RESEARCH
The Department has a lively and active research culture, reflected not only in the individual research profiles of staff members, but also in a range of research projects with which they are involved.
Funded research projects within PIR:
- 'Pro-Government Armed Groups (PGAG): Militias and Violent Non-State Actors Around the World' (PI: Prof. Neil Mitchell, funded by the ESRC)
- 'European Minority Rights Regime: Power, Interests, and Knowledge' (PI: Dr David J. Galbreath, funded by the Leverhulme Trust)
We are represented on editorial boards such as Review of International Studies , Millennium, Ethnopolitics, Policy Studies Journal, Comparative Politics, Journal of Youth Studies, JEPOP, International Studies Quarterly, Globalizations, International Political Sociology, Critical Asian Studies, Public Policy and Administration, Public Administration, Journal of Public Affairs, Social Movement Studies, Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies, Europe - Asia Studies, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Politikka, Demokratizatsiya, Modern and Contemporary France; Spanish Cultural Studies; Perspectives on European Politics and Society ; Regional Studies, SAS Rundschau, Politique et Société, Governance, Social Studies Review, Comparative Political Studies.
Furthermore, PIR houses the Centre for the Study of Public Policy (CSPP).
Overall, while research projects comprise collaborative, mainly externally funded problem-driven studies, and are set within a specific time frame, research centres are permanently established hubs of research activity, facilitating project work, research co-ordination, networking, and the development of centres of excellence for the production and dissemination of expertise.
RESEARCH CENTRES
Centre for the Study of Public Policy
The CSPP applies ideas from the social sciences to major problems of government in order to advance the understanding of both. It does so by combining quantitative, qualitative and institutional methods from political science, sociology, economics and related disciplines. When founded in 1976 it was the first public policy centre within a European university.
The CSPP specializes in comparative research across Europe and the wider OECD world of advanced industrial societies. Its fields of specialization include the growth of government; welfare provided by the state, civil society and the market; presidents and prime ministers; democratization; and social capital and health. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the CSPP launched an innovative programme of Barometer surveys to understand mass response to transformation in 16 societies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The enlarged European Union is studied from the bottom up in order to understand the extent to which the policy concerns of Europeans are primarily a reflection of individual characteristics, such as age, income and education, or of national institutions and cultures. The CSPP is also actively engaged in comparing EU societies with countries seeking enlargement or on its borders, especially Turkey, Croatia, and Ukraine.
The results of the Centre's research are first made available in its series of Studies in Public Policy; in books; in peer reviewed social science journals on both sides of the Atlantic; in public affairs periodicals such as the Journal of Democracy, and in Russian and German publications. Reports are presented to policymaking agencies such as the World Bank, OECD, the European Commission, the Council of Europe and UN agencies and in seminars across Europe, the United States and further afield. It also edits the Journal of Public Policy for Cambridge University Press.
Funding for CSPP research comes from national institutions such as the British ESRC and the Nuffield Foundation and from scientific and private foundations and intergovernmental bodies in eight countries of Europe and North America.
For further details, see www.abdn.ac.uk/cspp
Director: Professor Richard Rose FBA
Associates: Dr. Christian Haerpfer, Professor William Mishler, Dr. Neil Munro