Honorary Conference Participants

Katharina Bluhm is a Professor of Sociology at the Free University of Berlin and holds a double affiliation: she is head of the department of sociology at the Institute for East European Studies, where she is also Dean of Students, and is a professor at the Institute of Sociology. Prior to her current duties, she was a professor of economic sociology at the University of Osnabrück and an associate professor at the University of Jena. She worked as a visiting researcher at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin: WZB) (fall term 2007/08) and at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, Cambridge, 1999-2000. At the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 580) in Jena, she conducted a comparative project on economic elites in the enlarged Europe and had been a member of the directorate before she transferred to Osnabrück (2007/8). Apart from the SFB in Jena, she also had been involved in the coordination of an international research project on “National corporate cultures and international competitiveness strategies – the challenge of globalisation for European SMEs” financed by the European Union (The Fifth Framework Programme). Her main research areas include economic sociology, work and labour relations and comparative political economy. Among her recent research interests are economic elites, corporate social responsibility and varieties of capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe. Apart from her studies on Eastern Europe, she has long history of work and research experience regarding East Germany and East-West comparisons. Before Jena, she worked in the research group “Institutional Transformation in the New German Länder” at the Max-Planck-Society, located at Humboldt University in Berlin (1994-1996) and at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen (1990-1994). She has studied at Humboldt-University in Berlin and at Lomonossov-University in Moscow. She is the author of two monographs, the major editor of three volumes and of numerous scholarly papers. For many years, she has been involved in regular review and consulting activities for numerous national and international scientific journals and foundations.
Dr. Marek Dabrowski Dr. Marek Dabrowski, Professor of Economics, Co-founder, than Chairman of the Supervisory Council and President of CASE - Center for Social and Economic Research (until 2011),currently CASE Fellow, Member of the Scientific Council of the E.T. Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy in Moscow; Former First Deputy Minister of Finance (1989-1990), Member of Parliament (1991-1993) and Member of the Monetary Policy Council of the National Bank of Poland (1998-2004); Since the end of 1980s he has been involved in policy advising and policy research in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Egypt, Georgia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Yemen, as well as in a number of international research projects related to monetary and fiscal policies, growth and poverty, currency crises, international financial architecture, EU and EMU enlargement, perspectives of European integration, European Neighborhood Policy and political economy of transition; World Bank and UNDP Consultant; Author of several academic and policy papers, and editor of several book publications.
Isaac Ehrlich Isaac Ehrlich holds the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor and serves as UB Distinguished Professor of Economics, Melvin H. Baker Professor of American Enterprise, and Chair of the Economics Department at the University at Buffalo (UB), State University of New York (SUNY). He also serves as director of the UB Center for Human Capital, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research Health and Aging programs, and founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Human Capital, published by the University of Chicago press. He has previously served on the faculty of the University of Chicago and has also taught or served as a visiting scholar at the Tel Aviv University, the University of Virginia, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. In 2002 He was awarded an honorary PhD degree from the University of Orleans, France, for his contributions to economics science. His areas of research cover a wide gamut of applications of economic theory to human behavior and social institutions including crime and corruption, law and economics, information and advertising, risk and uncertainty, health and longevity, old-age insurance, and economic growth and development. A major theme of his current work is the role of knowledge and human capital in endogenous growth and development, demographic changes, income distribution, asset management, and the performance of financial markets. A closely related theme has been rationalizing observed variations in health, life expectancy, and the value of life saving over the life cycle and across generations and their interdependence with human capital accumulation. He has been the recipient of major grants from NSF to the law and economics program at the NBER, from the USAID to study private-sector induced economic development, and from the New York Agency of Science, Technology, and Academic Research (NYSTAR) for his work on human capital. He has also served as a member of the US Presidential Health Policy Advisory group and the Transition Team on Health Policy for President Ronald Reagan, the Hong Kong Government's Health Services Research Committee headed by Secretary Elizabeth Wong, and the Council of Economic Advisors of New York State Governor David A. Paterson.
Sebastian Galiani Sebastian Galiani is a Professor of Economics at University of Maryland and Visiting Professor at Universidad de San Andres, Argentina. He is a member of the executive committee of LACEA. In the past, he held positions at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Universidad de San Andres in Argentina and was Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia) and visiting Scholar at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He was the chairman of the Network of Inequality and Poverty of LACEA during 2004 and 2005 and a member of its executive committee between 2004 and 2008. Sebastian obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from Oxford University and works in the areas of Development Economics and Applied Microeconomics. He published papers in the Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Regional Science and Urban Economics and Labour Economics, among others. His work has been featured in Science, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Times and various other newspapers around the world. Sebastian has also worked as consultant for United Nations, Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and the governments of Argentina, Mexico, Panama and South Africa.
