Institute in Florence, and visiting professor at the University of Siena. He graduated from the Institut d\u27Études Politiques of Paris in 1953. He studied at St Antony\u27s College (Oxford) from 1953 to 1955, graduating with a B.Litt. He returned to Britain to study the relations between central and local government at Manchester University. He was a lecturer at the University College of North Staffordshire (now Keele University) from 1958 to 1963, a fellow at Yale University in 1963-1964, and then moved to the University of Essex in 1964, where he founded the Department of Government. He started the European Consortium for Political Research in 1969 and directed it for ten years following its foundation meeting in 1970. Having left Essex in 1984, he was appointed scholar of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York in 1984 before becoming Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence form 1985 to 1994. He holds honorary doctorates form the Universities of Salford and Essex in the United Kingdom, Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, Turku in Finland, and Siena in Italy. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of the Academia Europaea. In 2004 he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for his outstanding contribution to the professionalization of European political science, both as a pioneering comparativist and an institution builder . Blondel is particularly noted for the contributions he has made to the theory of party systems, the comparative study of cabinets, and the relations between parties and governments