Chair: Professor Yun-han Chu

Yun-han Chu is distinguished research fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica and Professor of political science at National Taiwan University. Prof. Chu received his Ph. D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty of National Taiwan University in 1987. He was a visiting associate professor at Columbia University in 1990-1991. He served as director of programs of the Institute for National Policy Research, Taiwan’s leading independent think tank, from 1989 to 1999. Prof. Chu specializes in politics of Greater China, East Asian political economy and democratization. He is the coordinator of Asian Barometer Survey, a regional network of survey on democracy, governance and development covering more than seventeen Asian countries. Prof. Chu was former president of Chinese Association of Political Science (Taipei) in 2002–2004, a member of the International Council of the Asia Society between 2001 and 2007, and a member of the Council of the American Political Science Association (2009–2011). He was recently elected an academician of Academia Sinica, the country’s highest academic honor, in July 2012. He currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of Democracy, Pacific Affairs, China Review, Journal of Contemporary China, International Studies Perspectives, and Journal of East Asian Studies. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of fifteen books. Among his recent English publications are How East Asians View Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008) Citizens, Elections and Parties in East Asia (Lynne Reinner, 2008), Dynamics of Local Governance in China During the Reform Era (Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc, 2010) and Democracy in East Asia: A New Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)

Vice-Chair Professor Sandeep Shastri

Dr Sandeep Shastri is the Pro Vice Chancellor of the Jain University and Director of its distingusihed Centre for Research in Social Sciences and Education. Dr Shastri prefers to describe himself as a  teacher by instinct, researcher by choice, trainer by passion and above all a life long learner.  Dr Shastri's research has been in the fields of Elections Studies, Federalism, Survey Based Research, Political Institutions and Processes. He has authored 10 books, over 40 chapters in Edited books and over 70 articles in refereed research journals besides more than 200 Op Ed page articles in leading international and national newspapers. He is the National Coordinator of the Lokniti,  an All India network of social scientists involved in survey based election and opinion studies. He has been the India Coordinator of the World Values Survey for over two decades. He is a consultant to prestigious international bodies like the Forum of Federations and is an adviser on constitutional reforms and transition to democracy in Myanmar and South Sudan.   Dr Shastri played a key role in drafting the Karnataka State Youth Policy by serving as the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Policy . Dr Shastri has lectured extensively across the world and spoken at Universities in more than 50 countries in all the six inhabited continents. He is privileged to have been chosen to participate in the International Visitor Programme of the US Government in 1995 and was a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar on Federalism in 1993. He has also been Ford Foundation Fellow,  Indo-Canadian Shastri Fellow and Visiting Fellow at Harvard University.  Dr Shastri is an Adjunct Professor at University of California, Berkeley and teaches there in the summer term. 

Vice-Chair Professor Robert Mattes

Robert Mattes is professor of politics at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland. Originally from the United States, he spent 25 years researching and teaching in South Africa before moving to Strathclyde in 2016. He was visiting research scholar at Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies in 2016. He is honorary professor of political studies and former director of the Democracy in Africa Research Unit in the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town. He is also a co-founder of Afrobarometer. Robert was principal investigator in major research projects such as the African Legislatures Project and the South African National Election Study. He is the co-author author of Public Opinion, Democracy, and Markets in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2005). His articles have appeared in American Journal of Political Science, World Development, and Party Politics, among others. Robert holds a PhD in political science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Member Professor Christian W Haerpfer

Professor Haerpfer is Professor of Sociology at the United Arab Emirates University in UAE and Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is the President of the World Values Survey Association (WVSA) since 2013. The World Values Survey is the largest academic and large-scale cross-national survey in the social and political sciences and has been conducted in 120 countries in 7 waves since 1981. Professor Haerpfer is Director of the Institute for Comparative Survey Research -ICSR- and Director of the ‘Eurasia Barometer - EAB’ in Vienna (Austria) since 1990. In the period 2004 – 2015, Dr Christian W Haerpfer was Full Professor of Political Science and holder of a Named Chair, the ‘Established First Chair in Politics’ in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen (United Kingdom). Christian W Haerpfer is currently Visiting Professor in Social and Political Sciences at the V.N.Karazin National University of Kharkiv (Ukraine). He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (United Kingdom), Glasgow Caledonian University (United Kingdom), National University of Rwanda in Kigali and Butari (Rwanda), Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Israel), University of Kiev (Ukraine), Glasgow University (United Kingdom), CEU-Central European University in Prague (Czech Republic) and University of Salzburg (Austria). His books include “Democratization” at OUP - Oxford University Press: Oxford & New York 2009), which will be published in a second edition in 2017. In 1998, he published “Democracy and Its Alternatives. Understanding Post-Communist Societies” at Johns Hopkins University Press in Baltimore (USA). In 2002 he published “Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe” at Routledge Publishers in London & New York.

