Herbert Kitschelt, the George V. Allen Distinguished Professor of International Relations, is the 2025 recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, in honor of his groundbreaking research on party systems.
Kitschelt is primarily known for his studies on how European multiparty systems are structured. Throughout his career, he has investigated how political parties, in competition with each other and as a result of changing attitudes and behaviors within the electorate, have shaped party systems, primarily in post-industrial societies with multi-party competition.
Informally known as “The Nobel of Political Science,” the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science is internationally regarded as one of the most prestigious awards in political science. Pablo Beramendi, Professor of Political Science and department chair, said that very few departments have Skytte winners in their ranks. “It is an exceptional recognition of Herbert’s scholarship,” he said. “More substantively, it is also a celebration of the kind of scholarship Herbert represents: intellectually deep and creative, focused on major questions and consistently creating synergies across different areas of the discipline, in particular institutions, behavior and political economy.”
Beramendi adds that Kitschelt, who joined Duke as an Assistant Professor of Political Science in 1984, has been “a pillar of the department,” helping build and consolidate a very strong comparative group, leading the department’s focus on European politics, and consistently nurturing the next generation of scholars by playing a major role in faculty recruitment and mentoring.
“When I think of Herbert’s career I think of the value of pursuing one’s interests with passion and rigor, of pushing the frontier on questions solidly grounded on concerns about how democracies actually work, of the value of reading broadly and deeply to motivate puzzles, of the value of being kind and generous while collaborating, and of his unwavering allergy to vacuous fads, shallow reasoning and artificial academic boundaries — in the presence of any of these he will sneeze vividly,” said Beramendi. “The Skytte prize is the discipline’s collective blessing.”
We sat down with Kitschelt to ask him about his career, his reaction to the Skytte Prize, and his advice for junior scholars.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
How does it feel to receive this recognition at this point of your career?
The Skytte award puts the spotlight on a particular research program that deals with changes of democratic party competition over the past half century, and the electoral crisis of traditional mainstream parties in established democracies, if not the crisis of confidence in democratic politics more generally.
My work highlights that, in many regards, America is not unique, but exhibits the emergence of partisan alignments, divides and conflicts that are encountered in all emerging knowledge societies. Nevertheless, comparison across a broad cohort of countries also highlights critical differences between American politics and that of other durable Western democracies.
The Skytte prize also highlights my work on the importance of global comparison of democratic party competition beyond established Western democracies. This second strand of my main research deals with electoral politics in postcommunist Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and lately in global comparison, also including African and Asian polities with multi-party electoral contests.
This is where my interest in “clientelist” politics comes in. Clientelism involves direct, targeted exchanges between politicians and voters that were widely practiced in Western countries — and especially in the United States —in the 19th and 20th century, but that are still critical ingredients of political competition in many democracies around the world — and not just in poor countries.
Duke is certainly lucky that you chose it as your home institution. How did it contribute to your professional success?
I have always enjoyed my Duke colleagues, whose insights have sharpened my understanding of politics and my research agenda. Let me especially mention my recently retired colleague John Aldrich with whom I co-taught graduate courses numerous times. I have also benefited from younger colleagues with different training than my own, helping me to throw new light on my research and absorb insights I would not have struck upon without them. Joint research with younger scholars has been a critical ingredient of my work.
Duke has provided me with the administrative infrastructure and some start-up funding to implement a global survey among political scientists on linkage mechanisms between politicians and voters in electoral democracies, the Democratic Accountability and Linkage Project (DALP, in 2007-9, then, with additional World Bank research funds, DALP II in 2022-25.) It includes over 1,600 political scientists in 94 countries, and has become an important data resource for the profession to study democratic party competition globally.
Duke also enabled me to encounter and train smart, creative and enterprising doctoral students, many of whom participated in my research agenda. Let me highlight a book I produced with four graduate students, “Latin American Party Systems” (Cambridge University Press, 2010). All four of them have become senior professors at major American and Latin American research universities, and they look back on this project as a catalyst of their scholarly careers.
For almost 20 years, Duke has also provided me with financial resources to run an annual “Frontiers of Political Science” conference with working groups of doctoral students from Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. Prepared by a semester-long seminar on an analytical subject that unites the students’ own research interests, the Frontiers conferences allow students to present early research papers on their work. Most importantly, students get to identify and invite up to a dozen prominent national and international scholars conducting research on subjects pertaining to the conference. These scholars not only present their own papers at these conferences, but also serve as discussants of our students’ papers. Furthermore, beyond the formal panel sessions, creating opportunities for young scholars to engage in informal conversations with senior scholars from around the world over breakfast, lunch and dinner has always proved particularly fruitful and has been enthusiastically valued by my students.
I should finally emphasize that Duke has wonderful undergraduates, some of whom pushed me in my teaching to clarify my ideas in ways that have also advanced my own research. Among them, let me single out only Jay Ruckelshaus, who contacted me as a Duke freshman, became my research assistant, won a Rhodes Scholarship and went on to write a Ph.D. thesis in political theory at Oxford University, the main results of which were published in an article in the American Political Science Review.
Undergraduates and graduate students often have the false impression that senior faculty treat undergraduate teaching as a burden. But I have found that it is often a creativity-inspiring opportunity: Communicating complex ideas and making research procedures intelligible to young, smart students with as yet little background in a field of research compels instructors to develop pedagogical skills to highlight the essentials without distorting facts and theories. This very process has sometimes given me new ideas about framing theoretical arguments and conducting empirical research.
Do you have any advice for these aspiring junior scholars?
Current doctoral students in political science have to invest a great deal more time in acquiring technical skills enabling them to generate and analyze data, as well as to articulate and formalize theoretical arguments than was common in my formative years as a young scholar.
At the same time, technical skills are insufficient for a successful scholarly career in political science. It also takes an eye to spot important new problems and to question established stocks of knowledge. In my experience, that capacity is acquired only by opening up one’s mind beyond one’s own narrow research specialty, and reading works in neighboring disciplines — be this in economics, sociology, or social psychology. One may also seek insights from even further afar: My own sources of inspirations have primarily been drawn from the study of comparative history and social philosophy.
Another source of insight intensely important for me has been talking to politicians themselves, and doing so in many different countries. Political scientists rarely engage in conversations with political practitioners, and I find this strange. The politicians I have encountered have generally been very smart people in the sense that counts for them and me as scholars: They tend to be good at identifying ways to obtain and survive in political office, sizing up the demands that constituents place on them and the constraints that institutions impose when they devise their strategies. Scholars are in a different role: Because they do not compete for political office and therefore lack the hands-on experience of the practitioner, they often cannot fully grasp and appreciate the rationales politicians employ to advance their causes. Engaging politicians has time and again been an eye-opening experience for me that has informed my theorizing on how politicians “do politics” and my empirical research strategies.
So, young scholars: Talk to the real-life political actors about whose conduct you wish to theorize and whose political moves you attempt to track empirically!
