2021 Executive Board election – results

The election ran from 14-28 June via OpaVote. 41 members cast their vote, hence candidates needed at least 21 votes to be elected.

The following votes were recorded: Soeren Keil (Chair): 32; Michael Breen: 24; Mariely Lopez-Santana: 30; Juan Cruz Olmeda: 27; Johanna Schnabel: 32; Carol Weissert: 31.

All candidates having received at least 21 votes, the Election Committee consisting of Paolo Dardanelli (outgoing RC28 chair) and Thomas Lancaster (outgoing RC28 vice-chair) certified all candidates have been elected.

29 June 2021

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2021 Executive Board election

Acting as the nominating committee, the outgoing Executive Board is putting forward the following candidates for election to the Executive Board for the next period. RC28 members will be notified by email regarding the modalities of the election. The election procedures are governed by our by-laws.

Soeren Keil (Chair)

Soeren Keil works at the Institute of Federalism of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He is the Head of the IRCC and oversees all international activities of the Institute of Federalism. He first got in contact with RC28 at the IPSA conference in Santiago in Chile in 2009. Since then, he has been involved with most of the RC’s events, including numerous presentations and functions at World Congresses and related conferences. He has worked with many leading federal scholars, including the late Ron Watts, and the late Richard Simeon. These and many others have been an inspiration and have pushed him to focus more strongly on comparative federalism and the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution. He would like to serve on RC28’s Executive Committee because he believes that his research focus on federalism and conflict resolution, his experience with organising events and managing larger projects, and his academic networks in Europe and Northern America, make him well suited to help the RC to extend its reach, keep its strong representation at IPSA events and enhance its membership. What is more, he regularly works with policy makers and has been involved in discussions about federalism in Bosnia, Syria and Myanmar//Burma. He believes that this link to the policy world will be an additional advantage and will help the RC to sharpen its profile beyond the world of academia.

Michael Breen

Michael Breen is a Lecturer in Public Policy (MECAF) at the University of Melbourne (UOM). He held a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Melbourne from 2018-2020, focussing on federalism in Asia, after completing his PhD at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2017. Michael has since published widely on issues related to federalism and multilevel governance, especially as it pertains to ethnic division and conflict, and reforms in Asia, as well as deliberative democracy in Asia. He has also advised on federal reforms in Nepal, Myanmar and Philippines, and worked in senior levels in federal states in Australia.

Michael has been an active participant in the conferences and events of both RC28 and RC14 (politics and ethnicity) and if elected to the board would aim to continue their close association and collaborative events. Michael has highly valued the networks, opportunities and exposure afforded by RC28 and RC14 and would like to contribute to their ongoing activities and the facilitation of opportunities for other early career researchers, in particular in the Asia region.

Mariely López-Santana

Mariely López-Santana is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Political Science Graduate Program at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University (Virginia, United States). She received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She was a Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow at the European University, and a Mundus MAPP Visiting Scholar at the Institut Barcelona D’ Estudis Internacionals.

For the close to fifteen years she has researched issues related to multilevel governance, devolution, and comparative federalism in Europe and the United States, including her cross-national work on domestic compliance with EU soft law, the multilevel governance of active welfare states, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on US states budgets. Through this work she has conducted fieldwork in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, and has researched the UK, German, and US cases. Currently, she is working on a project on municipal debt crises in the US.

She is the author of The New Governance of Welfare States in United States and Europe: Between Decentralization and Centralization in the Activation Era (SUNY Press, 2015). In addition, she has published her work in a variety of venues, including Publius, Oxford University Press, Journal of Social Policy, and Journal of European Public Policy. 

Even if López-Santana has studied a wide variety of topics (e.g., compliance, welfare states, employment policy, financial crises, fiscal matters), the common thread that links her work is her interest in intergovernmental dynamics. While she has always recognized that these are crucial matters, in part given her Puerto Rican background, the COVID crises have put federalism and multilevel governance at the forefront of many scholarly and public debates. In light of these developments, she believes that this is the perfect time to join the RC28 board. As a member of the board she wishes to: (1) keep pushing discussions of federalism, decentralization, devolution and multilevel governance to the forefront, including scholarly and public debates, and 2) mentor graduate students on these topics. Moreover, she wishes to keep leaving the board’s mark at IPSA’s conferences and fora. As the director of the MA and PhDs Political Science programs at her institution, she has plenty of experience running and growing these programs. Finally, she is fully committed to implementing policies that make this group and discussions more diverse, including gender, race, ethnic, and regional diversity.