Peter A. Hall Peter A. Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, a Faculty Associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and Co-Director of the Program on Successful Societies for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Hall is co-editor of Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health (with M. Lamont), Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make(with B. Palier, P. Culpepper), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (with D. Soskice),The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations,Developments in French Politics I and II (with A. Guyomarch, J. Hayward and H. Machin), European Labor in the 1980s and the author of Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France as well as over seventy articles on European politics, public policy-making, and comparative political economy. He serves on the editorial boards of many journals and the advisory boards of several European institutes. He is currently working on the methodology of political science, the political response to economic challenges in postwar Europe, and the impact of social institutions on inequalities in health.
Christian Haerpfer Christian Haerpfer is a full Professor of Political Science at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Aberdeen. In 2013 he was elected as 3rd President of the World Values Survey Association. In 2009 he was appointed the Director of Eurasia-Barometer by Globalbarometer Group. In 2011 founded and headed the European Centre for Survey Research (ECSR) at University of Aberdeen. In 2011 Prof. Haepfer became the Founding Chair of Research Committee 17 (Comparative Public Opinion) of the International Political Science Association. He is also Coordinator and Principal Investigator of Arabtrans-Social and Political Transformations in the Arab World, Member of Steering Committee of Globalbarometer Survey Group (GBS) and the Principal Investigator of Health in Times of Transition (HITT). He received his PhD and became Privat-Dozent in Political Science in the University of Vienna. Prof. Haepfer's research interests are Comparative Politics in Europe, Democratization in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe, Electoral Studies, Political Participation, Social Capital and Political Change in Europe, Political Change in Russia and CIS, Economic Changes and Democracy.
Ronald Inglehart Ronald Inglehart is a professor of political science at the University Of Michigan, and author of more than 225 scientific papers. He is the president of the World Values Survey since 1988 and one of the cofounders of the Eurobarometer project. Ronald Inglehart is also famous for developing sociological theory of post-materialism. Prof. Inglehart`s research focuses on cultural change and its consequences. R. Inglehartanalyses the links between values and beliefs of large groups of population and the presence or absence of democratic institutions usingmassive datasets of time-series WVS data from 78 countries of the world. He examines the effect of culture shift in advanced industrial societies on self-expression, sexual and religious norms, motivation, policy and freedom. Ronald Inglehart's numerous writings have been translated and published in German, Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Ronald Inglehart is a member of 8 editorial boards of scientific journals such as Government and Opposition, International Journal of Public Opinion, Politics and the Individual, Party Politics, Swiss Political Science Review, and some others. Professor Inglehart worked as a visiting professor or researcher in France, Germany,Netherlands,Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Nigeria, New Zealand andTaiwan. He also used to consult the European Union and United States Department of State.
Yuri M. Kabanov – professor, academic supervisor of HSE International Laboratory of Quantitative Finance. From 1974 to 2010 worked at the Central economic-mathematical institute where he made his way up from the junior research fellow to the head of the laboratory. He passed his Ph.D. and doctoral defenses at Steklov Institute of Mathematics (1975 and 1984). He has held faculty appointments at the MATI (Moscow State Aviation Technological University) and MIEM (Moscow State Institute of Electronics and Mathematics). In 1992 became a professor. In 1993-94 worked as professor at Bilkent University. Since 1995 to the present works as a professor (classe exceptionnele) of University of Franche-Comté. In 2007 he was elected for the four-year period to National Council of the French universities. He was Merkator Professor (TU Munich, 2002), Daiwa Chair Professor (Kyoto University, 2003, 2004). Member of the Academea Europaea (2012). His areas of research covers stochastic analysis, stochastic integration, stochastic optimum control, singular disturbances of the stochastic differential equations. The last 20 years the main perspective is the mathematical theory of finance and especially criteria of no-arbitrage and model of the markets with transaction expenses.
Tomasz Mickiewicz I joined Aston Business School in January 2012. My previous position was Professor of Comparative Economics at SSEES University College London (since 2008), where I started as a lecturer in 1996. Prior to that I spent one year as a researcher at the University of California in Davis. My first academic post was at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. In the past I also served on the board of directors of a major privatised producer of herbs ‘Herbapol’, worked with OIC International on a business incubators programme and also spent some time in public administration as the deputy mayor of Lublin, responsible for economic matters.
