Biography
Daniele Caramani is Ernst B. Haas Chair in European Governance and Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre, where he directs the European Governance and Politics Programme. He is on leave from the University of Zurich where he holds the Chair of Comparative Politics. He holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Geneva and a PhD from the European University Institute.
Caramani’s research bridges comparative politics, European integration and globalisation. His ERC Advanced Grant on global cleavages across world regions extends the analysis of nationalisation and Europeanisation to global socio-economic and cultural structures, alignments in supra-national parliamentary institutions and the discourse by transnational actors, agencies and media. His book on The Nationalization of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2004) was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research and was followed by The Europeanization of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015). The theoretical perspective that pervades the analysis of nationalisation, Europeanisation and globalisation addresses the interplay between territorial and functional cleavages, in particular the left−right class dimension and the politicisation of inequality. This approach entails a strong historical dimension reaching back to the first phases of mass democratisation, state building, nationalism and industrialisation in the 19th century.
This work is complemented by research on transnational voting rights and the transformation of democratic, pluralist representation through the tension between populist nationalism and technocratic supra-national integration. On these topics he has co-edited volumes on Voting Rights in the Age of Globalization (Routledge, 2015) and The Technocratic Challenge to Democracy (Routledge, 2020), as well as published articles in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, West European Politics, Party Politics, Comparative European Politics, among others.
Caramani’s empirical approach is comparative and quantitative, based on large cross-country and longitudinal datasets with aggregate data on parties and party systems, electoral systems and behaviour, as well as individual, roll-call and text data. He is the author of Elections in Western Europe since 1815: Electoral Results by Constituencies (Palgrave 2000, with CD-ROM), later expanded into a data archive of which he is a founding director, the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA), and which has received the APSA Lijphart-Przeworski-Verba Dataset Award.
On methodology, he authored Introduction to the Comparative Method with Boolean Algebra (Sage, Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences 2009) and, for a student readership, he edits the textbook Comparative Politics (Oxford University Press 2023, sixth edition).