Hanspeter Kriesi
Hanspeter Kriesi (born 1949, Bischofszell, Switzerland) is a professor of political science at the European University Institute in Florence where he holds the Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics. Previously, he has been teaching at the universities of Amsterdam, Geneva and Zurich. His wide-ranging research interests include the study of direct democracy, social movements, political parties and interest groups, public opinion, the public sphere and political communication. He was the director of a Swiss national research programme on “Challenges to democracy in the 21st century” from 2005-2012. From 2014 to 2019 he has been the principal  investigator of the ERC project “Political Conflict in Europe in the Shadow of the Great Recession". Since summer 2019, Kriesi is one of the three principal investigators of the SOLID project that investigates the novel conflicts about sovereignty, solidarity, and identity in the European Union and asks what made them emerge and escalate during a series of recent crises. Awards. Kriesi won the Francqui chair for the 2015-2016 and in 2017 the Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize in European Political Sociology.