Leonardo Morlino Leonardo Morlino (Italy) - Professor of Political Science and director of Research Centre on Democracies and Democratizations at LUISS, Rome. In the 2009-12 term, he served as President of International Political Science Association (IPSA). His most recent books include Changes for Democracy (OUP, 2011),Democracias y Democratizaciones (CIS, 2008), International Actors, Democratization and the Rule of Law: Anchoring Democracy? (Routledge, 2008, with Magen), Democratization and the European Union. Comparing Central and Eastern European post-communist countries(Routledge 2010, with Sadurski). He’s has also been one of the three editors of the International Encyclopedia of Political Science (8 vol. Sage Publications, 2011). The theory of anchoring Morlino developed the theory of anchoring to understand how and why there can be democratic consolidation or democratic crisis, the processes of legitimation and of anchoring should be carefully explored. The key proposition is that to achieve consolidation with a limited legitimation strong anchors are needed. The main anchoring mechanisms we can empirically find are: party organization, clientelism, neo-corporatist arrangements, and party control of interests.Other possible anchors include: a strong leader, a successful tv channel, an internet networking skillfully managed. Likewise, there is an internal crisis of democracy when for a number of different reason the existing anchors fade away, i.e. there is a de-anchoring. In case of crisis this phenomenon is usually compounded by delegitimation in terms of dissatisfaction about the implemented policies or of a decisional stalemate. According to Morlino a good democracy is, first of all, a regime widely legitimized and stable, where citizens are fully satisfied because the elected rulers are capable and able to respond to their needs and questions (quality as result). If institutions are still challenged, attention, energy will be absorbed by the needs and objectives of its consolidation or maintenance. In addition, its citizens and communities enjoy freedom and equality beyond the minimum(quality as content). Third, citizens of a good democracy must be able to monitor and evaluate it through elections (electoral accountability) or indirectly (mutual control among the institutions) if and how the two values of freedom and equality are achieved through the full compliance with the current rules, the so-called rule of law, their efficient implementation, effectiveness in decision-making along with the political responsibility for the choices made by elected elites in relation to the questions raised by the civil society (quality as procedure ). Citizens, experts, scholars with different ideal conceptions of democracy can check which of the qualities listed above best suit their ideals and to what extent those qualities are implemented in a certain country at a certain time, using the empirical research conducted by Morlino
Richard Edgar Pipes Richard Edgar Pipes (born July 11, 1923) is a Polish-American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union. In 1976 he headed Team B, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes taught at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1996. He was the director of Harvard's Russian Research Center from 1968 to 1973 and is now Baird Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard University. In 1962 he delivered a series of lectures on Russian intellectual history at Leningrad State University. He acted as senior consultant at the Stanford Research Institute from 1973 to 1978. During the 1970s, he was an advisor to Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson. In 1981 and 1982 he served as a member of the National Security Council, holding the post of Director of East European and Soviet Affairs under President Ronald Reagan. Pipes was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger from 1977 until 1992 and belongs to the Council of Foreign Relations. In the 1970s, Pipes was a leading critic of détente, which he described as "inspired by intellectual indolence and based on ignorance of one's antagonist and therefore inherently inept".
Paul D. Reynolds is the Aston University (Birmingham, UK) Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow. He has held faculty appointments at the U. of California, Riverside; U. of Minnesota; Marquette University; Babson College; London Business School, and Florida International University and visiting and research appointments at the U of Michigan, U of Pennsylvania Wharton School, INSEAD in France, Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, and George Washington University. Reynolds completed undergraduate work in engineering at the U of Kansas (BS; 1960); all graduate work was completed at Stanford University, with degrees earned in business (1964; MBA), psychology (1966; MA), and sociology (1969; PhD). Over the past 20 years he was the coordinating principal investigator of two longitudinal studies of US business creation [Panel Studies of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, I and II] and the founding principal investigator of a fifty nation comparison of entrepreneurial activity [Global Entrepreneurship Monitor]. Reynolds recently completed an extensive assessment of the participation of the bottom billions in business creation. He is also the author or co-author of five books; seven edited collections; 42 research reports and monographs; 85 peer review journal articles and book chapters; eight data sets in the ICPSR archives; and over two hundred presentations to professional and policy audiences. In 2004 Reynolds received the annual Swedish International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research and in 2012 the Dedication to Entrepreneurship (Research) Award from the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division. [07Mar13]
Eric Uslaner Eric Uslaner is a Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland-College Park. In 2011 he was named one of the top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior by Trust Across America. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester (UK) and the "Social Trust in Sweden" research project (Ersta Sköndal University College, Stockholm). He is also affilliated with the Transnational Research Institute on Corruption (TRIC) at the Australian National University. In the fall 2010 he was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Political Science at the Australian National University. In 2006 he was appointed the first Senior Research Fellow at the Center for American Law and Political Science at the Southwest University of Political Science and Law (Chongqing, China). In 1981-82 he was Fulbright Lecturer and Visiting Professor in the Hebrew University (Jerusalem). Prof. Uslaner received his B.A. from Brandeis University with Honors in Politics in 1968 and his M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) in Political Science from Indiana University. Among his research interests are American politics (especially, on Congress and Congressional elections), social capital, institutional design, generalized trust, inequality, segregation and social cohesion.
Christian Welzel Christian Welzel is a leading professor of the LCSR, a professor-pro-tempore at the Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg) and the Chair for Political Culture Research at the Leuphana University in Germany, as well as Adjunct Professor at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. He is also a Vice President of the World Values Survey Association. He was also a Visiting Professor in the Center for the Study of Democracy at the UC Irvine (the USA). Reviewer of 23 leading journals in sociology and political science. Prof. Welzel received his M.A. in Political Science and Economic History from the University of the Saarland in 1991, his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Potsdam in 1996 and Habilitation (“Higher Doctorate”) in Political Science at the Free University of Berlin in 2000. His research focuses on modernization, social change and human development, democratization, measures of democracy and governance quality, value formation, protest participation and social movements, civil society and social capital.