Juan Cruz Olmeda

Juan C. Olmeda is an Associate Professor at El Colegio de México, in Mexico City. He holds an MA and a PhD in Political Science (Northwestern University, US) and an MA in Ethics, Politics and Public Policy (University of Essex, UK).  His research agenda is focused on issues related to subnational politics and comparative federalism in Latin America. Since 2017 he has been editor in chief of the academic journal Foro Internacional.

During the last decades I have developed a research agenda focused on analyzing Latin American federalism from a comparative perspective. In my forthcoming book I present a model to understand how governors and presidents bargain in the contexts of negotiations to redefine the fiscal pact in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. At the same time I am in the initial steps of a project to analyze how political polarization affected intergovernmental relations during the pandemic in these countries and shaped the type of responses to the health and economic crisis. This avenue of research is a continuation of an analysis on how Mexican federal institutions reacted to the COVID crisis that is going to be published as a chapter in a book sponsored by the Forum of Federations. In addition I am a member of the research team working on the project “Why centralization and decentralization in federations?” coordinated by Paolo Dardanelli and John Kincaid, being in charge of the Mexican case. Given my experience and knowledge, I will like to bring to the Executive Board the Latin American perspective on federalism. Coming from a region of the world where institutions tend to be weak, the way in which federalim works in real terms is different in many ways from what we might observe in develop countries. This is important to understand that federations might react in different ways to the same type of challenges and also to acknowledge diversity.

Johanna Schnabel

Carol Weissert is LeRoy Collins Eminent Scholar and professor of Political Science at Florida State University. She also heads a public policy institute at FSU. She is a long-time scholar on federalism and served as editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism for 10 years. She is a recipient of the career federalism research awards in both the American Political Science Association and the American Society for Public Administration.  In 2016 she was the Australian-American Fulbright-Flinders Distinguished Professor in American Politics. While most of her research has been on American federalism, she has encouraged her colleagues to draw more on comparative work and is serving as a model doing so herself. She has served one term as RC 28 treasurer.

14 June 2021

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2016 Executive Board elections – candidates

Acting as the nominating committee, the outgoing Executive is putting forward the following candidates for election to the Executive for the period 2016-2018. The online voting system will open shortly and all RC28 members will be notified when it is open. Only members who have paid their dues or have agreed to do so are eligible to vote. Additional details on the Executive elections are available in section 5.5-5.12 of our by-laws.

Paolo Dardanelli (chair) 

Dr Paolo Dardanelli, School of Politics and IR, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NX, United Kingdom, +44 1227 82 7417, p.dardanelli@kent.ac.uk, https://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/staff/canterbury/dardanelli.html

Paolo Dardanelli is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Kent, UK, and was formerly Acting Director of Kent’s Centre for Federal Studies. In the 2016-17 academic year he will be Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, USA, and Visiting Professor at the University of Cologne, Germany.

He has researched federalism, devolution, state restructuring, and cognate topics from a comparative perspective for over 15 years. He is the author of Restructuring the European State (under review), Between Two Unions (Manchester U.P., 2005), and of articles in European Political Science Review, Political Studies, Party Politics, Acta Politica, Regional and Federal Studies, Nations and Nationalism, the Swiss Political Science Review and other journals. He is currently joint principal investigator on the project Why De/Centralization in Federations? funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Forum of Federations. His research has also been funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics, and Presence Switzerland.

Dr Dardanelli is the joint editor of Routledge’s Studies in Federalism and Decentralization series, is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Swiss Political Science Review, and was formerly the Book Reviews editor of Regional and Federal Studies.

He has been involved with RC28 since the Fukuoka World Congress of 2006 and was elected to the executive at the Madrid World Congress in 2012. As a member of the executive, he has been responsible for revamping and maintaining the website.

Dr Dardanelli is keen to build on the experience he has gained over the last four years to help the Committee develop further over the next term. He would be pleased to do so as the Chair of the executive.

Thomas Lancaster (vice-chair) 

Thomas D. Lancaster, Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA, 1-404-727-6568, polstdl@emory.edu

Thomas D. Lancaster is Professor of Political Science at Emory University.  He received his B.A. from Washington & Lee University and his Ph.D. from Washington University, St. Louis. His scholarly works on federalism are part of his broader interests in comparative politics, comparative political institutions (especially in western & southern Europe), and comparative political economy (especially institutional constraints on political & economic decision-making).  He has authored, co-authored, or edited five books and published forty-two scholarly articles and book chapters, including three articles in Publius: The Journal of Federalism and served co-editor of one of its special issues.  He has participated in various roles at the IPSA’s World Congresses at Paris, France (1985), Santiago, Chile (2009), Madrid, Spain (2012), and Warsaw, Poland (2014) in addition to RC-28’s own conferences in Philadelphia (2010) and Edinburgh, Scotland (2015).  In addition, he served a three-year term as an at-large member of RC-28’s executive board (2009-2012) and is currently completing a term as second vice-chair (2012-present).

