Professor of Comparative Politics and Government
Tel. [+39] 055 4685 210 / 2210 
Fax. [+39] 055 4685 279
Email Peter.Mair@eui.eu
Postal address
Department of Political and Social Sciences
European University Institute
Via dei Roccettini 9
50014 San Domenico di Fiesole - Italy
Office Hours and Secretary
Office hours are Mondays, 16.00-18.30. Otherwise by appointment.
Amy.Chamberlain@eui.eu, Tel. [+39] 055 4685 211 / 2211
(Alessandra Torre on leave)
Short Biography
Peter Mair joined the EUI in 2005, and is Professor of Comparative Politics and current Head of Department. He was previously attached to Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he held the Chair of Comparative Politics and where he is now Honourary Professor in Comparative European Politics.
Since 2001, he has been co-editor of the journal West European Politics. Born in Ireland in 1951, he is a graduate of University College Dublin, and was awarded a Ph.D. by Leiden University. He has previously worked in the Universities of Limerick, Strathclyde and Manchester, and was Assistant Professor of Political Science in the EUI in the early 1980s.
He has published extensively on comparative European politics, and has co-authored Representative Government in Modern Europe (4th edn. 2005). He is co-editor of The Enlarged European Union (2002), Political Parties and Electoral Change (2004), and European Politics: Pasts, Presents, Futures (2008).
His earlier book with Stefano Bartolini, Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability (1990) was awarded the ISSC/Unesco Stein Rokkan Prize and has just being reissued in the ECPR Classics series.
(1) Party Patronage in Contemporary European Democracies
Directors: Petr Kopecký (Leiden University) and Peter Mair
The key objective of this proposed research project is to explore the principles and practices of party patronage in contemporary European democracies on a systematic cross-national basis. Despite sometimes substantial theoretical interest in the past, there has been a lack of cross-nationally valid indicators and data to access the strength and impact of party patronage across time and space. At the same time, much of the theoretical work in this area has also been limited by virtue of the tendency to link the concept of patronage to exchange politics in pre-modern societies, thus ignoring its potential relevance as a party organizational resource in contemporary systems of multi-level governance. This project aims to fill an important empirical void in the literature on contemporary European polities. It also aims to use this new robust empirical evidence to theorize about party patronage within the context of party organisational development and transformation, on the one hand, and political-institutional transformations of modern state, on the other.
Party patronage is defined in this research project as the power of a party or parties to appoint people to positions in public and semi-public life. The scope of the patronage is then considered to be the range of positions so distributed. The focus of this research therefore rests on what Hans Daalder (1966) once defined as the “reach of the party” within the polity. We understand party patronage as theoretically and empirically distinct from the two related phenomena, namely clientelism (a form of representation based on selective release of public resources – contracts, subsidies, pork barrel legislation – in order to secure electoral support), and corruption (illegal use of public resources for private gains). The patronage which is of interest to this project is legal, and in principle, if not always in practice, it is above board. It is also therefore researchable.
The first specific concern of the project is to establish how far within a given political system the allocation of jobs and other important public and semi-public positions is in the gift of, or controlled by, political parties. The second objective is to map out the precise institutional location of patronage appointments within each political system, to include not only the core of civil service, but also institutions that are not part of the civil service, but are under some form of state control, such as public hospitals, various regulatory agencies and commissions and state owned companies. The third objective is to explore the relative importance of the national, regional and local levels of public administration in the location and scope of patronage. The final objective is to explore changes in the parties’ ability to exercise patronage resources over time, and the extent to which party patronage is exercised in a ‘majoritarian’ as opposed to a more ‘consensual’ manner across the spectrum of (mainstream) political parties.
This project has involved an intensive three-year research effort that has gathered and analysed data on public appointments and political control in 15 European democracies, ranging across both northern and southern Europe, Eastern and Western Europe, and across both large and small democracies. It also combines the analysis of polities in which there has been a strong tradition of patronage and clientelism, such as Greece, Ireland, and Italy, as well as those in which patronage is normally deemed irrelevant or non-existent, such as Denmark and Norway. The result of this large-scale research project has been the creation of a unique data set which is likely to be extensively mined by researchers for many years to come, and the first results of which will be published in a volume contracted to Oxford University Press for submission in late 2010.