Member Dr Marta Lagos

Marta Lagos is founding director of Latinobarómetro, a yearly continental opinion survey in 18 countries in Latin America. Formerly at the head of a Chilean think tank, CERC that conducted opinion polls during transition to democracy in Chile during the 80's and 90's. Marta Lagos trained as economist in Heidelberg, Germany, is founding director of her own polling company MORI (Chile) associated with MORI UK since 1994. Marta Lagos has been in the Principal Investigator for Chile in the World Value Survey since l990, was Chair of the Scientific Committee of the WVSA from 2008 to 2014. Was member of the Steering Committee of the International Comparative Elections Studies CSES since its foundation in 1994 until 2008. Her expertise in conducting comparative survey research has lead to extensive consulting in the formation of regional opinion barometers, recently the Asian and Afro Barometers that follow the experience of the Euro- and Latinobarometer. As a result of this experience a new organization has been created. She coordinates the comparative work available from the regional barometers, Africa, Asia and Latin America and more recently the Arab world and Eurasia where 72 countries are covered. She has a very active participation in local national institutions as member of boards, and consultant to international organizations. Also member of the United Nations Public Opinion Task. Force, as well as major consultant to UNDP report on the Democracy in Latin America and World Bank and US and European Governments. Since l995 WAPOR representative for Chile, and founding member and first president of the Chilean Association of Public Opinion Research. Editor of IJPOR (Oxford University press). Dinnerman Award 2008.

Member Professor Mark Tessler

Mark Tessler is Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where between 2005 and 2013 he also served as the University’s Vice Provost for International Affairs. Professor Tessler has studied and/or conducted field research in Tunisia, Israel, Morocco, Egypt, and Palestine (West Bank and Gaza).  Many of Professor Tessler’s scholarly publications examine the nature, determinants, and political implications of attitudes and values held by ordinary citizens in the Middle East.  Among the fifteen books he has authored, coauthored, or edited are Public Opinion in the Middle East: Survey Research and the Political Orientations of Ordinary Citizens (2011); and his most recent book, supported by an award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Islam and Politics in the Middle East: Explaining the Views of Ordinary Citizens (2015).  Professor Tessier has also written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Professor Tessler is the Scientific Coordinator of Arab Barometer survey.

Member Professor Elizabeth Zechmeister

Professor Zechmeister received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2003. Her research focuses on comparative political behavior and public opinion, in particular in Latin America. Her work includes studies of voting, ideology, political parties, representation, charisma, and crisis. Zechmeister has received support from the National Science Foundation for investigations into the public opinion consequences of terrorist threat and natural disaster, respectively. She has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Behavior, among other outlets. She is co-author of Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Latin American Party Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is co-editor of The Latin American Voter: Pursuing Representation and Accountability in Challenging Contexts (University of Michigan Press, 2015). In 2012, she was the recipient of the Vanderbilt A&S Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and in 2015 she received the Vanderbilt Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. Her courses focus on Latin American politics, Mexican politics, research design, and comparative political behavior and public opinion.

Member Professor Richard Gunther

Richard Gunther (PhD, University of California at Berkeley), professor emeritus of political science, is the international co-coordinator of the Comparative National Elections Project and co–principal investigator of national election surveys conducted in Spain (1979, 1982, 1988, 1993 and 2004), the US (2004 and 2012), Uruguay (1994) and Bulgaria (1996). From 1989 through 2000 he served as co-chair of the Subcommittee on Southern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. In addition to many scholarly articles and book chapters, Gunther is author or editor of 15 books, most of them dealing with political parties, electoral behavior, the impact of the media on politics and transitions to democratic rule. He is recipient of Ohio State University’s awards for Distinguished University Service and a Distinguished Scholar.  Gunther remains very active in the Comparative National Elections Project which, to date, has undertaken 44 national election surveys in 25 countries.  He is the CNEP's representative on the International Political Science Association's Research Committee on Public Opinion research.