Wolfgang Renzsch (vice-chair)         

Prof. Dr Wolfgang Renzsch, Jean Monnet Chair of European Studies, Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Postfach 4120, 39016 Magdeburg, Germany, +49 391 67 56582, renzsch@ovgu.de,  http://www.pw.ovgu.de/Lehrst%C3%BChle/Mitarbeiter/Professoren_innen/Prof_+Dr_+Wolfgang+Renzsch-p-152.html

Wolfgang Renzsch was appointed university professor at the Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg in 1994 where in 2005 he became a Jean Monnet Scholar. His research focusses on the European regions within the European multilevel system. He has also done research and written extensively on fiscal federalism in Germany. Recent books include Ausgabenrestriktionen der Länder in Deutschland (Nomos, 2005) and 20 Jahre ostdeutsche Landesvertretungen im Brüssel (with T. Wobben, Nomos, 2013).  Wolgang Renzsch has served on the RC28 Executive in various positions since 2006.

Soeren Keil (program chair) 

Dr Soeren Keil, Reader in Politics and International Relations, Canterbury Christ Church University, School of Psychology, Politics and Sociology, North Holmes Road
Canterbury CT1 1QU, UK, Tel. 01227 863099, keil.soeren@gmail.com

Soeren Keil works at Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK. He first got in contact with RC28 at the IPSA conference in Santiago in Chile in 2009. Since then, he has been involved with most of the RC’s events, including numerous presentations and functions at World Congresses and related conferences. He has worked with many leading federal scholars, including the late Ron Watts, and the late Richard Simeon. These and many others have been an inspiration and have pushed him to focus more strongly on comparative federalism and the use of federalism as a tool of conflict resolution. He would like to serve on RC28’s Executive Committee because he believes that his research focus on federalism and conflict resolution, his experience with organising events and managing larger projects, and his academic networks in Europe and Northern America, make him well suited to help the RC to extend its reach, keep its strong representation at IPSA events and enhance its membership. What is more, he regularly works with policy makers and has been involved in discussions about federalism in Bosnia, Syria and Myanmar//Burma. He believes that this link to the policy world will be an additional advantage and will help the RC to sharpen its profile beyond the world of academia.

Carol Weissert (recruitment chair) 

Director, LeRoy Collins Institute, Professor of Political Science, Florida State University
506 W Pensacola Street, Tallahassee FL  32306-1601, 850-644-1441, weissert@fsu.edu
http://collinsinstitute.fsu.edu/

Carol Weissert is LeRoy Collins Eminent Scholar and professor of Political Science at Florida State University. She also heads a public policy institute at FSU. She is a long-time scholar on federalism and served as editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism for 10 years. In the spring she was the Australian-American Fulbright-Flinders Distinguished Professor in American Politics. While most of her research has been on American federalism, she has encouraged her colleagues to draw more on comparative work and is serving as a model doing so herself. She is committed to serving actively on RC28’s executive and attending the IPSA World Congress regularly.

Harihar Bhattacharyya (at-large) 

Dr Harihar Bhattacharyya, Department of Political Science, The University of Burdwan
Burdwan – 713104, West Bengal, INDIA, 0342-2530925, 0342-2531144, harihar59@gmail.com

Dr Harihar Bhattacharyya received his Ph. D degree in Government from the London School of economics and Political Science as an internal candidate. He is currently a Professor of Political Science, University of Burdwan West Bengal (India). During 2006-08 for two years he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Commerce, Law, Management and Fine Arts of the University of Burdwan. He held prestigious visiting assignments in various universities in India and abroad: Baden-Wurttemburg Fellow ( 1998) at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University (Germany); Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of Federalism, Fribourg, Switzerland (1998-99) (one year); L M Singhvi Fellow at the Hull University, UK (2002); DAAD Senior Fellow at the Heidelberg Universuity in 2007; Visiting Fellow at the Delhi University (North Campus) in 2010; and Eminent Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (2013). He taught at the universities of Hull (UK); Heidelberg (GermanY0, Delhi University; and Fribourg 9Switzerland). Prof Bhattacharyya has visited many countries: UK, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Mexico, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Tanzania, Singapore, Nepal and Jordan. He has also participated in global peace making: Arusha for Burundi (1999); Austria (for Sri Lanka); Locarno (for Sri Lanka); Dulikhel for Nepal.He also facilitated constitution-making for Nepal in 2008. He prepared the India Country report on ‘Decentralization Effectiveness and Human rights: The Case of India’ in 2005 for ICHRP (Geneva) for UNDP.