The data were gathered by 15 country teams who interviewed some 45 respondents in each country (or 675 in all). Experts were chosen from within three major groups: academia, the non-governmental sector and the civil service. They were chosen as experts who were knowledgeable about appointments to institutions in nine different policy areas (e.g. judiciary, economy, foreign affairs, welfare etc.). The country teams interviewed at least 5 experts for each of the nine policy areas (hence the 45 interviews per country). The experts responded to a uniform questionnaire in face-to-face interviews conducted by the contributors to the volume and were asked to assess the pervasiveness, persistence and several other aspects of the party patronage practices within their policy area of expertise. Their answers were analysed systematically to produce a detailed description of the empirical situation in different institutional arenas of the state, but also aggregated to produce a more general picture of the patronage practices in the country.
These data are supplemented with information from other primary and secondary sources such as literature on the status of the civil service, prior history of patronage, media reports about the current practice and government reports about employment trends in the individual countries.
Other members of the research project are Oliver Treib (Austria); Maria Spirova (Bulgaria); Carina Bischoff (Denmark); Stefanie John and Thomas Poguntke (Germany); Takis Pappas (Greece); Jan Meyer-Sahling (Hungary); Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson (Iceland); Eoin O’Malley and Stephen Quinlan (Ireland); Fabrizio di Mascio (Italy); Sandra van Thiel (Netherlands); Elin Haugsgjerd Allern (Norway); Carlos Jalali (Portugal); Raoul Gomez and Tania Verge (Spain); Matthew Flinders and Felicity Matthews (UK).
(2) Seclusion and Inclusion in the European Polity: Institutional Change and Democratic Practices (SIEPOL)
Directors: Adrienne Heritier and Peter Mair.
This research project is intended to analyze the causes, processes and impact of political seclusion and inclusion at the European level and at the national level of the old Member States, as well as the inter-relationship between these levels.
The project focusses primarily on the role of institutions in the process of seclusion and inclusion, and on their relation to the democratic functioning of the European Union and its Member States.
By seclusion and inclusion we refer to the following: at both the European and national levels, we appear to be witnessing two contrasting developments. On the one hand, political decision-makers appear increasingly 'sealed off' or 'secluded' from the wider constituency, and, indeed from the rank-and-file of elected politicians. On the other hand, there are multiple and diffuse attempts at a radical opening-up of democratic decision-making that invoke greater inclusion through direct-democratic procedures, greater decision-making transparency, more widespread access to information, and greater contacts with civil society.
The project is intended to investigate the factors that drive these developments at the European and national levels, to assess the extent to which the two processes are related, and to analyze the links, if any, between what occurs at the national level and what occurs at the European level. Finally, we discuss the normative implications that our findings have for democratic legitimation in Europe.
This project is currently subdivided into three sections, the third of which is The Politics of Institutional Reforms in the Established European Democracies, directed by Peter Mair, Carina Bischoff (Copenhagen) and Zsolt Enyedi (CEU, Budapest). Data collection for this section was finalised at the end of March 2010 and then passed to country experts for checking. The first presentation of these data will be at a workshop on “Institutional Change in Advanced Democracies”, which will be organised by Peter Mair, Alex Wilson, and Yvette Peters on 8-9 June 2010.
(3) Observatory on Political Parties and Representation
Directed by Luciano Bardi (RSCAS and Pisa) and Peter Mair
See: http://www.eui.eu/DepartmentsAndCentres/RobertSchumanCentre/Research/
InstitutionsGovernanceDemocracy/EUDO/PartiesRepresentation/Index.aspx
(4) Representation and Accountability in EU Governance
These research activities, developed under the auspices of the CONNEX bnetwork of excellence, have now been completed and have resulted in two edited special journal issues:
Political Representation and EU Governance (Peter Mair and Jacques Thomassen, eds.). Special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy, 17:1, 2010, 1-136.
Political Accountability and European Governance (Deirdre Curtin, Peter Mair and Yannis Papadopoluos, eds.). Special issue of the West European Politics, 33:5, 2010, forthcoming.
(5) Other research activities
Additional research projects focus on party organizational change and the cartelisation of party systems, as well as on the problems facing contemporary democratic legitimacy as a result of party failings. For recent publications on these and other research projects, see Recent Publications below.
Wojciech Gagatek, Political Parties at the European Level: Their Organization and Activities. EUI, 2008.
Joost van Spanje, Pariah Parties: On the Origins and Electoral Consequences of the Ostracism of Political Parties in Established Democracies. EUI, 2009.
Laurentiu G. Stinga, Still Elected Dictators? A Study of Executive Accountability to the Legislature in Multi-Party Democracies Across Time: Italy (1974-2006), Argentina (1982-2006) and Romania (1992-2007) . EUI, 2009.
Katarzyna Grzybowska-Walecka, International Party Cooperation Before and After 1989: The Polish and Hungarian (Post-) Communists and the Western Social Democrats. EUI, 2009.