Jean Blondel

Jean Blondel (born in Toulon, France, in 1929) was educated in Paris and Oxford. He was the founding professor of the Department of Government at the University of Essex in 1964 where he remained up to 1983. He co-founded the European Consortium of political Research in 1970 and directed it up to 1978. He was Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York in 1984 and became in 1985 Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence and is now attached to its Schuman Centre. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of Siena.

His field is comparative politics, most recently in the context of about leadership and governmental structures and decision-making. His main publications are Voters, Parties, and Leaders,(Penguin, 1963 with  numerous editions, Comparative Legislatures (Prentice-Hall, 1973), World Leaders (Sage, 1980), Government Ministers in the Contemporary World (Sage, 1985), Political Leadership (Sage, 1987), Comparative Government (2nd ed. Prentice-Hall and Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995), Governing Together, co-editor with F. Muller-Rommel (Macmillan, 1993), Party and Government, co-editor with M. Cotta (Macmillan, 1996). People and Parliament in the European Union, with R. Sinnott and P. Svensson (OUP, 1998). Democracy, Governance and Economic Performance, co-editor with I. Marsh and T. Inoguchi (United Nations University Press, 1999). 

He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Salford, Essex, Louvain-la-Neuve, and Turku.