Prof. Bhattacharyya has authored/co-edited so far 10 books including five single authored and more than 100 research papers in journals and books. His recent books include: (2010) Federalism in Asia India, Pakistan and Malaysia (London and New York: Routledge); (co-edited) (2010) The Politics of Social Exclusion in India: Democracy at the Crossroads (London and New York: Routledge); and (2016) co-edited) Globalization and Governance in India: New Challenges to Society and Institutions (London and New York: Routledge) (2015). One of his recent research articles titled: ‘Federalism and Democracy in India: The Growing Salience of Diversity-claims over Equality-claims in Comparative and Global Perspective’, Regional and Federal Studies (2015) (Routledge).

He has carried out many prestigious research projects of his own as well as international collaboration. In 2013 he completed and submitted report on an ICCSR funded project on ‘Asymmetric Federalism, Tribal Identity and the Left in Tripura’. Currently he is a Lead Researcher responsible for the theme of ‘Ethnic Conflict Management in India’s North East’  in an international research project based in the University of Edinburgh, UK on ‘Continuity and Change in Indian Federalism in the Age of Coalition Governments’ funded by the Leverhulme Trust UK (2014-17 January).

His current research interests are: comparative federalism; decentralization and human rights; democracy in India; and federalism and ethnic conflict management.

1 September 2016

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2016 Executive Board elections

Our Research Committee is governed by an Executive that counts at least six members, a chair, two vice-chairs, a program chair, a recruitment chair, and a treasurer (our bylaws). We’re looking for three or more RC28 members to serve in various positions starting this summer. Please let RC28 know by email (ipsarc28@gmail.com) if you’re interested in serving on our Executive. Provide us with your full name, affiliation, contact information, and a brief motivation for your service. You may also nominate someone else in the same way. Members serve in two-year terms for a maximum of 6 years. We will proceed as outlined in our bylaws (sections 5.2 to 5.12) to prepare for the election of current and new members. The electronic election window will open within 14 days after our next Business Meeting at this year’s World Congress in Poznan and will remain open for 14 days thereafter.

8 July 2016

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RC28’s New Name: Comparative Federalism and Multilevel Governance

IPSA-RC28 has a new name! It is now called Comparative Federalism and Multilevel Governance (Fédéralisme et gouvernance multi-niveaux comparés in French). At RC28’s annual meeting in Madrid, Spain, July 2012, our members voted unanimously in favor of changing RC28’s name to better reflect the mission and objectives of our Research Committee as well as our membership base, which increasingly spans federal and non-federal countries. The name change was approved by IPSA’s Executive Committee in May 2013.

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Six-Year Renewal of RC28

In the summer of 2011 our Research Committee was asked to submit a report of its activities over the previous six years. The report was sent to the Committee on Research in Training (CRT) in September 2011. A notice of the renewal of our RC membership for the next six years (2012-2018) was sent by the CRT and IPSA Executive in April 2012.

7 June 2012

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RC28 Executive: Election Results

Dear Colleagues,

Also on behalf of Bertus de Villiers I take pleasure in informing you that the recent elections of the new IPSA RC 28 Executive unanimously endorsed all candidates on the ballot as suggested in their functions by the Nominating Committee. This therefore means that the new Executive consists of the following office holders:

Chair and Liaison with the APSA Section on Federalism: Michael Stein, Canada

First Vice Chair and Programme Chair: Sonja Wälti, USA

Second Vice Chair and Liaison with the Forum of Federations: Wolfgang Renzsch, Germany

Publications Chair and Liaison with the Regionalism and Federalism Section of the ECPR: Wilfried Swenden, United Kingdom

Recruitment Chair: Rekha Saxena, India

Since all candidates expressed their willingness to accept the responsibilities of the respective positions, Bertus and I assume that they will accept to be elected, unless a note to the contrary by August 25th.

Both of us congratulate all elected officers on this vote of confidence, and we wish them all of the energy and good luck they will need to make the Federalism Research Committee even more successful than it has already been in the past.

Since our terms of office end with this election –(that of Bertus after three years, mine after nine)– we would like to let you know that we, indeed, appreciated the always diligent and reliable co-operation of those who were already members of the outgoing Executive (i.e. Michael and Sonja). It was a pleasure working with you in a good team.

With best regards to all of you from both of us,

Uwe Leonardy

31 January 2010