Member Professor Wenfang Tang

Wenfang Tang is Stanley Hua Hsia Professor of Chinese Culture and Institutions and Chair of Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa. He began conducting public opinion surveys in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and participated and led many large scale national public opinion surveys since then. His current research focuses on public opinion and political culture in contemporary China, as well as comparative political behavior. He has authored and coauthored several books on Chinese public opinion published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Stanford University Press, and many articles in both leading general political science and area-studies journals. His latest book titled Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability (http://www.tangwenfang.org/books.html) was published in 2016 by Oxford University Press. 

Member Professor Nikolay Narbut

Narbut Nikolay Petrovich holds D.Phil. in Social Science, PhD in Philosophy. He is Professor, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Humanitarian and Social Sciences and Founding Head of the Department of Sociology at Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia. Professor Narbut is also Chief Research Associate of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a well-known expert in the field of sociology of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He has published more than 100 scientific and educational works. Under his leadership, more than 20 master's theses were defended, including those by foreign applicants. Professor Narbut is a full member of the Russian Academy of Social Sciences, a member of the European Sociological Association, the chief editor of the journal "Bulletin of Peoples' Friendship University. A series of "Sociology", a member of the editorial boards of a number of leading Russian and foreign scientific journals, chairman of the council for doctoral and master's theses on the sociological sciences.

Member Professor Marita Carballo

Marita is President of the National Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and Full Academic of the National Education Academy, President of the World Association of Public Opinion and Research (WAPOR); Vice President of the Scientific Executive Committee of the World Values Survey (WVS) and of the Comparative Sociology Committee of the International Sociological Association (ISA). From 2009 to 2012 Marita was President of Kantar Latin America. From 2003 to 2008 she was Global Head of TNS's Political and Social sector -based in London- where she played a key role on large- scale surveys, notably in the Standard Eurobarometer for the European Commission, and she was responsible of projects including more than 90 countries. She was President of Gallup Europe between 2004 and 2007. She started her career in research as President and Executive Director of Gallup Argentina (1980- 2001). Since 1991, Marita served as Member of Gallup International Executive Council and in 2003 was voted Honorary Member. Her most recent books are “Cultural Values at the Turn of the Millennium (2005)” ,”Public opinion in a Globalized world” as Editor in 2007, “Value Change in Latin-America – Mexico” as Editor (2013) and “Happiness of Nations” (Penguin Random House, 2015).

Member Professor Eduard Ponarin

Eduard Ponarin is a tenured professor in the Department of Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is an expert in ethnic and religious minorities in post-Soviet territory, particularly Islamic challenges in former Soviet Republics. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan. Eduard Ponarin is Director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) of the Higher School of Economics (since 2010). Previous positions: Professor, Department of Political Sciences and Sociology, European University at St. Petersburg (1998-2012); Member of the editorial board of Journal of Post-Soviet Power Institutions (2005-2007); Member of PONARS Executive Committee (2003-2006); Research assistant at the Population Studies Center, the University of Michigan (1990-1996). 

Secretary Mag Kseniya Kizilova
Kseniya Kizilova is Secretary General of the Research Committee 17 “Comparative Public Opinion” of the International Political Science Association, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Global Barometer Survey group. Kseniya Kizilova is Vice-Director of the Institute for Comparative Survey Research "Eurasia Barometer" and Head of Secretariat of the World Values Survey Association. Her field of expertise includes social and political transformations; public health; life quality; population well-being and happiness. Kseniya Kizilova specializes also in design and organization of comparative social surveys; analysis and interpretation of qualitative and quantitative sociological information. Her professional experience includes 12 years of work as sociologist and social science researcher and involves implementation of over 30 research projects; she has 35 publications, including articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters in collective monographs.